The Art of Digital Demand Generation
Marketers are facing the opportunities and temptations of more channels, more content, more touch points and more technologies while thinking about how it all works together to deliver a consistent, effective customer experience that leads to deliver the ever-rising marketing ROI. I met couple of CMOs in APAC from B2B domain in the last four weeks of 2019 and while having discussions about marketing landscape beyond 2020 to another decade of 2030 and the impact of technology into the overall marketing domain (a research paper is being compiled by me to be published in March, 2020), all of them have expressed their biggest challenge at the moment is — demand generation from various marketing initiatives while targeting their enterprise customers across various geographies. With ROI becoming the holy-grail of all the marketing spend, marketers are tracking all the attributional impact of their campaigns to contribute in the required demand generations and supplementing with leads to sales funnel.
While lead generations supports the sales team in short term, demand generation is a holistic approach to marketing and sales cohesion within an organization. It aims to create a long-term relationship between a brand and a potential buyer through various nurturing campaigns and tactical marketing approaches. And it gauges and develops a prospect’s purchase interest in the offered products and services. Building awareness about products and its offerings is a vital component in the demand generation process that takes continued efforts involving multiple facets of marketing.
Commonly used in B2B and B2G and long term B2C sales cycles, demand generation is the targeted marketing program to drive awareness and interest in the products and services of an organization. It’s the convergence of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process. There are multiple components in a structured demand generation process that vary on the complexity of a sale such as building awareness, positioning relevance and context, supporting validation and mitigating customer evaluation. With advanced MarTech and DataTech getting embodied in the overall marketing landscape, the methodologies are moving beyond AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) developed by American advertising advocate E. St. Elmo Lewis. In AIDA model marketers focused on to attract Attention to maintain Interest that helps to create Desire and then compels the customer to get Action. With time this method got refined with various modifications.
Demand generation is not just about leads. Its about creating high quality leads that engages with the brand and turns into revenue. Marketers are considering it as the practice of creating demand for the enterprise’s products and services through marketing that impact the direct outcome where the target audience should be more likely to purchase your products and services. Demand generation program is conducted through a number of different tactics to generate leads that may include filling out a form, downloading a piece of content (case study, white paper, use-case, blog article, registering for newsletters and signing up for a webinar and so forth). Once the leads are registered into the funnel, they are nurtured from the first interaction along with a journey to the consideration phase where marketing passes the qualified leads off to sales (the MQLs to SQLs — as per HubSpot). The success of a demand generation program is measured by the following:
- The quality of leads
- The conversion metrics
- The contribution to the organization’s bottom line
In a demand generation program, all the nurtured leads in the funnel are not going to be sales ready. Some leads which will take further nurturing are returned by the sales team to marketing team who in turn can re-engage with those leads and put efforts to reach that benchmark level persuasive level of interaction to return then back to sales for further conversation and conversions.
While designing a successful demand generation program, marketers need to four different components such as the stakeholders, the method or tactics, the goal and the metrics.
The Stakeholders: Demand generation is a collaborative activity between sales and marketing teams. While marketing owns the overall demand generation program, the sales people play key role in heling to define processes and maintain an open line of communication with the marketing team members which really makes a huge difference.
The Tactics: Demand generation involves coordination among multi-layered marketing activities to identify and engage buyers through targeted inbound and outbound activities through various marketing automation tools and platforms. There are certain key tactics that defines the true architecture of demand generation such as web insights, inbound marketing, content marketing, social media engagement and influence, lead nurturing, lead scoring, effort measurement and optimization, and most important the alignment of sales and marketing.
The Goal: The goal should be to have a well-balanced demand generation process that improves the lead quality, accelerate the buying cycle and improves the conversion rates from initial interests to qualified opportunities.
The Metrics: While there is a debate over quantity and quality between MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads), the most important focus for the sales is to generate higher revenue from marketing source leads as each lead carries a cost from the marketing budget which is ROI focused. Fueling the lead funnel with full of high volume with low quality leads will not help the sales revenue funnel in the long run and will deteriorate the relationship between marketing and sales. Marketing need to focus on generating high quality leads that will convert in order to achieve demand generation success.
Advanced demand generation programs rely on various proactive lead generation activities through hybrid marketing automation platforms with advanced audience analytics and supported by more traditional market programs and processes. This is because demand generation programs tend to assume that prospective customers are aware that they have a need or problem and are attempting to solve it when they search for solutions. Before we discuss about crafting the art of swift demand generation, let us understand the challenges for today’s marketers. The challenges are empowered buyers, meeting expectations and ROI pressure.
Empowered buyers: The conversations between brand and consumers have crossed many miles and now before the brand, consumers are talking among themselves regarding the brand and its offerings. They are driving the buying journey. As per the recent study by one of the frontline marketing automation platforms, 45% of the buyers wait longer than they did in the past to initiate contact with a vendor and buyers typically get 55% through the buying journey before they engage with a sales representative from the enterprise. Hence marketers today have to find a way to position their brands as trusted advisors to buyers as they move along with the buyers’ journey. According to a recent study by I and my team, 58% of buyers are spending more time researching various options than they did in the past. Hence it is imperative that marketers must engage with prospective buyers by building relationships and trust.
Meeting Expectations: With available over loaded information across world wide web, buyers expect precise information at the right touch point at right moment regarding the services or offerings to understand the need which follows the interaction with the organization. Buyers are living in an always on world filled with instant messenger, highly personalized apps, messages, offers and services. At one end these are pretty incredible but at the other end they are throwing challenges to marketers to anticipate the needs of our buyers and deliver thoughtful and contextual content having relevance to their needs. One size fits all content doesn’t work anymore in the current environment. Marketers must understand various formats of content and the channels they will be disseminated to grab the attention of the targeted audience. Marketers not only have to put efforts in creating content but also have to focus more on the dissemination of the content across respective touch points where the buyers are seeking the them.
ROI Pressure: Every marketing effort and penny is now tied to the revenue contribution of the organization. Like sales, marketing teams are now having revenue goals as well. A thoroughly designed demand generation process could address these challenges by offering an efficient and reliable process to identify and engage these empowered buyers turn quality leads into revenue which is measured.
Let us understand the methods for a robust demand generation process which I normally follow along with my team for various enterprise customers; web insights to facilitate inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, measuring and optimization, alignment of sales and marketing.
Web insights to facilitate inbound marketing:
Website is the most prominent demand generation asset. This is where marketers observe the digital body language of people visiting the brand website that reveal their interests, problems, content consumption and preferences and urgency for the product, services or offerings. Right web insights help in devising inbound marketing tactics to design various content offers, blog posts, email offers, web widgets, chatbots and other related web resources. For web insights I and my team use tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Kissmetrics, Similar Web, Experian and Mix Panel etc.
For inbound marketing I used marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, SendInBlue, Active Campaign, AutoPilot, Getresponse, Smartech and Drip etc. as per the needs and available marketing budgets. Some of these platforms have extensive automation features to accommodate all form of online marketing and support to refine various campaigns with actionable insights generated from embeded analytics engines. Others have limited features with open API which can be integrated into a larger inbound ecosystem.
Content Marketing:
Content is the fuel that powers the inbound marketing which in turn facilitates the demand generation engine. During my survey last month among the marketing executives, I found out that 75% of them rely more on content to research purchases that they did the previous year. According to HubSpot, 60% buyers have expressed that they had a significant impact on their buying decision by the provided content. Contextual content powers the inbound activities which attract and pull prospects to the sales funnel. Content is consisting of blog posts, press releases, whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, infographics, videos, emails and snippets etc. The most prominent focus in content marketing at the moment is to provide contextual content with the prospect’s individual pain points, readiness to buy, content preferences and where they are in their purchase journey. While designing the content marketers must address the following that will bring relevancy to the target audience and help to attract higher quality and more convertible leads :
- Who are the ideal prospects and customers?
- How do they go about making their buying decisions?
- What are their apprehensions and pain points?
- What are some of their common objections?
Some of the recommended platforms and tools that I and my team use frequently to measure the effectiveness of our content marketing initiatives are Outbrain, StoryChief, ScribbleLive, Ceros, ClearVoice, BuzzSumo, Curata and Acrolinx etc.
Social Media Marketing:
Social networks are not just B2C anymore. 70% of the participants in my survey revealed that they get content through social networks and peer groups in 2019 than the previous year. As per Gartner’s recent study, besides impacting the lead generation activities, social networks are also highly influencing the prospective buyer’s vendor selection and buying decisions. A right social media strategy is vital to a marketer’s demand generation program. While designing the social media marketing, always on focus needs to be there on the customers’ needs which include listening, joining groups, creating and facilitating conversations. Providing information at the right social media touch points when the prospect or customer is hyper active another task for the marketer to build trust. With social media, marketers can build rapport with the audience to create trust to be seen as thought leaders in their space and problem solvers.
There are many social media marketing tools available to run efficient social media marketing programs from listening to analysis to response management to influencer engagement etc. Some of the tools are Hootsuite, Sproutsocial, Meltwater, Buffer, Locobuzz, SocialBakers, Sprinklr, Unmetric, Tagboard, TailWind, Sendible, Brand24 and Adobe Spark etc.
Lead Nurturing:
Lead nurturing is not about making the sale but educating and responding to the prospects’ needs and building that trust within them by providing accurate and contextual information. It’s a proven method for turning prospects into buyers by systematically contacting prospects over a period of time and delivering them content relevant to where they are in their buying journey and influence the same. In my various lead nurturing initiatives for enterprise customers I have found out that only 20 to 25% new leads in the funnel are ready to buy the services or offerings. The rest 75% fall somewhere in the full range of a buyer’s journey. This brings marketeers to the spot by asking — how do they recognize sales ready leads? And how to gauge the other 75% of those leads on whether they have changed their minds and are now ready to be passed to the sales? Lead nurturing tools like HubSpot, Lead Squared, Inside Sales Box, Salesforce Pardot, Nutshell, Zoho, Nimble, and Pipedrive etc.
Lead Scoring:
Lead scoring is a crucial chain in the demand generation machine. It comes into play while determining a lead’s sales readiness in the demand generation process. It’s a way of measuring prospects’ engagement with the brand and assets by giving higher points for different activities that show more sales readiness. This process uses a point system to assign values based on a prospect’s online and offline behaviors. This action help the marketers to understand the digital body language of the prospect and to gauge where the buyers are on their journey and their sales readiness. In this exercise marketing works closely with the sales team to determine how many points a prospect will get for different set of activities such frequency of visits to the website, filling up the landing page, download of reports and case studies, enrolling for upcoming webinars, etc. Once a lead has accrued enough points based on the defined points for respective activities, they can be passed on to sales flagged for follow up or dropped into a more accelerated nurturing program. As per Google, marketers who use lead scoring have seen a 70% increased lift in their lead generation ROI. Along with the major marketing automation platforms, many times I and my team use these tools for leas scoring exercise — Velocify, Vanillasoft, 6Sense, Lattice Engines, Lead Space, Salesforce Engage, Oracle Datafox, Cloud Lead, Sales Wing and Madkudu etc.
Measuring and Optimizing Efforts:
Marketers need to evaluate in real time what’s working in the demand generation program and what’s not working and how to tweak to optimize that program. This is a great opportunity to re-evaluate where the marketing efforts and budget are going. By measuring the effectiveness of the efforts marketers can then focus their attention on the areas of the funnel which are not yielding results. Depending on the organization’s size and budget, there are varieties of marketing metrics a marketer can focus on when it comes to demand generation. In order to bring efficiency and productivity to the efforts monitoring of closing percentage, cost per acquisition, cost per lead, the average deal size, LTV, and time to close are essential.
Alignment:
Demand generation exercise is absolutely a team mechanism that requires cooperation between marketing and sales. Both the functions need to speak the same language — what is a MQL vs SQL, what does it mean to sales and what does that mean to marketing? The benchmark for lead scoring and agreeing on the standards, for qualification and for following up on a lead need to worked together, not in silos. An integrated lead generation program plays an important part in building a strong marketing and sales relationship.
In the overall demand generation process, marketers should facilitate the flow of generation of leads, nurture those leads to establish organization’s offerings as a choice in the consideration process and intimately build the trust among those leads and prospects. Once the leads are nurtured need to be passed on to the sales team when they reach a level of engagement to which both the marketing and sales teams have agreed upon as being ready for contact. Afterwards sales move these prospects to an opportunity stage where they will become customers.
(Note — I am available for discussions on various flows and scenarios for designing your digital demand generation mechanism)
