GETTING STARTED WITH How to effectively plan, execute, and measure DEMAND GENERATION 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 marketing programs that both drive awareness and create demand for your company’s products or services. Much more than lead generation, demand generation programs: • Align your marketing team with your sales 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 marketing automation 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. • Lead scoring 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.