What is Demand Generation?

Fostering growth and achieving business targets isn't simply about having an exceptional product or service. It necessitates a thorough understanding and efficient implementation of demand generation strategies.

By Michael Garris, Demand Generation Team Lead and Growth Strategist

Demand generation is a data-driven marketing program leveraging inbound methodology to drive awareness and interest throughout the entire buyer and customer lifecycle.

Quite simply, it’s the things that a marketer does to create (generate) excitement and awareness (demand) for their solution. 

A holistic B2B demand generation strategy accounts for every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey — all the way from anonymous visitor to delighted customer, at specific stages throughout the customer’s lifetime. It uses data to align marketing and sales, track marketing's revenue contribution, and drive long-term growth for your organization.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation vs. Inbound Marketing

Digital marketers often use demand generation and lead generation interchangeably. However, these are two distinct concepts, each with unique roles and strategic implications in the broader marketing landscape: 

1. Demand Generation is a function; you want to generate demand for your product or service.
2. Lead Generation is the step that (hopefully) will follow demand generation, capturing the interest of your potential customers via an ‘opt-in’ action, typically filling out a form on a landing page, asset, subscription, etc.
3. Inbound Marketing is a method used to achieve either of these goals (demand generation and lead generation). Inbound marketing can assist you in educating and guiding your customers with valuable content and offers through a variety of channels.

Demand Generation: Sparking Interest

As discussed earlier, demand generation is a holistic, strategic process aimed at sparking interest in your company's products or services. It involves a variety of tactics, which blend to generate and convert interest and drive buyer intent for your products and/or services. These tactics can include:

1. Content and inbound marketing
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Email marketing
4. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
5. Social media marketing
6. Marketing automation
7. Partnerships
8. And all other revenue-generating marketing strategies

Demand generation focuses on getting potential customers engaged with your brand by building a long-term relationship.

By nurturing these relationships through valuable and engaging content, businesses can build a solid foundation of trust and brand loyalty.

Demand generation strategies are typically considered as broad, reaching a larger audience, but demand generation strategies can (and should!) be more tailored to specific groups or smaller markets. We’ll go into this later in this article, but these tactics are used to educate customers about the product, its benefits, and how it can solve their problems.

Many layers go into an incredible demand generation strategy, and depending on the needs of your business, marketers need to understand all of these layers to understand what levers are best to pull.

As an Elite HubSpot Solutions partner, the New Breed team understands the nuances of demand generation strategy, and how to shape it for each and every business model.

That’s why we’ve called on them and others within New Breed to author the rest of this guide, each choosing a specialty that they’re most passionate about to give you an overview and tips on how to master demand generation. Our demand generation strategists can hone in on supplementing a specific campaign or creating an entire strategy, all while delivering performance reports and the resources needed to succeed. 

If you’re stuck on ideas or feeling resource constraints, we’re here to help you reach your demand generation and revenue goals. Just get in touch with us to get started and we can discuss the many service offerings we can provide as an extension of your team. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss what it takes to build an incredible and successful demand generation strategy, including: 

1. Brand awareness

2. Inbound marketing

3. Account based marketing

4. Email marketing

5. Sales enablement

6. Growth strategy and revenue performance

7. The 5 tenets of a successful demand generation program

Click on the section above that interests you most to go straight to it! 

Brand Awareness

Written by Nick Frigo, Brand Manager at New Breed 

To generate demand, people have to know who you are, which is why our first section is on brand awareness. This is all about putting in place steps so your contacts and customers can recognize and trust your brand.

Your brand is the sum total of all your customer touchpoints, and it helps your business stand out from competitors. Creating a strong brand identity is important for people to remember your company and what it offers. While many think of a brand as a logo, it’s much more than that — it’s what makes you stand out from competitors and is uniquely you. 

Your brand should be in everything your company creates, and externally, that means putting a stamp on demand generation execution so it looks and feels like your brand. Creating alignment and understanding of what your brand is and isn’t is important so that customers coming into your funnel get a clear view of what your brand stands for, and what it can offer them. 

Here's how to gain the same alignment between your brand and demand gen efforts.

1. Proper identification of buyer personas

To reach the right buyers, you need to know, well, who you want to reach. Your buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyers. It can include things like job titles, goals, and challenges. From here, you can start to build out what sort of content and marketing channels will resonate the most with them. 

Taking this a step further, you’ll also want to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP), which looks at the type of companies that are a good fit for your product or service. These are the business in which your buyer persona is housed. 

Creating a buyer persona and narrowing down your ICP can be challenging, but here are a few inputs to get you started: 

1. Look at your existing customer data to see who is buying from you (and importantly, who has stayed!)
2. Conduct surveys or interview your current customers to gain further insights into their needs and pain points
3. Create a document that captures their typical demographic, interests, behaviors, and goals
4. Sort these into ‘personas’ to create detailed buyer profiles

2. Clarify your brand story

Take the steps with your wider teams to define who your company is, rather than just ‘what you do.’ This looks at defining an aspirational message to hone in on why your company is different than others. Typically, this is created by a combination of your founder/CEO, marketing and sales leadership and stakeholders from other teams. 

If you need help with any of these steps, our team at New Breed can hold a Strategic Growth Workshop to dive into these pieces, which are essential to getting your demand generation and overall marketing tactics right. 

3. Understand your Unique Selling Proposition

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) boils down to just a few lines of what makes your product different from your competitors. While the brand story focuses on your company as a whole, your USP looks specifically at your product and/or services and what makes them unique compared to what’s already on the market. 

Your brand is apparent in a number of places, including: 

1. Content
2. Website
3. Logo
4. Swag
5. Events
6. Office space
7. Your company name
8. And so much more! 

While these are big asks, they are key to building the right type of brand awareness, and in turn, feeding your demand generation strategy. 

Inbound Marketing 

by Caroline McCusker, Sr. Demand Generation Strategist

Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to attracting leads by creating valuable content that addresses the needs of your target audience. 

Simply put, it’s about providing value to your target audience and establishing yourself as a trusted resource before promoting your products or services as a solution to their challenges.  

Content and SEO

Content is the cornerstone of any successful inbound marketing strategy. A great way to start thinking about how to develop a strong content strategy is to think about the questions your prospective customers might have. What challenges are they facing and beginning to research on their quest for a solution?

If you create content that directly speaks to their needs, you’ll be well on your way to establishing yourself as a thought leader and building trust with your audience.  

As you develop your content strategy, it’s critical to consider SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure that the content you develop is actually visible on the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of SEO here, that’s for another post, but it is critical to develop a list of specific keywords to use in your blog titles and content. Look for relevant keywords that have decent search volume, but less competition to increase your chances of being able to rank for them. While this is important for the new content you’ll produce, don’t forget to revisit existing content that could use an SEO-optimized refresh to improve its organic search ranking and drive more traffic to your site, which is exactly what we continue to do with this post! 

Types of Inbound Marketing Content

Different audiences will find different types of content useful, so your content should be offered in a variety of formats. Remember that audiences engage with different types of content differently, so it’s important to test out what content formats work the best. This could even be a part of your survey and information-gathering phase when you develop your buyer personas. 

For example, are you catering to time-poor executives? A longer, 1-hour webinar might not be the best format, but a data-rich infographic that can be skimmed in just a couple of minutes, or a series of 10-minute video interviews could resonate better. 

Here are several different types of content that you can consider creating: 

1. Blog posts 
2. Social media posts 
3. White Papers and guides 
4. eBooks
5. Reports 
6. Webinars
7. Videos
8. Infographics 
9. Tip Sheets
10. Checklists 
11. Slideshows
12. Templates & toolkits 
13. Resource lists 
14. Quizzes, calculators, and assessments
15. Case studies 
16. Comparison guides 
    

Some of the content you create to fuel your inbound marketing strategy will be ungated on your site, meaning it doesn’t sit behind a form and is accessible to search engines. Blog posts are the prime example of ungated content – in fact, maintaining an active, SEO-optimized blog is critical for attracting the right audience to your website. 

On the other hand, you may want to gate many of the longer-form pieces of content you generate like whitepapers, eBooks, guides, and reports. Gated content should provide a high level of value to your visitors.

After all, you're offering them a free resource in exchange for their contact information, so the content needs to be enticing and useful enough for someone to give up their personal information.

By delivering on the value you’re offering, you can build that trust with your audience as well, so don’t promise someone an in-depth guide and then the content behind the gate is a one-page product overview! 

Leveraging Content

With all the time and effort spent to create valuable content, you’ll want to ensure you’re leveraging it to the fullest extent through repurposing the content created or finding new ways to promote your unique content. Make it available on your website, promoted on social media, and via email (you can send announcement emails when new content is published and weave it into email nurture campaigns to educate and guide leads through the buyer's journey). 

Pair these traditional inbound marketing tactics with outbound marketing tactics and run paid advertising campaigns to promote your content offers and further fuel lead generation. Consider content your fuel for demand generation campaigns, all driving excitement and awareness (and leads!) for your brand and their offerings

Since partnering with New Breed, New Home Star, has leaned into creating valuable downloadable content to fuel their inbound marketing strategy and generate leads. Together we’ve built out a resource center and developed several pieces of downloadable content in the form of eBooks, reports, infographics, and case studies. By leveraging the channels noted previously (including paid ads), they’ve been able to use this content to more than double leads generated year-over-year. 

Advantages of Inbound Marketing 

While inbound marketing shouldn’t be the only tactic in your demand generation toolkit, it is an important one! There are a few key benefits to implementing an inbound marketing strategy that we wanted to call out. 

1. Brand loyalty: Inbound is all about providing value and solving customer challenges. This positions your company as a thought leader and builds trust with your brand. Over time, this creates a strong brand with a loyal customer base. 
2. Longtail results and ongoing ROI: Creating a strong inbound marketing strategy takes a significant time investment and requires consistency. The good news is that the content you create has the potential to attract new leads and customers long into the future. With outbound marketing, you typically stop seeing results when you stop spending money, but with inbound, a quality piece of content is multipurpose and can deliver results for some time. 
3. Highly measurable: Using tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics, you can track website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates to measure the success of your efforts. This data can help improve your strategy as you discover what content your audience is craving.
4. Cost-effective: While we generally recommend putting some budget behind promoting your most valuable content, inbound marketing relies on organically driving traffic to your website and distributing content via social media. The ability to drive the right audience to your website and convert those visitors into leads and ultimately customers without a huge budget makes inbound marketing an attractive strategy.
   
   Remember, though, that organic traffic is a long game, which is why some of your higher-value pieces should have a distribution plan alongside of it. 
   
   

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

By Bryan Kratz, Sr. Demand Generation Strategist

Inbound marketing is all about what you create to reach your particular audience. But In today's competitive landscape, traditional lead generation can fall short. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) offers businesses the ability to focus their efforts on high-value accounts that would be the optimal fit for their product or service. This ultimately helps maximize a company’s chances of conversion and revenue generation.

How is ABM different from Demand Generation?

At its core, ABM alters the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of casting a wider net to generate and capture demand, ABM is a focused approach where you target key accounts that are an ideal fit for your solution or product. 

That said, we are still generating demand for a solution to our ideal customer’s pain points. 

So instead of looking at demand generation and account based marketing as mutually exclusive approaches to marketing, consider ABM as a subclass to Demand Generation. ABM has a particular time and place when it is the most effective demand generation strategy—knowing when and where to use it is paramount.

Key Components of ABM

Determining if ABM will be a good fit for your demand generation program—and more importantly the overall effectiveness of this type of campaign—depends on a number of factors. 

We boil these down to the following key components of ABM: 

1. Account Selection. The first step in ABM is identifying target accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). This involves analyzing data to pinpoint companies that match specific criteria such as industry, company size, revenue, buyer roles, and purchasing behavior. If your total addressable market is massive, consider ABM only after you’ve implemented less sophisticated methods of demand generation so you can understand who your most valuable buyers are.
2. Omnichannel Engagement. ABM encompasses an omnichannel approach to engage target accounts across various touch points throughout the buyer's journey. The most effective campaigns leverage a combination of email, paid advertising, social media, sales outreach, direct mail, and events. Building your campaigns with this in mind, marketers can create a seamless experience to reinforce their brand’s message.
3. Personalized Messaging. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns which deliver a more generalized message to a broader audience, ABM gets laser-focused. To have an effective ABM campaign, we will need personalized content and communication tailored to the unique needs and challenges of each target account. Whether through email, social media, or targeted advertising, you must have highly relevant content.
4. Alignment with Sales. Successful ABM initiatives require close collaboration between marketing and sales teams. You must secure 100% buy-in from leadership from both teams before venturing down this path. 

This alignment of effort allows both teams to work together to identify target accounts, tailor outreach strategies, and coordinate follow-up activities.

In our experience, the most effective ABM initiatives are those that include massive involvement and commitment from both sales and marketing.

If you think your organization is ready for ABM, New Breed offers an ABM Blueprint to help take your ABM strategy from readiness to ROI, unpacking what it takes to deliver ABM success. 

Email Marketing

By Kelsey Meiklejohn, Sr. Demand Generation Strategist

Email marketing is an integral component of a demand generation strategy. In addition to being a tool leveraged to drive engagement and increase demand, email allows marketers to nurture their contacts down the funnel. 

When it comes to email, as you can imagine, the content within the email matters just as much as the tactics surrounding your email campaigns.

Your content can range from prospecting to thought leadership and everything in between, which all depends on the goals of the campaign you’re launching and what audience you want to engage.

Figure out what makes the most sense for communicating to your contacts and create a campaign schedule that meets those needs. 

Marketing campaigns, lead generation, lead nurture, product announcements, and regular newsletters are all great ways to stay in touch with your database. When creating these strategies be sure to take into account the tips below. 

1. Segmentation: Segmenting your audience is the first step towards a successful email marketing campaign. Your goal is to deliver the right message to the right audience and that starts here. For starters, you want to be sure to differentiate between customers and prospects. 
   
   Next, you should be breaking down your list by your target personas. Some other factors to consider when segmenting: lifecycle stage, job title, tenure, location, company size, and industry. Looking at how these segments perform is a great way to understand what audiences are most engaged with your content and where you may need to fill in the gaps with more targeted content creation.
2. Content. The next step is focusing on your messaging. This messaging should be targeted specifically to the audiences referenced above. You want to keep your message concise and impactful and provide opportunities for the reader to convert, which is why we suggest a mix of call-to-actions (CTAs) as well as in-line hyperlinks. 
   
   

   A 2022 study found that 71% of consumers expect companies to offer personalized communication

   Adding personalization to your subject line and email body can make the reader more confident that this content is tailored to their needs. 
   
   We want to use this opportunity to continue moving contacts down the funnel, so be sure to entice the reader that there is even more for them in the content or resources you are linking to, in short, don’t give them so much information that they feel like they don’t need to progress past the email. 

3. Cadence. Next, you’ll want to focus on the cadence of your email marketing campaigns. As we all know, there is such a thing as too many marketing emails. While there is no perfect science to email marketing cadenceHubspot does provide the following insights: 
   • • Emails sent on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday get the most engagement.
     • Marketing emails sent from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Tuesday garner the most engagement, followed by Monday and Wednesday at the same time.
     • The weekend is a dead zone for engagement — Friday, Saturday, and Sunday have the lowest open and click-through rates.

The only way to find out what the best cadence is for your audiences is to test different send days, times, and frequencies while consistently reviewing analytics. In addition to reviewing open and click-through rates, keep an eye on your unsubscribe and overall email health analysis throughout this testing phase.

4. Automation Don’t leave your reader hanging! Follow-up and nurture streams are critical steps to successfully move your leads down the funnel. Each email marketing campaign should consider both non-openers and non-clickers for re-engagement opportunities.

For example… Contact opened your email but didn’t convert? Tailor your follow-up email to specifically address just that!

A group of contacts didn’t open the email? Try testing different subject lines and re-send to that group after an appropriate amount of time.

And don’t forget about your engaged audience either. Creating messaging tailored towards moving leads through the funnel and setting up timely automation that gets the email into your leads inbox is key!

Set up lead nurture campaigns that are relevant to the segmented list and encourage further engagement from additional actions that can be taken. 

The most important thing to remember when it comes to email marketing is to review and adjust. Don’t let your messaging get stale and if the tactics you’re deploying are not yielding the expected results, adjust accordingly after reviewing metrics! 

If you're looking for support on your email marketing strategy, the team at New Breed can help you with understanding your database, creating content, and building your demand generation strategy from the ground up. Get in touch with us to learn more about our demand generation assessment. 

Sales Enablement

By Mary Mcintire, Senior Demand Generation Strategist

Ensuring alignment between marketing and sales is vital for your overall business success. Thankfully, sales enablement efforts fueled by a comprehensive demand generation strategy can foster unity between these departments and, in turn, increase the organization’s overall close rate. 

1. 1.  

      Marketing should look to equip the sales teams with the right tools and strategies to engage buyers with a highly personalized approach.

The following list outlines essential sales enablement strategies, techniques, and instances that your marketing team can adopt to unify marketing and sales efforts and, ultimately, drive more revenue!

Your Website

Your website stands as your most valuable marketing asset and a great tool for sales enablement. A growing number of B2B buyers now prefer a self-service experience. When visiting your website, buyers have (almost) all the information they need at their fingertips, allowing them to make informed decisions. 

In fact, research shows that the average B2B buyer is 57% through the purchase decision before engaging with a sales representative, making what you put on your website all the more important. 

But their engagement shouldn’t stop on your website. Having clear CTAs to contact sales to guide them through the final stages of the buying process is imperative, which is reliant on a number of different factors like landing page design, sharp copy, and even testing the shape of your buttons. 

Developing an exceptional website experience is no simple task. It requires substantial internal coordination, strategic deliberation, adept writing, and proficient graphic design skills to elevate your website into a sales enablement tool. 

One of our clients, Bizible, saw a 400% increase in demo requests after we unraveled their (self-declared) “Frankenstein of B2B SaaS websites,” into a newly-designed site showcasing their authority, helpful resources, and innovative CTA elements throughout the site. 

At New Breed, we’ve created hundreds of websites from start to finish and taken on projects to help companies of all sizes improve conversions on their website. If you need help maximizing your website as a sales enablement tool, that’s where New Breed’s team of experts can support you. 

Testimonials

Think of a testimonial as a seal of trust. It's when someone similar to your customers advocates for your company, signaling to potential buyers that they can rely on your expertise and offerings. 

According to  Demand Gen Report's 2014 Content Preferences Survey: Buyers still look first to their peers when seeking an opinion regarding the B2B purchasing decision. Respondents who were asked to rate specific channels in finding relevant content on a scale of 1-to -5 (1 being most valuable) gave ‘peer referrals’ an average rate of 2.27, the highest rate among all channels.

Almost all respondents (97%) give more credence to content that includes peer reviews and user-generated content.  

While it's easy to boast about the excellence of your own products, self-promotion alone doesn't spur sales. Instead, having individuals who resemble your customers attest to your company's credibility and proficiency holds far more weight.

Remember to engage with satisfied customers for testimonials and integrate them into your website and marketing materials to foster confidence and trust.

Case Studies

Case studies serve a similar purpose to testimonials, yet they offer concrete evidence of the work you've accomplished. They offer buyers tangible proof points of your products capabilities, aiding in the establishment of trust and building their confidence.

Display your case studies prominently on your website and utilize them as sales collateral to demonstrate to potential customers the success stories of their peers.

A great case study should showcase not only the results of your partnership, but also the why behind your client’s challenges and how that led them to your business. 

Playbooks

While testimonials and case studies are customer-facing, playbooks are internal tools. These tools are designed to support your Sales team in navigating your defined sales process for more efficient information gathering. 

These playbooks provide details about your product or service, addressing potential topics that may emerge during sales calls. They frequently feature comparisons between your offering and those of competitors, providing sales reps with confidence when navigating discussions about the competitive landscape.

Sales Enablement Software

Finding the right sales enablement software can feel overwhelming. With such a wide array of choices, how can businesses be confident they're selecting the best fit?

Leveraging robust software such as  HubSpot’s Sales Hub Enterprise equips your sales team with user-friendly tools for effective sales enablement. Seamlessly integrated with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Service Hub, Sales Hub Enterprise enhances your team's ability to convert marketing leads into customers and facilitates ongoing relationship management for your CRM team.

Also, functionalities such as standardized reporting and lead analysis, sales content optimization, automatic lead rotation, automated email sequences, and website visit notifications provide salespeople with real-time data on prospects, empowering them with data that will help meet the prospect where they are at within their buyer’s journey and close deals quicker.

By implementing these fundamental sales enablement methods and leveraging the right tools, your marketing team can effectively bridge the gap between marketing and sales, ultimately leading to more closed deals and sustained business growth.

Revenue Performance and Growth Strategy

By Ashley Witt, Demand Generation Strategist

A successful demand generation program is essential for driving revenue and fostering sustainable growth. Your demand generation strategy's effectiveness is measured by the revenue it produces and the efficiency and growth with which it creates a sales pipeline, whether through generating new leads or expanding your customer base.

At the core of this success lie two pivotal elements: revenue performance and growth strategy. Understanding how these components work hand in hand and integrating them into your demand generation program can propel your business forward, ensuring long-term profitability and market leadership.

Integrating Revenue Performance and Growth Strategy

Revenue performance refers to the measurement and optimization of the revenue generated through your marketing and sales efforts. It involves assessing how effectively your demand generation activities contribute to creating a sales pipeline and converting leads into customers.

In order to be able to understand revenue performance, Revenue Operations (RevOps) should be accounted for in your demand generation program, either through an in-house RevOps team, a partner, or a combination of in-house and partner services. At its core, RevOps is the process of aligning technologies, stakeholders, and business processes to fuel revenue growth and expansion.

An effective approach will be multidisciplinary and combine technical and strategic functions, including the following:

• Implementation and platform setup based on your unique business practices, including form strategy, lifecycle stage definition, and lead scoring.
• Technical integration to drive a frictionless experience between systems with clean and unified data throughout.
• Designing processes and playbooks, training stakeholders, and preventing lost or delayed revenue opportunities.
• Reporting and analysis to pinpoint funnel and pipeline gaps.
  
  At the very least, this report should clearly show each stage a potential customer goes through with your company, from the initial contact to becoming a customer. It should also provide clear insights into your conversion rates at each of these stages:
• • Visitors to leads
  • Leads to opportunities
  • Opportunities to customers

Measuring your funnel stages and conversion rates will take place in your CRM and rely heavily on your marketing automation tool as well as your sales team’s manual data entry.

Download the Essential Guide to Demand Generation

Growth strategy, on the other hand, encompasses the plans and actions your business undertakes to expand its market presence, diversify its offerings, and enhance customer retention. A robust growth strategy aims to increase overall revenue and secure a competitive edge in the marketplace.

When integrated, revenue performance and growth strategy create a powerful synergy that drives demand generation success. Here’s how they work together:

1. Aligning Objectives for Unified Goals

Integrating revenue performance metrics with your growth strategy ensures that your demand generation activities are aligned with your overarching business objectives. This alignment guarantees that every marketing effort is purpose-driven, contributing directly to revenue growth and strategic expansion.

For example, if your growth strategy focuses on entering new markets, your revenue performance metrics should track the success of campaigns targeting these markets, ensuring that your demand generation efforts are effectively supporting market expansion goals.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making

Revenue performance metrics provide valuable data on the effectiveness of your demand generation activities. By analyzing this data, you can make informed decisions to refine your growth strategy. This data-driven approach allows you to identify high-performing tactics and areas for improvement, optimizing your marketing efforts for maximum impact.

For instance, if data shows a high conversion rate from leads to customers in a specific segment, you can allocate more resources to targeting similar segments, aligning with your growth strategy to expand your customer base.

3. Enhancing Customer Retention

A key aspect of growth strategy is customer retention. Revenue performance metrics can help you identify trends and behaviors that contribute to customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

By integrating these insights into your demand generation program, you can develop targeted campaigns aimed at enhancing customer retention and increasing lifetime value.

For example, if revenue data indicates that personalized email campaigns lead to higher repeat purchase rates, you can incorporate this tactic into your growth strategy, ensuring sustained revenue from existing customers.

4. Continuous Improvement and Adaptability

The dynamic nature of the market requires businesses to be agile and adaptable. By continuously monitoring revenue performance and adjusting your growth strategy accordingly, you can stay ahead of market trends and emerging opportunities.

This iterative approach ensures that your demand generation program remains effective and relevant in a rapidly changing environment.

For instance, if a new competitor enters the market, analyzing revenue performance can help you quickly identify the impact and adjust your growth strategy to counteract potential threats, ensuring continued market leadership.

Practical Steps to Integrate Revenue Performance and Growth Strategy

1. Define Clear Metrics: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your growth strategy, such as lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and revenue per customer.
   
   

2. Implement Robust Reporting: Use advanced analytics tools to track and report on revenue performance. Ensure that these reports provide actionable insights that can inform your growth strategy.

3. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourage collaboration between your marketing, sales, and finance teams to ensure that revenue performance and growth strategy are integrated seamlessly into your demand generation efforts.
   
   
4. Regular Strategy Reviews: Conduct regular reviews of your growth strategy and revenue performance data to identify trends, opportunities, and areas for improvement. Adjust your demand generation program as needed to stay aligned with your business goals.

Integrating revenue performance and growth strategy into your demand generation program is not just beneficial — it’s essential for long-term success. By aligning your marketing efforts with clear revenue goals and a strategic growth plan, you create a robust framework that drives sustainable business growth. Embrace the partnership between revenue performance and growth strategy to maximize the effectiveness of your demand generation program and secure a competitive edge in the marketplace.

5 Factors of a Successful Demand Generation Program

by Quinn Longbothum, Director of Demand Generation

1. Give value before asking for value

You can’t reasonably expect your target audience to take a desired action without making it worth their while. In today’s world, demand generation needs to work harder than simply generating leads to support sales.

Placing the customer at the center of your demand generation efforts should be your top priority, while getting them to consider your brand as the perfect fit for your needs as a follow-up objective. Before you ask prospective leads for something, make sure you’re first giving them something valuable that they need.

Tips on providing more value:

Consider offering free calculators, templates, or other resources that can help your audience solve problems or complete tasks. People like freebies, and this can establish your brand as a helpful resource. You can also attend industry events and provide value to attendees by hosting workshops or speaking at panels to drive thought leadership and authority in the industry.

2. Know your audience

You could provide the best software or services that surpass anything else on the market, but if it’s not being marketed to the right audience, you’ll ultimately be disappointed with the leads you generate. Developing effective marketing collateral starts with understanding who your audience is and what drives them to take action.

To find out who your target audience is — and isn’t — create buyer personas or customer avatars to help you better understand the real people you’re trying to reach. With a strong sense of your buyer personas’ pain points, day-to-day responsibilities, and aspirations, you can more effectively cater content to their particular needs.

3. Create original content

These days, every business is engaging in some form of content marketing. And unless you’re promoting a first-of-its-kind product, odds are you’ll be competing with others to earn your target audience’s attention.

Looking to the established players in your space is helpful in knowing the type of content your audience wants, but closely mimicking that same content doesn’t do anything to differentiate your business in the eyes of the consumer. 

The benefits of publishing original, unique content are twofold:

• First, it works to set your brand apart from competitors. Find a particular niche or value prop about your company that no one else can offer, and let it shine through in your content.
• Second, original content can bolster your SEO efforts. Google will push you down the search results if your content closely mirrors existing content or is stuffed to the brim with keywords, so make sure the content you create is uniquely your own.

Tips for your content strategy:

Instead of simply creating blog posts, consider creating interactive content like quizzes, assessments, and surveys that engage your audience in a more dynamic way. You can also explore creating different types of content like podcasts, videos, or infographics to diversify your content strategy and stand out from competitors.

Remember, repurposing existing content can be an extremely efficient yet effective strategy. Maximize the value of your existing content by repurposing it into different formats and channels.

For example, you can turn a blog post into a podcast episode, a webinar into a video tutorial, or an infographic into a social media post. This allows you to reach new audiences and reinforce your messaging across multiple touchpoints.

4. Listen to your data

Don’t let gut feelings and hunches guide your important decisions. Use data-driven demand generation strategies to improve your funnel's effectiveness and focus on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The following metrics shed light on possible improvements to your demand generation strategies:

• Closing percentage
• Funnel conversion rate
• Cost-per-acquisition
• Lifetime customer value

Tips on using your data:

Use your marketing automation and CRM tools to track and analyze your KPIs. This can help you identify what's working and what's not, and make data-driven decisions to improve your demand generation efforts.

If your lead conversion rates are low, you may need to make changes to your messaging or improve your landing pages. These can be critical steps to reaching your audience and getting them to engage with you. 

No matter what tool you use to process, segment, and pull insights from your data, make sure you maintain data integrity and regularly implement data cleaning techniques in your CRM to uphold your source of truth.

5. Test, Test, Test!

Testing multiple variants can also help you remove the guesswork, optimize content marketing performance and continually improve content quality going forward.

A/B testing is a tried-and-true method for testing different versions of content against one another and seeing which one outperforms the other. In turn, you gain a better understanding of the type of content that strongly resonates with your target audience. 

Whether it’s nailing down the specific wording of a CTA, striking the right brand voice, or figuring out the perfect color palette, A/B testing helps you identify what works and what doesn’t. As you continually test over time, you’ll know how to increase user engagement, conversion rates, and more qualified leads.

The Takeaway

A demand generation program is an essential step toward optimizing your marketing funnel and increasing your lead generation efforts. For a comprehensive look into what it takes to be a demand generation marketer and the tactics, you can start deploying within your organization, download our Essential Guide to Demand Generation.

 And remember, if you're ready to chat demand generation strategy and support, our team is here to help you along the way.  Schedule a Demand Generation Assessment to learn more about our services.

This post was originally published June 7, 2018 and has been updated for relevance and accuracy.