Marketers are not experiencing the results they wish through demand generation. Andrew Davies, co-founder and CEO of idio, offers four steps you can take to ensure your demand generation campaign are a success
According to the Annuitas 2014 B2B Enterprise survey published last November, only 2.8 per cent of B2B enterprise executives believe demand generation campaigns achieve their goal. Despite the demand generation discipline being around for years, marketers continue to struggle. When 60 per cent of marketing decision makers at enterprise-level firms with revenues in excess of $250 million say they don’t feel their tactics are successful, and just under three percent describe their efforts as ‘very effective’ – we know that we have a problem on our hands.
With so few marketing executives failing to hit their target, what are the likely problems and what can be done to fix them?
1) Disconnect between marketing goals and measurement
There is a massive disconnect between what marketing departments are expected to deliver and what is actually being measured. The Annuitas study shows that more than three quarters (77.4 per cent) of respondents reported that ‘quality of leads’ was a top goal of their demand generation programs and campaigns, but ‘revenue generated’ was the primary measure of success, cited by 27.4 per cent of respondents.
It’s absolutely integral to measure the revenue effect of your demand generation practice (indeed, if you’re not tracking prospects, marketing qualified leads, ‘sales aualified leads’, ‘sales opportunities’, and ‘deals won’ – what are you doing?!). However, make sure what you consider to be your primary measures of success are aligned with the KPIs demanded of you by your marketing and sales team. If ‘quality of leads’ is a pressing need in your organisation, then recognise that.
2) Failure to create accurate buyer personas
Buyer personas should form the backbone of every demand generation strategy. They enable you to understand the specific needs, preferences and buying behavior of the job roles involved in the purchasing process for your product. More importantly, buyer personas help you identify areas of vision and value that will resonate with your prospect.
As a content marketing software company, we are constantly updating our understanding of our target buyer. Typically, this is B2B organisations with long sales-cycles (software companies, financial services or professional services providers) that must use content to nurture prospects or that must identify their client’s unspoken pain-points to advise or upsell to them. We have had to devise and refine our buyer personas by asking ourselves: ‘What is our ideal buyer’s role and title?’, ‘Who are they and how are they measured by their superiors?’, ‘What are their professional goals?’, ‘What needs and pain-points do they have?’, ‘How would solving these needs and pain-points make them more successful?’ and so forth.
Understanding and building out these personas are integral to enabling us to produce demand generation campaigns that chime with buyer interests and not just our own marketing message.
3) Need to improve interaction with sales
Demand generation does not end at lead handover. In a recent webinar, Laura Ramos of Forrester suggested that: “Marketing’s new imperative is sales support…moving from nurturing leads to creating a shared customer context”. To do this requires a mixture of approaches that meld communication, content and technology.
From a communication standpoint, it’s making sure that the insights gleaned by sales are rapidly fed back to the demand generation team. When leads are rejected, the demand gen team need to know why so as to optimise their efforts and the buyer personas they are working from.
From a content standpoint, it’s making sure that the demand generation team are not just ‘feeding’ leads but also enabling sales. For example, a commonly cited problem from sales reps is being unable to find the right piece of content to send to their leads. Demand generation teams are in an excellent position to use their understanding of each lead’s interests to recommend the best content assets for sales to pass on.
Finally, technologically, it’s about making sure that both marketing and sales have a common view of the pipeline that is jointly measured and reported in a single dashboard.
4) Lacking the demand generation skills to pay the bills
Demand generation is a team sport. The modern B2B marketing team needs to be technology, content and data driven.
This marketing team will need to use two fundamental techniques, primarily a data machine that generates lead data at scale, cleansing and annotating it and a mathematics machine that acquires the purchasing intent signals out of the data, using data science techniques such as natural language processing. A marketing technology stack with tools such as marketing automation (MA) and predictive lead scoring would allow modern B2B marketers to scale their ability to communicate with prospects and to be able to respond to purchase intent with relevant content. As a result of the requirements the roles that are essential to the modern B2B marketing team include:
- Director/head/chief marketing technologist – a necessary senior executive with a hybrid of both technical and marketing skills who can support both CMO and CTO to empower with more domain knowledge and control.
- Director/head/chief demand generation – The DG head should lead the team in prospecting, lead triage and opportunity generation, with a focus on revenue as well.
- Director/head/chief content marketing – Content marketing treated as a part-time job will yield poorer results; employing one person to head up entire content strategy, campaign and execution is key.
Fixing an ailing demand generation practice is no easy feat. Invariably, there are many moving parts: evolving organisational demands, personal KPIs, rapid content creation cycles and not to mention an increasingly dynamic audience with rapidly changing needs. However, by measuring what matters, creating better buyer personas, enabling sales and hiring the right skillsets, demand generation executives will be well-placed to optimise their efforts.
