Demystifying Demand Generation Marketing
In my experience working with entrepreneurs and CEOs that have a general sense of specific marketing skills, the term “demand generation” (“demand gen” for short) can be defined in as many different ways as there are people being asked to explain it. Anyone can look up the definition of the term, but what does it really mean in pragmatic terms? I’ll offer up a set of marketing terms as they all relate to demand gen along with implications for marketing excellence in this field.
Marketing Definitions
Demand Generation
Demand generation is the art of creating awareness and interest in your products or services to generate demand among your target audience.
Lead Generation
Lead generation, on the other hand, focuses on capturing specific information about potential customers, such as their contact details, to nurture them into becoming paying customers.
Brand Awareness
At its core, brand awareness refers to the extent to which a target audience recognizes or recalls a particular brand. It's the familiarity people have with your brand when they encounter it, whether through a logo, slogan, product, or other elements associated with your business.
Demand Gen – The Inclusive Concept of Various Marketing Skills
Being a demand gen leader myself, it is my biased opinion that per the aforementioned definitions of three key marketing concepts, “demand gen” is the overarching framework that encompasses both lead gen and brand awareness to ultimately drive pipeline and revenue. If demand gen is the starting point to generate interest in a product, very rarely will a marketer stop there. Implicitly, a demand gen professional will want demand for products to result in “conversions” where prospective customers shift from having mere interest in a product to readiness-to-buy, reflected as leads/opportunities in a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) database. This data capture, a.k.a “lead gen” is the objective of all good demand gen activities.
“Implicitly, a demand gen professional will want demand for products to result in “conversions” where prospective customers shift from having mere interest in a product to readiness-to-buy, reflected as leads/opportunities in a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) database. This data capture, a.k.a “lead gen” is the objective of all good demand gen activities.”
Where lead gen is the result of demand gen, “brand awareness” is the prerequisite. To create interest in your products and services, one must first educate the marketplace about your brand. Hence the brand awareness specialty. Having worked in software-as-a-service (SaaS) for most of my career, I can tell you firsthand, that there are many pre-conceived notions about software categories and many of those are misconceptions. When a nascent software enters the marketplace, the first challenge is to define what it is and what its value to customers will be. Brand awareness helps position products within the ecosystem of comparable yet competitive products. Then it takes a brand a step further to make it recognizable, standing for certain values. That is why the function of brand marketing often entails determining “promises” so that the brand name and logo get recognized for concepts that customers value such as trustworthiness, efficiency, speed, customer satisfaction. Once this value has been established, the function of demand gen is to find the prospective customers that would benefit from said value, and convince them to learn more and buy.
Actionable Demand Gen Activities
A demand gen strategy for any company should be comprehensive enough to establish integrated marketing campaigns that include both brand awareness and lead gen elements. These may include, but are not limited to:
· Content marketing – creating valuable, informative content that addresses the pain points and interests of your audience while also showcasing invaluable customer success stories. Website content falls under this competency along with the ability to optimize content for web searches, referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is tangential to search engine marketing (SEM) which is a whole separate art in and of itself, derived from the content on your website to advertise to mass audiences. Content syndication is the process of distributing content, such as articles, blog posts, or videos, to third-party platforms or websites for wider exposure within their niche or industry. Lastly, content marketing is relevant for all public relations (PR) efforts to align messaging and scale visibility.
· Social media marketing – leveraging social platforms to connect with your audience, share content, and build brand affinity. Social media efforts can be organic (free promotion) as well as paid.
· Email marketing – using email campaigns to nurture leads through the sales cycle and provide valuable information. For many companies, this is the most simple and direct means of communicating with their target audience aside from their must-have website.
· Event or “field” marketing – hosting webinars, workshops, roundtables, or virtual events to engage your audience. Or this could include participation in pre-established trade shows. This specialty is unique in that it is experiential, captivating all the senses.
· Channel marketing – working with partners to augment and scale marketing activities, leveraging their expertise to assist with or own the subsequent sales process.
· Account-based marketing (ABM) – a strategic approach that focuses on targeting high-value accounts or specific companies rather than individual leads. It involves personalized marketing efforts tailored to the needs and preferences of key decision-makers within those accounts, aiming to build stronger relationships and drive sales within specific target organizations.
Each of these marketing specialties requires dexterity as they can be analyzed with a myriad of key performance indictor (KPI) metrics that indicate successful outcomes or a need to course correct. Typically, a mature demand gen team would have a specialist in each of these roles because of the diversity of skills required to get granular and determine what is working. A demand gen expert should know enough about all these focused areas to make them fit together in a strategic, integrated campaign, and may have the luxury of delegating specific tasks to specialists to pull all activities together for effective communications.
Combining these activities not only increases a marketer’s reach in the marketplace, but also maximizes the return on marketing investment (ROMI). Merging these different tactics provides content and promotions that appeal to prospects however they find and consume information, in varying ways. In my experience, I’ve used this combo and more – intentionally finding my audience where they spend their time and marketing to them there, on their terms.
Objectives of Demand Generation
At the end of the day, a demand gen effort is successful if a net new prospect is able to do his/her due diligence about the company and its products, learning enough to find out how s/he can benefit from using them, then take action to meet with a representative from the company. This is when the prospect is considered a “lead,” connoting that contact information has been entered into the CRM system and can subsequently be qualified as having a propensity to buy. This probability of a purchase leads to “pipeline” (revenue potential), which is a key KPI for any demand gen pro. Pipeline is the opportunity that every sales rep has on the table to close a sale for a projected amount of revenue.
Furthermore, a lead has inherent value for cross-sell and upsell opportunities down the line if a company looks at the prospect over the course of their lifetime value (LTV) including renewed subscriptions/contracts over time. A good demand gen pro will likewise work with sales and customer success teams to make sure the product and the company brand is top-of-mind with customers, communicating ways to optimize it and add to it for enhanced functionality.
Basic Automation Applications for Demand Gen Experts
There is a multitude of apps a demand gen marketer can use to automate processes for each of the tactics used to execute marketing campaigns. At a high level, a demand gen expert will need to be able to find platforms for marketing content, starting in-house with the company website. Then demand gen activities will drive external prospects to the website where the marketer can strategically control visitor behavior, resulting in conversions.
A marketing automation tool (MAT) such as Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, and more, will integrate the various elements of demand gen campaigns including assets such as emails, landing pages, and other campaign elements for communication. The MATs vary in sophistication but should include the ability to target a specific audience (manage lists) and monitor the results of campaigns through data capture.
While MATs capture contact information, a CRM tool such as SalesforceCRM is an imperative part of any demand gen expert’s daily life to make sure leads are followed up on by sales teams in a timely manner. And if leads are rejected in the discovery phase, the MAT recycles them back into a nurturing marketing activity to keep leads interested until they are ready to purchase.
Measurement for Success
A demand gen expert should have an analytical mind and comprehension of numerous data sets needed to determine success metrics. You read that correctly, marketers use investigative, problem-solving skills in addition to being creative. There are many numbers to track, which needs to be done systematically to derive trends.
You can get deep into the analytics of marketing KPIs and success metrics to establish goal attainment, which is an important exercise because you can’t fix what you don’t measure. But moreover, a demand gen framework is successful anecdotally if a lead enters the company database through engagement with marketing content, and subsequently has an educated and productive conversation with the sales team where real, specific pain points are addressed. These are what we call “warm (or hot) leads,” and the sales team loves them. When prospects already have a general sense of what your brand stands for, what functionality your products have to offer, and are open to hearing about what those products can do to improve their business before jumping on a call with Sales, the demand gen efforts have worked, making the sales process a bit more seamless.
“When prospects already have a general sense of what your brand stands for, what functionality your products have to offer, and are open to hearing about what those products can do to improve their business before jumping on a call with Sales, the demand gen efforts have worked, making the sales process a bit more seamless.”
I would argue that demand gen also encompasses sales enablement, which ultimately helps the sales team acquire marketing assets in all formats that help nurture an opportunity through to close, driving new revenue. Not to mention, partnering with sales experts to ensure messaging on all comms is aligned and poignant to get results.
Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is what SaaS companies strive for in order to continue operating and turn a profit. As a demand gen expert, I have always used a data-driven approach to help sales teams achieve ARR goals. Quantifying reach in the marketplace as well as resulting engagement and conversions allows marketers to adjust campaigns to continue boosting numbers upwards. When pipeline goes up (assuming the sales team is effectively closing deals to keep pace), revenue will inevitably climb. And that’s why we do what we do.
About the Author
Allison has an international MBA in marketing and entrepreneurialism, and has built her career on developing strategic marketing plans. By working with Microsoft for nearly a decade, she honed corporate marketing skills before transitioning to the startup world to help companies grow brand recognition and subsequently revenue. There, she explored various SaaS industries including cybersecurity, DevSecOps, telematics, and industrial IoT (IIoT). All of these industries leverage automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, and various forms of data management. It has been Allison’s pleasure to bring these powerful tools to light and watch as companies grow their business.
Visit her on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/AllisonQDurbin
