Demand generation (also commonly referred to as “demand gen”) is the process of creating demand for your products or services, from an audience that wasnt aware of you before. Essentially, you would create new qualified leads to ensure your business grows consistently. First and foremost, this needs to start with a strategy based around your objectives, goals, target customers and expected results.
Demand Generation Strategy
When creating demand generation for your business, you’ll need to establish what your strategy is. Setting the right strategy for every initative will make sure you’re getting the right kind of leads (the ones that actually purchase from you), at a market (or below) rate cost, within a set timeframe or cadence.
1. Your Demand Generation Objectives
You may be thinking, your overarching objective is along the lines of creating more qualified leads at X cost-per-lead. Although this might be a good KPI for an individual or department fullfilling this role, when implementing lead generation initiatives it’s necessary to drill down further. Here are a few reasons why you should break down demand generation into multiple smaller objectives:
A Seasonal Campaign
Your business might have a seasonal aspect to it. If you want to target a specific target audience, at a certain time of year, with relevant messaging and seperate budget, his should be seperate from ongoing lead generation initiatives. Reporting on the campaign’s effectiveness will be easier, when segregating other initiatives.
Test First, then Scale
As a marketer, you will always be testing new ideas eg a new target audience or a new marketing channel, with minimal budget to then scale gradually. This ensures you’re protecting your budget and making sure you get proven ROI from launching a new demand gen campaign.
Improvement Content Conversion Rates
Its essential in marketing to measure every part of the ROI on marketing costs, including labour. Often ongoing demand generation initiatives can perform better with continuous improvement. For instance, SEO blog articles, landing pages and PPC campaigns can always be tweaked and improved. By seperating these into different demand gen campaigns with their own objectives, you can evaluate and prove ROI on labour time focused on improvements.
2. Your Target Audience
Who is the target audience you are looking to drive awareness of your products or services with this initative? You most likely have 3-5 buyer personas and each initative will often work best, when focusing on 1 of those buyer personas specifically. You will be writing content, creating media and targeting them with channels specific to their individual profile so an early understanding is essential.
3. Demand Generation Goals
Once you have your objectives set and have established the target audience, its time to set your goals. Otherwise, how would you know if you are successful? SMART goals are one of the pillars of good marketing. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Lets explore SMART goals for demand generation further:
Specific
This is your objective which we discussed previously. You should now break this down further into Measurable, Acheivable, Relevant and Time-bound to create a tangible goal.
Measurable
Measurable is one or more metrics, which define the expected success of your initative. Often for demand generation, the best metrics are cost-per-lead (CPL), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), number of MQL’s, number of MQL’s closed, average deal size and LTV.
Achievable
Can this be lead gen initiative be done? Is it reasonable? Those responsible for delivering the initiative, need to agree it can be achieved. Think of this as a service-level-agreement (SLA) stage for your demand generation initative.
Relevant
Is the goal worthwhile? Is it worth your time and others time invested in it? Weigh up the reward if successful vs the impact of not doing this. Have you got the balance right?
Time-bound
What is the timeline for your demand generation initative to be delivered? If this is ongoing, rather than a campaign, or other fixed time initative, what are the milestones?
You should now have a SMART demand generation goal, that looks something like this: Increase HR Manager MQLs by 15% at $80 CPL in December and January.
- Specific: increase the number HR Manager leads
- Measurable: 15% HR Manager lead increase, at $80 CPL
- Achievable: yes, based on historic YoY data and insights
- Relevant: HR Managers fit the buyer persona – more leads will result in more sales
- Timely: 2 months eg December & January when HR Managers have last year’s budget and this new year’s budget to spend.
4. Key Messaging
Finally, you will need establish the a message you will be sharing with your buyer persona across all the media types and channels during this demand generation initiative. Build it around an understanding of what they value about your product or service, what pain points this solves or which relevant challenges you want to help them solve.
For example, recruitment agencies benchmark salaries for roles they recruited for in the past year. They have an overall key message eg “we are the UK leaders in Data Science, Machine Learning and AI recruitment”.
However, they also break down key messages for each buyer persona eg candidates and businesses who are looking to recruit to a particular job title. For example eg “we hired xyz number of Data Scientists last year, with 87% rating their experience with our consultants outstanding”.
Once you’ve established what you want to achieve strategically, you can get started on tactical implementation – developing content, with different media types to be published on select marketing channels. If you want to learn more, jump over to our other article – demand generation tactics.