Marketing With Purpose Kit: Turning Marketing Into a Revenue Engine

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Tullio Siragusa (0:16)

Welcome back to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of the Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. So let's get started. Today, I'm excited to welcome Lizzy Young. She's Director of Marketing at Creative World School. Lizzy is a Certified Franchise Executive and Certified Franchise Marketer, who has spent the last decade helping more than 150 organization across franchise, education, healthcare, hospitality, wellness, technology, and agency environments build stronger, smarter marketing systems. Her expertise spans brand strategy, customer acquisition, lifecycle marketing, local activation, and full funnel growth.

But what really stands out is her focus on turning marketing into a measurable driver of pipeline and revenue. So we're going to explore turning marketing into a revenue engine. And I'm really excited to hear how Lizzy connects great marketing with real sustainable business growth.

Lizzy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

Lizzy Young (1:46)

That was a great introduction. Thank you.

Tullio Siragusa (1:49)

Before we dive in, I'd love to hear from you. Why was turning marketing into a revenue engine the topic you chose to explore with us today? And what makes it so important right now?

Lizzy Young (2:01)

Yes. Well, what I've seen as a marketer as time has gone on, markets are getting more and more saturated. So there's more competition no matter where you are, whether you're on a national scale, a regional one or a local one. So there's a lot more pressure on marketers, I would say more than there's ever been, to really perform throughout the funnel.

And like I said, I've noticed as a marketer, even when I started a decade ago, it was already trending that way. But what I've seen that makes the difference between a marketer who's good and a marketer who's great, is that full funnel focus and really connecting it with sales. Because at the end of the day, what organizations need to move forward, they need revenue, right? They need to be growing. And it depends on the organization on what their growth goals are. Each one had their specific one. But if those aren't moving forward, a lot of it does eventually come back to marketing because they're supposed to be playing a role in that. So like I said, I've seen that trend change a lot over time. And that's what's making the big difference today when you hear about these companies, even in the franchise world that are closing locations and struggling with that. A lot of it is just due to their simply being so much more competition, and you need to stand out more than ever, and you need to keep customers around more than ever. It's not just about customer acquisition anymore for marketing. It's also how do you keep them coming back? How do you keep them referring business? There's so much more to it than that I feel like had been a main focus in previous years.

Tullio Siragusa (3:28)

Absolutely. I mean, it should have been like that always, you know, but then we get up on the vanity numbers, click through rates, conversion, all this other stuff that are meaningful if they produce outcomes. But now, let's face reality. A lot of marketing leaders are often pulled between near-term campaign results, you know, show me the money right now, and the investments needed to build long-term brand impact, right? Especially in franchise system, where you have to maintain a baseline to build trust, and that has an impact. Sometimes that was a lag that's several quarters out. Now, how do you measure, and, excuse me, how do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals? So, you know, the quarterly, let's give me the results now, but also in balancing that future brand building, where do you find the biggest friction point in making that happen?

Lizzy Young (4:25)

Well, it's really important to look at the brand as a whole, and I've seen a lot of friction there with teams working in silos and within franchising itself, to even on the marketing side, you have the consumer marketing, you have the franchise development marketing, and too many times I've seen those be in totally separate lanes, but at the end of the day, they're both really trying to help the franchise grow just in different ways. So I think when collaboration breaks down, that's a major problem, not only for marketing, of course, but for the entire organization. I think a lot of teams get very dialed in with their specific goals, which is of course good for them to look at, but they often lose sight of the greater vision, the greater picture. On the Framdev side, sometimes, as we want to open this many locations within the next few years. On the consumer side, of course, it's also about gaining a lot of market share there. So I worked with a lot of teams just on getting them aligned, and that alone has produced excellent results, literally just sitting down, going back to the basics.