When considering your budget for demand generation each year, it’s important to take a look to see which activities are giving you the best ROI. Results can vary from activity to activity, but if you determine which activities perform the best, you can scale those going forward. Here is a list of demand generation tactics that can drive results consistently over time.
1. Defining Demand Generation Goals
Marketing and demand generation goals vary from business to business. They often have more to do with the maturity of the marketing organization. Goals range from:
- Creating brand awareness
- Driving number of leads, SQLs, and MQLs
- Engaging new contacts
- Impacting opportunities at target accounts
- Driving percentage of revenue
- Reaching specific conversion rates between specified funnel stages
When determining which demand generation activities to focus on, it’s crucial to define specific outcomes for each one. If you don’t know what your goals are, how can you celebrate when you get there?
2. Creating Helpful Content
Content is the core of demand generation. It is an essential tool to engage prospects and create a demand. You can include several types of content in your toolbox including landing pages, blog posts, infographics, ebooks, guides, contributed articles, whitepapers, webinars, research reports, case studies, videos, podcasts, and nurture emails.
Since your target audience will sort through a vast amount of content, you should ensure that you provide only high-quality content. Starting with your buyer personas, understanding them, their needs, challenges and goals, you should align all of your content to various buying stages for each one of those personas.
3. Repurposing High-Performance Content
Since creating high-quality content takes resources and time, it is important to use your investments as much as you can. When you can identify specific pieces of demand generation content that are successfully driving results such as being effective at moving prospects through to the next stage in the funnel or engaging new contacts, look for ways to repurpose that content.
For example, if you find that a report that you have created helps drive new leads into your marketing funnel repeatedly, look for new ways to utilize the report in different circumstances. The report took hours of time to create, so finding new methods of driving results with the report will give you more from your investment. You can use the same report by referring to it in blog posts or articles, packaging it with other content such as an infographic, including it in a whitepaper, and using it with other marketing channels.
4. Distributing and Amplifying Content
Demand generation marketers often put many hours and much energy to developing high-quality content, and then the content sits, waiting for people to discover it. If your business is a library, then using that method to distribute content is exactly what you should do. But in a B2B business where you need to drive results, your marketing plan must include promotional tactics to place your content where your buyer personas will find it. The content is no good unless people engage with it.
Distributing your content can include:
- Routine social-media sharing – Works best with easily digestible content with limited text, and visual and multi-media content.
- Using an email mailing list – Maintain a list of qualified prospects and customers to continue to build a relationship. This list can be segmented by interest, location, etc.
- Network with third-party sources – To accelerate the number of potential prospects to find your latest content, work with trusted associates or media partners who already have relationships with your target audience to scale demand generation results.
5. Refining Account Targeting
A “set it and forget it” approach doesn’t mesh well with demand generation. There are too many variables that change over time including keywords and buyer personas. While some of your target audience won’t change, you may find new audiences by studying the customer data that you already have. To make sure that you aren’t missing any audiences, you should periodically:
- Make sure your target audience is synced with your sales team’s targets
- Evaluate who is buying. Are you still engaging with the same target personas? You may need to develop new buyer personas
- Examine firmographic and demographic metrics for your best customers to target the right audiences with your campaigns
