GETTING STARTED WITH How to effectively plan, execute, and measure multi-channel campaigns.

www.parkerwhite.com | [email protected] we give brands life™ Part 1: Understanding Demand Generation

At its core, demand generation encompasses the entire gamut of programs that both drive awareness and create demand for your company’s products or services.

Much more than , demand generation programs: • Align your marketing team with your team • Act as touch points used throughout the entire sales funnel • Evolve and grow outbound and inbound initiatives • Help build qualified lists that can be nurtured into sales-ready prospects • Utilize to deliver personal and timely content • Provide comprehensive analytics for measuring campaign performance

Demand generation is the marketing system’s lifeline—bridging the gap between your sales and revenue operations—with the end goal of building and nurturing key prospect and customer relationships for as the duration of each individual’s sales cycle.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LEAD GENERATION AND DEMAND GENERATION

Lead generation is the process of generating and collecting contact information through the promotion of lead forms and landing pages in order to increase your leads database. A classic example is providing top-of-the-funnel offerings such as whitepapers, eBooks or webinars in exchange for an email address—a lead.

Demand generation acts as an umbrella for all marketing programs that create awareness and drive demand for your product throughout the entire sales funnel. More technical in execution, demand generation entails identifying and mapping out the entire buying process—from initial awareness to paying customer, and all various buying stages in between.

By analyzing real-time data and implementing a lead nurturing/scoring system, your marketing team is able to deduce when specific leads might be ripe for your sales team to intervene. Since it happens across all digital mediums, it’s open to continuous iteration—making it easy to demonstrate the value you’re producing from all of your marketing activities and investments. To be clear; You can’t do lead generation without demand generation; the two feed off each other. However, it’s important to find the right balance between the two to truly be successful in your multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Part 2: The Demand Funnel A demand funnel is a visual framework for grouping and scoring prospective customers based on their progress in the buying process. It is an essential element in your marketing strategy and yet: “68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel”(MarketingSherpa).

It’s crucial that sales and marketing teams are aligned in this effort and are working in tandem to ensure overall alignment of your brand’s goals and objectives. Sales and marketing teams must agree upon universal terms for each stage and situation of the demand funnel. This helps to define common language between sales and marketing teams—and driving demand only works when both teams are united in their efforts.

WHAT’S IN A DEMAND FUNNEL? • Your website plays the most crucial role in filling leads for your demand funnel. Make sure it’s easily navigable and regularly updated with new and useful content.

• Triggers must be set in place at each stage of the funnel to help decipher when conversions take place between stages, and who will act upon them accordingly.

• is typically a number given to a prospect defining where they are and what stage they might be in relative to the sales funnel. For instance someone who came to your site and read a blog would have a lower lead score than someone who came to your site, read a case study, browsed your product or service pages, and downloaded an eBook.

• Segmentation plays a pivotal role by allowing your marketing team to organize its database into lists, helping you group similar prospects in the same stage of the sales funnel together. • Lead nurturing is done to help foster relationships with your prospects as well as show/ convince your product or service is the best solution/option.

Demand generation is the marketing system’s lifeline—bridging the gap between your sales and revenue operations—with the end goal of building and nurturing key prospect and customer relationships for the duration of each individual’s sales cycle.

MARKETING AUTOMATION’S ROLE IN THE DEMAND FUNNEL

Marketing automation software is to demand generation what Henry Ford’s perfected assembly line was to the industrial revolution. Though both can still be done manually, to truly maximize scale and productivity it’s no longer a matter of “if” you should use marketing automation. Marketers—many of whom might be your direct competition—are operating their sales funnels with automation principles straight from the industrial age and manufacturing demand for their brands on a measured scale.

By unifying your sales and marketing teams you are creating an integrated factory. Your marketing team can focus on creating and driving demand through both inbound and outbound marketing initiatives, pushing prospects and leads down the assembly line to your sales team to close the deal. It’s through this automated journey that both sales and marketing can utilize various touch points, personalization, and behavioral flows to nurture individual leads and prospects for maximum conversion. Each step ultimately involves fostering customer relations; thus it’s important to define the process early on. Once this is complete, your marketing team’s goal is to leave the prospect with enough knowledge and positive images of the brand and product that the sales team can easily set them up to take action—or they end up taking action on their own depending on your product or service platform.

Part 3: Buyer Personas Buyer personas are tools that help you understand who your target audience is and how to effectively communicate with them; you can’t effectively craft your messaging without knowing exactly who you are talking to, and what kind of content will resonate with them. “90% of companies using personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of who buyers are”(Boardview).

To tell your brand’s story, your personas must be well developed; it helps your team to become familiar with the characters in the story that they’re trying to sell. A brand is an identity that has personality, values and traits, so personas must be created to that reflect that identity; if your brand does not believe in its story, then the prospect will not believe in your brand and they will turn to the competition.

Start by giving your persona a name. Then, think about the persona’s background. Decide on characteristics like age, gender, income level, living situation, education level, hobbies, occupation, pain points, personal and professional goals and things that would turn him or her toward or away from your brand. Another question to ask is the prospect’s role in the buying process: Is the person the decision-maker or an influencer? If the prospect is the decision-maker, who or what might influence his or her decisions?

Your marketing and sales teams must work together to determine what they want the persona’s buying process to look like. That will allow the marketing team to assess how they will use the persona’s unique story to contribute to the brand’s story. A side note on personas: Marketing and user experience (UX) professionals both like to use personas, but to different means. On the marketing side (as applicable here), a persona is used to capture the attitudinal behavior of your audience and are based primarily on quantitative research. UX personas are archetypes based on qualitative research regarding behaviors, needs and goals. Don’t fall into the assumption that your marketing personas can be used for UX decisions and vice versa.

By establishing the right kind of personas, your marketing team can take them through the buying process to find any weak points in your current strategy. To do so, start with the five stages of considered purchases: inquire, learn, evaluate, justify and select. With this model, you can choose a product and the best persona for that product to evaluate step by step the efficacy of your marketing and sales strategies.

Part 4: Mapping Content & Building a Content Calendar Similar to mapping the buying process with your personas, your team should also map your content to find its strengths and weaknesses. Your story is told first and foremost through content; it needs to be diverse in order to reach all of your personas, but it still needs to come together with a seamless message and voice.

A content calendar is a helpful way to layout a timeline for your content. The calendar will allow your team to plan the release of content at peak traffic times to maximize the impact on the target audience—and it also helps you create a cadence for your messaging mix. Think of your calendar as a checkpoint for content; when the content is added to the calendar it is assessed again, which gives the marketing team an opportunity to ensure that the content is worthwhile, relevant, timely, and most importantly, not fluff.

CONSISTENCY AND COMMUNICATION

Internal communication is key to success—both between teams, and within the marketing team itself. Lack of specificity is a common problem; for example, if one marketer thinks the chosen persona likes light-hearted memes while another believes the same persona wants to see charts with data, then the message will be inconsistent and ineffective. To prevent this clash, your marketing team should create a content style guide with specific do’s and don’ts so the content is consistently on message and engaging.

Once your marketing team is creating consistent content, it’s important your sales team be aware of what content is being produced—and when it is going live. This will allow them to understand what the marketing qualified leads will have been exposed to—and can thus better turn those leads into customers.

To remain consistent, create one calendar that every member of every team has access to and uses. This allows anyone to check on what each department is doing, how each campaign is going, and when the next round of content will be released.

MAKE IT PERSONAL

To further optimize your content, focus on the emotional connection between your brand and your customer. Your content should talk with buyers, not at them. You want to persuasively converse with the prospect, not bombard them with content. If your team produces generic, cookie cutter content, “74% of the people it reaches will lack a connection and feel frustrated”(CMO).

Think about your personas. For example, Robert, who’s 56 and the marketing director of a corporation that sells weight machines is looking for content and a strategy—which is significantly different from Carol, a 34-year-old marketing manager for a protein powder company. Yes, they’re both in the fitness world, but Carol needs more social media development because her market is B2C. Robert is B2B, so it is more important that he have a stronger website while also using traditional methods to promote his products.

Your personas serve as a guide to manufacturing your content. They should be well vetted in all aspects—physical, behavioral and emotional— to allow your marketing team to better reach them, nurture them and pass them along to the sales team where they can convert them into customers.

Part 5: Scoring Leads Marketing automation is an essential tool, especially when it comes to lead scoring. Specifically, your marketing and sales teams will need to decide on characteristics that define a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a sales qualified lead (SQL). These criteria cover parameters such as demographics, interests, behaviors, and their role in the decision making process.

“61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales and only 27% of those leads will be qualified.”(MarketingSherpa).

This miscommunication creates strain on both teams and wastes resources, so make sure each team understands the criteria.

The various amounts of points per lead are difficult to track, which is why marketing automation is crucial—but there are also some simple, manual ways to lead score. Once you’ve tracked a buyer’s online behavior, you can see where they are in the buying cycle and adapt your strategy if necessary. However, it is not a predictor of who will close or who will buy. Instead, it provides a prioritized and researched list for the sales team to further go through and take action on.

HOW TO SCORE

There is no exact lead-scoring model that will guarantee perfect results, but explicit and implicit information are key to understanding which model is best for your brand. Explicit refers to information provided through online forms and can include company size, industry, interests, etc. Implicit attributes are based on digital behavior such as how they check email or the rate at which they click through websites. There are four common scoring models that place differing value on both explicit and implicit information: 1. Interest-Only Scoring: This model exclusively uses a prospect’s behavior to gauge his or her interest. 2. Qualification-Only Scoring: On the opposite end of the spectrum, this model ignores behavior and focuses solely on the data that matches characteristics of the prospect to an ideal persona. 3. Two-Dimensional Scoring: This model combines the criteria from the previous two models. 4. Predictive Lead Scoring: This model looks through past data to determine patterns from previous leads in order to compare them to current prospects to determine their fit.

No matter which scoring model you use, it’s important your team continually monitors its efficacy and understands how to reassess if necessary. It is also important that your marketing and sales teams communicate before you choose a model so each team knows how to react at each stage. An easy way to measure the effectiveness of your lead scoring model is to calculate ROI… which we’ll cover later.

Part 6: Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing is important for prospects at all stages of the buyer’s journey. So important, in fact, that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads and those nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases (Marketo).

BECOME AN EXPERT NURTURER

Remember when we said your content needed to feel personalized? Persona specific content marketing is a good place to start. Leads nurtured with targeted content generate more than a 20% increase in sales opportunities (HubSpot). Email marketing is the most direct way to get that content to each individual lead, but before you send out your content, your marketing team needs to ask itself a few questions:

• Can the prospects trust your content or do they feel trapped by your messages flooding their inbox? • Is your content relevant or obviously a generic email blast? • Does it give your buyer a chance to respond or is it one sided? • Does the content coordinate with your brand’s other content?

If your content offers a conversation, is trustworthy, relevant and coordinated, then let your marketing team hit send.

Your brand’s website is another easy and effective platform to release content on. For maximum impact, make sure you’ve built strategic landing pages with ample keywords, have a blog that is engaging and regularly updated and is a “resource center” where prospects can review your previous content. Content marketing through social media calls for more creativity than the other two platforms, but it’s worth the effort. Before you start releasing any new content, be sure that the channels your brand is currently using are where your buyer personas are most active.

While content marketing is a good way to nurture leads, the most effective method depends on the product and the target persona. Whichever method you choose, here are some final lead nurturing tips to help you maximize your results:

• Track all content and its results. • Be prompt when responding to leads. • Constantly stay in touch so the lead doesn’t get cold. • Offer value to the lead, don’t just bury them with content. • Learn from your mistakes. Part 7: Measure Success With Analytics At the end of the day, you must gauge the efficacy of your marketing strategy with hard numbers and ROI. The essence of analytics is to follow the customer through the buying process to analyze their actions that either led to revenue or a lost lead. It’s easy for your sales team to look at the revenue and be pleased with their work, but marketers have to prove that they’ve been actively driving revenue. Therefore, it is essential to define the right metrics for each team before any changes are made to receive more accurate data and refine your methods.

When deciding exactly what data to record and report, it’s important to remember that if it’s not directly relevant to the decision making process, it’s probably best left on the sidelines. Depending on your overall company goals, key KPIs will need to be established so that both marketing and sales teams can be held accountable and ultimately see the efficacy of the demand funnel.

Analytics is essential in manufacturing demand. The metrics not only allow your marketing team, sales team and executives to understand the progress or lack there of for the business, but also give the appropriate amount of credit to each team.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NURTURING LEADS

The multi-channel approach to marketing now allows us to be more sophisticated than ever before in our approach to acquiring new customers. While there’s still a place for good old- fashioned lead generation in the marketing mix, today’s fragmented audience needs a new approach that not only gets them in the door—but helps guide them through the decision making process in a way that’s consistent, repeatable—and above all—trackable. Demand generation is the art and science of marketing and sales working together in harmony—and it pays off in higher quality, genuinely qualified leads.

About ParkerWhite: We align ourselves with companies that are developing products and services with the same values. From medical devices, emerging e–health technologies, education, and healthy lifestyle consumer products. Health is our sweet spot, or rather—our agave spot!

READY TO GROW YOUR BRAND? [email protected] | 760-670-3482 | parkerwhite.com