Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 4, In this podcast episode, the host discusses the five key principles of demand
generation. These principles are: understanding your target audience, creating
compelling and relevant content, implementing multichannel marketing
strategies, building a strong sales and marketing alignment, and regular
performance measurement and optimization. The host explains each principle in
detail and provides practical tips for effective implementation. Additionally,
emerging trends in demand gen such as AI, machine learning, personalized
marketing, automation, augmented reality, and voice search optimization are
discussed. The importance of data privacy, security, resource requirements,and
continuous learning is also highlighted. Implementing these principles can
help businesses attract leads effectively and achieve sustainable marketing
success.
Summary notes from Episode 4:
The podcast episode discusses the five key principles of demand generation:
understanding your target audience, creating compelling and relevant content,
implementing multichannel marketing strategies, building a strong and engaged
sales and marketing alignment, and regular performance measurement and
optimization. Understanding the target audience involves conducting market
research, analyzing customer data, and leveraging social listening to tailor
messaging and deliver relevant content. Creating compelling and relevant
content involves researching customer pain points, using storytelling
techniques, and mapping content to the buyer’s journey. Implementing
multichannel marketing strategies helps reach a wider audience, increase brand
visibility, and provide multiple touchpoints for customers. Building a strong
and engaged sales and marketing alignment requires regular communication,
shared goals and metrics, and a closed-loop feedback system. Regular
performance measurement and optimization involve measuring and analyzing
performance to identify what’s working and what needs improvement, and
aligning key performance indicators (KPIs) with marketing efforts. Some best
practices for implementing these principles include aligning them with
business goals, clearly defining target audience personas, and developing a
comprehensive marketing plan. Success stories and case studies can provide
real-world examples of effective demand generation strategies. Emerging trends
in demand generation include AI, machine learning, personalized marketing,
automation, augmented reality, and voice search optimization. Considerations
for businesses include data privacy and security, resource requirements, and
the need for continuous learning and upskilling. Implementing these principles
ensures consistent and sustainable marketing success.
Full Transcript:
00:00
What is going on? Everybody. Welcome to the demand gen pod. Today, we’re talking about the five key principles of demand generation. I think demand gen is the foundation for driving awareness, generating leads, and ultimately fueling business growth. And today, in this episode, we’re going to explore some core principles that we leverage that underpin effective demand gen strategies. So, from understanding your target to creating selling content, we’ll cover it all. Join us as we unpack each principle, share practical tips and some best practices, and discuss emerging trends and technologies shaping the future of demand generation. So, whether you’re a marketer looking to boost your demand gen efforts or a business owner looking to achieve some sustainable marketing success, this episode is for you. So get ready to master these five key principles. Let’s go. If you haven’t already, we’re super happy to have you here. Please take a moment to subscribe, whether it’s on your podcast app or on YouTube, which we are also there.
01:03
All right, let’s get through them. What are the five? We’re going to lay them out first, right at the top here. First is understanding your target audience. Second, create compelling and relevant content. Third, implement multichannel marketing strategies. Principle number four is building a strong and engaged sales and marketing alignment. Principle number five is regular performance measurement and optimization. I don’t think that any of these should be a surprise to you if you’ve listened to the podcast before, but let’s start at the top. So again, demand gen refers to the strategies in the activities aimed at creating and nurturing demand for a company’s product or services. Hence, demand gen. And it’s important that in marketing, we leverage it because it helps businesses generate leads, but it also helps build brand awareness and also drive customer acquisition. Another big part about demand gen, because demand gen doesn’t just span the top of the funnel, but it also spans the bottom of the funnel conversions as well.
02:02
It also lowers customer acquisition cost too substantially. Businesses should focus on these five principles, I think, and that helps to ensure a comprehensive and effective demand gen approach. So, like I said, principle number one is understanding your audience. A deep understanding of the target audience allows you to create tailored and personalized marketing campaigns and effective ways to gather insights include conducting market research, analyzing customer data, and leverage social listening. You can also just ask there’s that too. Businesses can use this type of information to tailor messaging. You can segment your audience and also deliver relevant content that actually resonates with each person that you’re sending it to. And that’s really important. Principle number two is creating compelling and relevant content. So creating valuable and relevant content establishes thought leadership sparks interest, and it especially engages the target audience and strategies that include researching and understanding customer pain points.
03:03
Using storytelling techniques which we’ve talked about in the podcast before, and also incorporating multimedia elements, businesses should map their content to the buyer’s journey and provide educational content for awareness, persuasive content for consideration, and action oriented content for decision making. Stages. And you can kind of break that consideration, or the consideration and the educational content for awareness per se, content for that consideration, action oriented content for decision making stages. You can do that, splitting it out sort of with those campaigns that map to each part of the funnel. Principle number Three implementing Multichannel Marketing Strategies I would love to say that it comes down just to email and you can leverage email and you can be successful only using email, but that is totally not true. Utilizing multiple strategies can help you reach a wider audience, increase your brand visibility, and engage customers across various touch points.
03:59
And that’s the really important thing, is that not only are you able to widen the breadth and opportunity for visibility, but you’re also like for each individual person, but you’re also able to provide multiple touch points for a single person at the same time, which is really powerful. So some of these strategies might include social media, right, content marketing, email marketing, search and engine optimization or SEO, and paid advertising as well. And leveraging all of these across the board at the same time with the same goal for similar audiences can be super powerful. Because now you’re seeing emails from a company, you’re also seeing paid advertising from a company, you’re also more likely to search, and when you are more likely to search, you’re also more likely to find it due to your SEO, so on and so forth. That happens every time. I’m telling you, it happens every single time.
04:50
Doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Principle number four is building a strong and engaged sales team and aligned to marketing. So alignment between sales and marketing teams ensure a smooth and seamless customer journey from lead gen to conversion. And that’s so crucial because marketing is not the only one that’s responsible for a really good experience and a consistent experience. So is sales. And marketing and sales need to be aligned in order to actually be able to provide that. Sales needs to understand what is marketing doing? What campaigns is marketing running? What types of content are people downloading? They need all that information in the CRM so that they can actually speak to that content and speak and make sure that they are aligning what they’re saying to the content that the lead has already read. Some common challenges, I think miscommunication, which stems frequently from just a lack of collaboration or also differing goals between departments.
05:48
So sales may have one set of goals, marketing may have another. You need to align both of those together and make sure that both marketing and sales leadership agrees on what that is and then put a plan going forward to kind of trickle down to the rest of the team for the strategy. But some good practical steps that you can leverage for sales and marketing alignment, regular communication. You can establish those shared goals and metrics and then you can also implement a good closed loop feedback system. So that means both good and bad. What was successful, what failed? Whether that be something as simple as content or maybe it’s scripts that Sales is using, maybe it’s a whole campaign. What has been successful and why do we think it’s been successful? What has failed and why do we think that it’s failed? Principle number five regular performance measurements and optimization.
06:40
Huge fan of measuring and testing and measuring and analyzing performance allows you to identify what’s working and obviously what needs improvement. Key metrics and KPIs may include things like lead quality, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost I think is super important, customer lifetime value and a return on investment. I also think those are pretty high level and you might have really specific KPIs relevant to your business or your product. So it may not even be business level KPIs, it may be product specific KPIs as well. If you’re on a subscription plan then you may have sort of customer churn, turnover, re ups, things like that. Those might be included in your KPIs as well and you want to be able to see. Ideally, can you map all of your marketing efforts to each KPI? And vice versa, can you map all of your KPIs to marketing efforts?
07:31
Really important, I think so. Another thing for some tips regarding this prioritize agility and adaptability utilize marketing automation tools. Whether they’re more expensive ones like Eloqua or Marketo, frankly, HubSpot ranks up there as pretty expensive as well pardot or if they’re slightly cheaper like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse something that is AWeber, something that is a bit more rudimentary but also fully capable depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and what other tools that you have. And then also fostering agility and innovation within the marketing team and keeping up with those industry trends as well. So let’s work together to grow both with sales and marketing. And I used to work at a company called SmartBear Software and SmartBear had a VP of marketing who had actually come over from HubSpot and she brought in this process they used at HubSpot called Smarting Sales and Marketing together.
08:36
And really what that translated to was the sales and marketing leadership getting together to come to an agreement on goals, what they wanted, what they needed in order to be successful and then outline what that actually looked like and then not only that, but translating that to the people who are actually doing the work. So the marketing managers, any sort of marketing specialists, any content creators that we’re actually building all those out, all the various content out and to sales as well. And then in addition to that, mapping KPIs that align not only to marketing but also to sales. And that went as far as saying sales needed to define what a sales qualified lead looked like. Marketing defined what a marketing qualified lead looked like and both groups agreed on those definitions. So that meant when it came back to accountability, marketing’s job was to deliver, create leads to then generate marketing qualified leads to convert to sales qualified leads.
09:33
And Marketing had already agreed as to what that was going to be. And then finally we used all of that to drive meetings. I think they were weekly meetings between Sales and Marketing. The entire sales and marketing orgs would come together and sit down and look at what marketing was doing, what campaigns were building. So we would go over all of those with, like, a slide deck and then sales, what sales had been doing, seeing conversions on, failing to see conversions on, and anywhere that both teams thought that there could be some improvement. And all of those things came together to really make a powerful Sales and Marketing team. I’ve never worked at another company like SmartBear where Sales and Marketing actually talked to each other and we knew each other. Even some companies that I worked at after Sales was just this group in the back, even if were on the marketing team and it never made a lot of sense to me.
10:24
But I always thought that this marketing that came in through from HubSpot was a really clever process. Real quick, before I forget, I’d love to take a quick break and remind you please that if you’re not subscribed, please come and subscribe, whether it’s on your podcast that you’re listening to or we are also on YouTube and really appreciate you taking that time. All right, so listen. Some best practices for implementing these five key principles effective implementation involves aligning the principles with the business goals. So trying to understand how each of these five principles actually align with the business goals, and again, vice versa. Working from the bottom up clearly define your target audience personas and develop a comprehensive marketing plan. Success stories and case studies can provide some real world examples of demand generation strategies in action and their impact on business growth. So it’s definitely worth looking into those and trying to identify case studies that align to your actual business.
11:22
But you can also prioritize agility and adaptability utilizing those marketing automation tools like we talked about and keeping up with industry trends and other best practices. So what about some emerging trends in demand gen? We have AI, which is certainly taking a huge step forward, and machine learning, personalized marketing, automation, augmented reality and voice search optimization. All of these are kind of coming through. We want to be on top of it. And businesses can leverage these technologies to enhance customer experiences, personalize content at scale, and gain a bit of a competitive advantage. Some other considerations that you want to think about though, depending on what kind of type of company that you are data privacy, security, potential resource requirements and the need for that continuous learning and upskilling. But in conclusion, those five principles of demand generation are crucial for businesses to attract, engage and convert leads effectively.
12:24
And implementing these principles ensures that consistent and sustainable marketing success will be there for you. Think about taking these principles and incorporating them into your business. I’d love to hear about how you’re doing it, how it’s working and where you’re leveraging each of these principles and I really appreciate your time today. My name is Ryan. Thank you again for joining me on the Demand Gen Pod. We will see you next time.