Demand Generation is the art and science of creating, nurturing, and managing buying interest in your products and services. It involves four key elements; campaign management, lead management, marketing analysis, and data management.
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.
Never before have business-to-business (B2B) marketers faced such enormous pressure in their jobs. With competition intensifying and prospective customers becoming increasingly elusive, companies are demanding that marketers deliver measurable results. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are now expected to demonstrate the impact of their actions and the return on their investments. The failure of so many marketing executives to rigorously and successfully defend their decisions partly explains why the average tenure of top CMOs is now less than 23 months.
Since the advent of email marketing in the mid-1990s, companies have embraced the misconception that email is virtually "free" as a marketing medium. This false impression often leads to over-communication -- which, in turn, triggers diminished response rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. Even marketers who are sensitive to email recklessness sometimes face internal pressures, such as end-of-year revenue numbers, to send "one last blast to the entire database" with the justification that "it doesn't cost us anything."
Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy and Deliverability Officer at Eloqua discusses how email has changed, and best practice for marketers looking to use email marketing in a targeted and compliant manner.
This paper explores areas in which marketing can help sales identify and manage deals in their sales pipeline through technologies and business processes that amplify existing CRM systems. Marketers need to recognize that determining lead criteria is only the first of
many steps they can take to enable their sales teams. New enhancements to CRM systems are driving truly evolutionary changes in marketing’s relationship to sales.
What Makes a Successful Demand Generation Plan? Gregg Holzrichter, senior director of global demand generation for VMware talks about what makes a successful demand generation plan, how VMware is successfully using marketing automation, and what his plans are for the future. Gregg honed his demand generation and sales and marketing alignment skills as a star marketer at Siebel Systems. Read MoreAn Interview with Endeca's Will Pringle and his group's highly effective Demand Generation Team Will and his team share some insights about the challenges they faced, how they structured their organization, and the benefits the company has seen as a result of his group's laser focus on demand gen. Read More
The sales process--turning prospects into customers--begins with demand generation. And it is fueled by high-quality leads. B2B Marketers agree: virtual events are among the most effective lead generation tools.
The new emphasis on social media is forcing marketing departments everywhere to find new ways to succeed as they transition into this new reality. In this information-packed session led by Steven Woods you’ll get beyond the buzzwords and hype surrounding social media and learn how to think about social media in the context of your demand generation strategy. With real world examples from a variety of industries, Woods will bring a new perspective and challenge the way we think about campaigns, marketing assets, analysis, and our prospects.
Learn how to drive prospects to your virtual doorstep. This short video discusses the four areas on which you need to focus to not only drive registration to your online events, but to drive attendance.
In selecting marketing automation software, there are considerations that go well beyond features and functionality. In this short but information-packed video, Abe Wagner, co-founder and V.P. Engineering with Eloqua talks about what he would look at if investigating a marketing automation or demand generation software investment. Read More
I spent a bit of time this weekend reading (okay, more like skimming, I admit) a report on our recent SAS-70 audit. I would be lying to call it an interesting read; detailed descriptions of our process controls, policies, and operations as a software company. But, it did get me thinking about the ongoing evolution of the Demand Generation space.
It's an interesting space, and it has been evolving very rapidly. When we started Eloqua back at the end of 1999, Google was still 10 months away from launching adwords, blogs only existed in primitive form as frequently updated web pages, and most B2B websites were barely more than brochure-ware. Read More
I'm in a bit of a circular world right now as I write a blog about Demand Generation that explores the topics in a book I've just written about using various web media, including blogs, for Demand Generation, and of course both the blog and the book will be used for generating demand. So, I should probably explain that, me, this blog, and the book.
It all started about a year ago, in a conversation with our CEO, after a long series of trips to visit a lot of clients... Read More
