Neha Gianchand is a passionate B2B marketing leader. Senior vice president and head of marketing at Straive.
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Effective demand generation is a core component of your marketing strategy. Lead generation plays a pivotal role in evaluating the effectiveness and success of your marketing campaign—it’s about offering to create value and impact through engaging content and qualifying leads through ongoing engagement.
Effective demand generation encompasses a wide array of marketing tactics—effective campaigns, engaging content, clear and sound messaging about the services, and reinforcing it through multiple touchpoints: social media, website, third parties, wikis and so on. Driving and converting prospects into customers, the marketing strategy must ensure that enterprise brand presence across various channels works in tandem to deliver a consistent message.
Ideally, an effective demand-gen strategy fosters prospects into loyal, longtime and recurrent customers. However, comprehending effective marketing is entirely different from knowing how to market your solutions or services to your prospective accounts. Business-to-business (B2B) marketing has grown significantly, and so has the complexity as the digital business environment has evolved immensely over the last decade. Today’s buyers often learn and educate themselves through basic online research and reading about the services they intend to go after. And, more and more stakeholders are involved in purchase decisions than ever.
Enterprises must evolve and respond to this emerging digital landscape. Merely having an online presence is not enough. A sophisticated marketing strategy is imperative to influence audiences. A successful marketing strategy identifies leads, nurtures them and converts them into prospective customers. It is a progressive and thoughtful approach to delivering the right message into the right channels to make an impact. Offline approaches, such as trade shows, are still relevant; however, innovative approaches must also be devised, evaluated or tested to influence digital buyers. Their buying behavior has transitioned to more informed purchase decision-making rather than sales-led approaches. Thus, an aligned or unified marketing approach is paramount to influence informed buyers across various channels.
Setting Up An Effective Demand-Gen Engine
Defining And Identifying KPIs Clearly
A systematic and data-driven approach to measuring marketing campaign performance is vital to making the right decisions. Clearly identifying and setting the key performance indicators (KPIs; quantifiable parameters) that you intend to achieve is essential. It helps to assess the campaign performance and reevaluate in case of any deviation. It also supports optimizing the budget across multiple channels (entirely data-based decisions).
Number Of Opportunities/Funnels And Deal Size
Developing sound and robust lead scoring is essential to help assess the credibility and effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Therefore, keeping track of how many leads are converting into an opportunity/funnel is necessary. It starts from tracking the website visitors who finally convert into opportunities. This also helps you to determine the value generated by your demand-generation strategies. It helps you assess and increase your spending by focusing on the right prospects.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Getting website clicks isn’t enough. The focus should be on converting clicks into a revenue stream. Customer acquisition cost is integral to effective demand-gen metrics and helps you identify your return on investment (ROI) against customers. Cost per acquisition (CPA) determines your financial success and estimates the amount of money spent on acquiring a customer through a demand-gen campaign.
In-Person Events
For an effective demand-gen strategy, identifying the right event is critical for the enterprise to make itself visible to the right audience. Developing the right and relevant messaging to create a marketing impact. Also, estimating the event’s ROI in terms of brand visibility, the number of in-person meetings, and potential and existing customer presence is the way forward to success.
Enabling Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) lets you weed out inconsequential companies initially and helps you identify high-value accounts so that you can develop more personalized and effective communication for them. With a well-defined ABM strategy, enterprises can personalize the buyer’s journey and tailor communications according to their accounts to help generate better ROI and increase customer engagement.
Leveraged Content
A content marketing strategy is a way for the enterprise to reshape its brand identity, garner interest and keep its target audience engaged. Develop the right content that syncs your potential and existing customers. Reuse the best-performing content assets, and analyze your content to strengthen your content strategy. If you have a limited budget, focus on which channel works best for you and align your content with the channel requirements. Also, you can leverage content that is already existing within the organization rather than developing new content from scratch, giving you more time for execution, distribution and maintaining consistency across all communication channels.
Conclusion
Effective demand generation is a continuous process and takes time to showcase its potential. You can’t expect overnight outcomes. It requires incessant monitoring, evaluation and data-driven feedback/input to improve and get better. Digital landscape channels will continue to unlock challenges, and limited resources, timelines and tight budgets can make things even more challenging. Therefore, defining the right metrics and tracking for them is key.
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