“Revenue Marketing”? You Mean… Marketing?

You’ve probably heard the term thrown around like it’s some kind of revolutionary breakthrough. “We’re doing revenue marketing now.” Like it’s a flex. Like we weren’t always supposed to be driving revenue.

But let’s pause and be real for a minute. Calling it “revenue marketing” is like calling water wet or fire hot. It’s redundant. It’s unnecessary. And honestly, it’s a little insulting to what marketing’s always been meant to do: grow the business.

Let’s go back to basics–the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Each of these? Revenue drivers. Every single one.

You build products people want to buy.

You price them to sell–and to support your business goals.

You distribute them where customers will find them.

And you promote the hell out of them so they actually move off the shelves.

So when did we start needing a whole new term to describe what marketing already is?

Maybe it came from a well-intentioned place–frustration over fluffy metrics, a desire for better alignment with sales, a reminder to make marketing accountable. And I get that. But adding a label doesn’t fix the foundation. It doesn’t make you more revenue-focused. It just makes the job sound newer than it is.

We don’t need to divide the industry into “revenue marketers” and... what? “Non-revenue marketers”? That’s not a thing. Every campaign, every message, every channel touchpoint should ladder up to a business outcome. Always.

The truth is, if your marketing isn’t driving growth–brand growth, customer growth, revenue growth–then it’s not marketing. It’s theater.

We’ve allowed terms like “revenue marketing” to surface because somewhere along the way we lost the thread. We got distracted by KPIs that don’t tie back to sales. We siloed brand and performance into opposing teams. We forgot that top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel are on the same damn funnel. And now we’re making up new terms to solve a problem that isn’t semantic. It’s strategic. The work isn’t to rename what we do–it’s to realign what we do.

That means asking tougher questions. Are we setting the right goals? Are we structured to deliver impact? Are we measuring what matters? Are we showing up for the business–not just for the boardroom slides, but for the customer who’s deciding whether we’re worth their attention, their dollars, their loyalty?

Brand campaigns. Retention emails. CX strategies. Every single piece of the marketing ecosystem plays a role in revenue, whether it’s direct or downstream. And if we do our jobs right, the impact shows up on the balance sheet–whether or not someone labels it “revenue marketing.”

So maybe instead of inventing new buzzwords to justify our existence, we double down on what already justifies it: results.

Marketing isn’t a cost center. It’s a growth driver. It always has been. It’s just time we start acting like it.