Introduction to Demand Generation
In order to create, nurture, and manage buying interest in today’s environment, we must first start with a realization of the changes in today’s buyer. Today’s buyer acquires their information online, through various sources, on a timeframe that makes sense to them. Because of this, marketers must focus on understanding the needs of the buyer and facilitating their buying process, rather than pushing marketing messages at them.
In order to accomplish this, today’s marketer must focus on Demand Generation. Firstly, this means understanding the buyer’s interest area, interest level, and stage of the buying process. This can be done by understanding their online behavior, or Digital Body Language. With an understanding of the buyer’s behavior, marketers can then use lead scoring to determine which of those buyers are at a stage in their buying process where they are ready to engage with sales. Those that are ready can be passed to sales, while those that are not ready can be engaged in a lead nurturing program that keeps their interest level high over time.
With an understanding of buyer’s interest areas and stage in their buying process, marketing campaigns can be personalized based on these factors. This, however, means a deeper level of personalization of targeting, timing, and content of marketing communications than had been typical historically, and necessitates the use of marketing automation software to facilitate delivering the right message at the right time to the right person.
In order to succeed with demand generation, a strong focus on data quality and data management is necessary. As marketers are interacting with buyers over a longer period of time, they need to ensure that they keep their data on those prospective buyers clean and up to date. Also, as marketing campaigns are now more often driven by marketing automation software in order to get the right targeting, timing, and content for each communication, it is necessary to have the data fully standardized so it can used by automated rules for personalization, segmentation, and scoring.
As marketers begin to succeed with demand generation, a new approach to marketing analysis becomes possible. By looking at the marketing funnel by buyer stage, marketers recognize that in any buying process there may be multiple campaigns, multiple buyers, and many months involved. Marketing can then begin to understand how each of those campaigns influenced buyer behavior, and how the revenue achieved can be attributed across the many campaigns involved. This new approach to marketing analysis provides a much clearer view into marketing effectiveness than could ever have been achieved previously.
Demand generation is a discipline that is necessary in today’s environment, in which buyers are in control of their own buying process and have access to all the information they require to make a buying decision. Marketers must understand their digital body language to determine their interest level and area, use marketing automation software to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, score leads to determine who is ready for sales, and nurture those who are not. As they do this, marketers focused on demand generation must keep their date clean and well managed, and as they do so are able to apply new forms of marketing analysis to truly understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
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