Effective demand generation goes beyond simple, day-to-day tactics to focus on a long-term strategy for forging customer relationships and delighting buyers.
A demand generation program is built upon branding, inbound marketing, customer success, accurate reporting and an effective tech stack. Those fundamentals will help you execute a demand generation strategy that will delight your customers and grow your business.
Why Effective Branding is Essential
The lines between B2B and B2C strategies are beginning to blur. Buyers are doing numerous searches before ever engaging with a brand, so it’s important to make a strong first impression and have consistency across your content.
People want to buy from people, so showing off the team who makes your company great will strengthen your brand and better resonate with your potential buyers.
Inbound Marketing As a Tactic
When the inbound methodology was first introduced, it was focused around developing authentic, organic interactions. More recently, there has been a focus on Account-Based Marketing (ABM), not only focusing on prospects who have already engaged with your brand but also working toward developing content to educate and engage companies that might be interested in your product or service.
With the change from the funnel to the flywheel, inbound marketing has shifted from being focused on simply acquiring better leads to helping prospects move through the entire customer lifecycle.
Investing in Customer Success
Customer success should not be an afterthought. If you just focus on bringing customers through the door, but those customers are churning and unhappy, they won’t leave good reviews about your company. Without evangelists to help you spread the word about your brand, you won’t grow.
Focus on what’s working for the customer and what isn’t to help make sure the product or service the customer bought fulfilled the promise made by you as a marketer. At the end of the day, retaining and upselling customers is what drives your company’s growth.
Don’t be afraid to talk with your customers and use the knowledge gained to inform your customer success strategy and improve your customer acquisition strategy.
Measuring ROI
Taking a data-driven approach means you need to analyze your marketing efforts and then leverage that data to actually improve your strategy.
Don’t be overwhelmed by the plethora of available information and instead determine which metrics are the most important to help you reach your goals. Examine your metrics in the context of your overarching goals and prioritize them based on your performance indicators.
Start with your key performance indicator (KPI): what is the ultimate action you want a customer to take on your website? Then you have your leading performance indicators (LPI), which are the touch points leading up to your KPI. Finally, there are the tactical performance indicators, which are metrics like page views, session lengths and bounce rates examined in the context of how they contribute to your LPIs and KPIs.
Optimizing Your Tech Stack
Be mindful when investing in software. Read reviews and search for third-party validation before purchasing. Additionally, make sure to look for software that doesn’t just meet your needs in the short term, but also sets you up for where you want to be as you grow.
The essential tech stack for demand generation includes a marketing automation system, a CMS, a CRM, a BI platform and tools for conversational marketing and customer service.
Watch the webinar for more insights into scaling your business with demand generation.
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Demand Generation
