Posted: November 12, 2019
When your manager and boss are looking for results from your marketing efforts, there are specific KPI’s, or key performance indicators, they are likely to ask about. But the main question is how many new customers did your marketing bring in?
Depending on the type of marketing campaign you were working on, you may not have a large number of new customers to report. Does that mean your marketing campaign was a flop?
Not at all! If your main goal is to bring in new customers, you need to look at the type of marketing campaigns that you are implementing, and a demand generation campaign should become your new best friend.
What is Demand Generation?
Demand Generation is the technical term for a group of marketing practices that create brand buzz, promote new products or services, and in general build hype for a business. It’s about creating touchpoints between potential customers and your business at every point of the buyer’s journey. The idea is to provide information and solution to a potential customer’s problem so that they see you and your product as the right solution for them. It also connects with your sales processes to better transfer marketing qualified leads, MQL’s, to your sales team as they become sales qualified leads, or SQL’s. If you’re unfamiliar with these terms, head over to HubSpot to learn about the Inbound methodology and buyer’s journey.
Why You Need Demand Generation
You aren’t getting new subscribers or selling more of your product, it can feel like you’re yelling into the void. It’s something to do, but not very practical. If there isn’t anyone around to listen or view your marketing efforts, you’re unlikely to convert leads into customers.
That’s the role of a demand generation campaign. Finding and locking potential customers into the buyer’s journey will help you nurture leads, and make the rest of your marketing efforts worthwhile.
Think about it: If you were only focused on content marketing, you’d be creating a lot of social posts and blog articles. That would be wonderful...if only you had rounded out the rest of the demand generation strategy so that more eyeballs were viewing your content. Leads that interact with your content are more likely to go to your website to learn more, interact with more of your content, and if it’s a right fit, move further along the buyer’s journey.
How You Generate Demand
Well, demand generation is just that: generating demand. Each business and product will be unique and require a personalized marketing strategy. However, there are some general practices that can be applied when you’re just getting started.
As you start thinking about your demand generation campaign, the goal is to nurture a lead into a customer. That means providing content, information, and incentives from an anonymous web visitor on your site all the way to a customer evangelist who interacts frequently with your brand.
Here are four major areas where you can start thinking about fine-tuning your demand generation campaign:
Brand Awareness: Just like the name implies, this is all about getting the word out about your brand. In a world of short attention spans and increasingly competitive niche-spaces, this can feel like a daunting task. Initiatives around branding, fully researched product development, well-rounded buyer personas, and public relations pushes can all be a part of building brand awareness.
Inbound Marketing: If you aren’t familiar with inbound marketing, it’s time to brush up. Instead of the yesteryears of pushy salespeople trying to convince you to buy something, inbound marketing is all about providing information so that when the customer is ready to buy, they’ll come to you. Building an SEO-optimized website, blog content, lead generation, and content marketing are just a few of the building blocks of an inbound marketing strategy.
Sales Enablement: Gone are the days of marketing and sales departments always at odds. Inbound methodology requires the close alignment of the marketing and sales process, especially when it comes to demand generation. High quality marketing strategies will lead to better qualified leads. But when those leads get passed on to the sales team, the inbound methodology doesn’t stop there. Your sales team needs the same info and tools to continue the buyer’s journey and nurture those SQL’s into customers. Case studies, fact sheets, estimator tools, and testimonials will all help with your sales enablement.
Client Retention: Ever heard the saying, “The easiest people to sell to are your customers”? That’s exactly what the fourth pillar of demand generation is all about. By promoting excellent customer service and keeping in contact with your current customers, while delighting them with deals and insider incentives, you’ll stay top of mind for their future purchases.
How to Report on Demand Generation Initiatives
One of the major drivers of any marketing campaign, but particularly a long-form one like demand generation is data management. Unless you’re able to lead score and determine when a lead becomes an MQL and SQL and customer, it will be incredibly difficult to nurture a lead through the buyer’s journey. A key component to this is using a well-organized CRM (customer relationship management) program to manage your contacts and their interactions with your brand and products. (We’re impartial to HubSpot, ourselves.)
It would be a whole other blog post to talk about setting up a CRM system but the main gist is that you want all your data and customer info in one place so that when you need to pull reports and track how your demand generation campaign is going, you’re able to easily see the results and find places for improvement.
How to Get Started with Demand Generation
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to demand generation. If you’re new to digital marketing or haven’t heard of the buyer’s journey before, educating yourself will be the first major step. HubSpot offers inbound education through their website so you can start there to get the basics down.
If you’re missing the key stages of the inbound methodology, begin with the basics there. Define your buyer personas to determine what types of content marketing to develop. This part of the process involves adding all the different bricks to build the Demand Generation foundation. It takes a lot of work if you haven’t done it already, but it will act as the backbone for the rest of your marketing campaigns.
And most importantly, you just need to get started! Demand generation marketing takes time to perfect and develop. The sooner you get started, the sooner you'll be on your way to seeing results.