Demand generation is your way of creating interest in your products. While simple in theory, executing an effective demand generation campaign involves a careful balance of giving your audience the information they need while also incentivizing them to engage further with your business.
Your goal is clear: You want better communication between your audience and your sales team, so you can see those results in your conversion rates and deals.
But what should you keep in mind for your next demand generation campaign? We recommend a bi-phased approach that focuses on (1) implementing the program and (2) creating a robust process for tracking performance.
Below is an illustration of how to effectively implement and monitor a demand generation program.
Phase 1: Implementation
Get to Know Your Target Audience
You need to know who you want to engage with your products and services, so the first and most important step of your demand generation program is to identify and understand your target audience.
Develop buyer personas to tailor the marketing strategies effectively, ensuring messages resonate with potential customers. Make sure you clearly define their demographics, understand what their motivations are, and outline exactly how your products and services can tackle all of their needs—point for point.
Create High-Quality Content
It goes without saying that the content you produce should be high quality—more specifically, it needs to be something your audience cares about. It should be readily accessible in a location on your website that makes sense. That’s part of ensuring a seamless customer journey.
Vary what you create and distribute, so you can better understand during the performance-tracking phase what works best. Utilize various formats like blogs, eBooks, webinars, and videos to engage potential customers.
Utilize Multi-Channel Marketing
You’ve heard the phrase “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket.” The same truth applies here.
Leverage multiple channels such as email, social media, SEO, and paid advertising to maximize reach and engagement. The more ways you can reach your audience and make your presence hard to ignore, the more effective your demand generation program will be.
Employ Marketing Automation Tools
For a large demand generation campaign, your team’s resources might be stretched thin. This is where marketing automation tools can save the day.
Depending on your needs, automation tools can perform a variety of functions: email actions, drip sequences, lead scoring, customer data collection, and so much more. Shop around for tools that offer you the greatest bundle of automation tasks to maximize your investment.
Personalize Marketing Efforts
Personalizing marketing messages and campaigns can go a long way in supercharging engagement—but doing so takes time and deep insights into who you’re speaking to.
While personalization may not be the first part of your demand generation program, you can implement this step later down the line once you’ve collected enough data and insights to tailor messages, offers, and interactions.
Phase 2: Track Performance
Set Clear, Measurable Goals
Your demand generation program has been out in the wild for a while, and now it’s time to see what has worked and what can be improved. But first, you need to establish clear, specific, and measurable goals for the demand generation program.
Utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure success, and stretch your goals regularly to encourage your team to employ new, more effective methods.
Use Analytics and Tracking Tools
While you and your team should come together to talk through performance metrics together, you can leave the actual tracking to analytics and tracking tools that can monitor the performance at all times.
Tools like Google Analytics, CRM software, and marketing automation platforms provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your demand generation program. These insights will inform how you change the program moving forward.
Review and Optimize
Once you’ve collected insights, bring your stakeholders together to review the performance of your demand generation program. Analyze metrics such as lead generation, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI) to assess success and areas for improvement.
From there, you can make data-driven adjustments to enhance effectiveness and ROI—and even pare down areas of high effort but low results.
Keep in mind that optimization is a continuous process. Regularly review your results, and pivot accordingly—and frequently.
Solicit and Incorporate Feedback
Don’t just rely on the numbers to inform the decisions regarding your demand generation program. Use feedback from stakeholders, sales teams, and your customers to help you refine your strategy.
These qualitative insights will help you gauge why certain strategies worked or did not work—not just if.
Next Steps
Getting your demand generation campaign off the ground takes time, effort, and collaboration across various entities in marketing. But making sure that campaign is actually delivering the results you want and need presents its own set of challenges, and you need to be prepared for both.
Curious about how your current approach to demand generation is working and what gaps you should patch?
Take this quick, 10-question marketing assessment. Then, an experienced Fractional CMO will be in touch with you for a comprehensive analysis of your strategy, so you can work together to launch and track your most successful demand generation campaign yet.
