How to Scale Your Demand Generation Efforts Effectively?
Generating demand is absolutely vital to the growth of any company. Still, scaling demand generation can be an inherently complex task. On this blog, we tend to focus on demand generation as part of the broader top-of-funnel discussion. And that’s pretty appropriate given that demand generation itself is a funnel-focused initiative. But how do we ensure that what we’re doing is really generating demand for our company?
Understanding Demand Generation
Before diving into scaling strategies, it is essential to understand what demand generation means. Demand generation means the marketing activities that are aimed at producing interest in your products or services. It is not just lead generation; it encompasses the entire buyer’s journey.
Additionally, demand generation embodies methods like content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and email campaigns. Per HubSpot, companies that assign a high priority to blogging are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI. This figure is suggestive of how vital demand generation is to the kind of overall success any organization would want.
How to Scale Your Demand Generation Efforts Effectively?
Demand generation is a means to an end—the end being more revenue for your business. You can think of it in two parts: first, the part that brings demand to your top funnel; second, the part that ensures that demand turns into an adequate supply of opportunities that convert.
Let’s separate those two parts. Here are the main elements at work in the first part:
- Use data analytics: Employ data analytics to find out which of your campaigns are performing the best. Look at engagement rates, lead quality, and conversion metrics.
- Break Your Audience Into Segments: Customize your messaging for different audience segments. Each segment might respond differently to your campaigns.
- Put Your Money in Marketing Automation: Marketing automation devices can make your processes run smoother and your overall marketing efforts more efficient. When you use automation to handle the repetitive, mundane tasks that your team used to do (and that we did in the not-so-distant past), you free them up to handle the campaigns that require more strategic thinking.
- Expand Your Content Library: Cultivate an array of content that serves the many stages of the buyer’s journey. Not only does this make you a go-to resource, but it further cements your authority as an industry leader.
- Boost Joint Efforts: Work together as a team. Ensure that sales and marketing are aligned. Collaboration across departments is essential. Messaging and management of company leads must be consistent.
Furthermore, increasing engagement rates can be accomplished by nurturing the leads you already have through targeted email campaigns. The Annuitas Group has conducted research that indicates this particular method can nurture leads to the point of generating 47% more purchase-ready leads than those leads that are not cultivated in this way.
Examples of Successful Scaling Strategies
Myriad firms abound that have done a superb job of amplifying—of taking the germ of an idea or the small-scale expression of it and turning it, in a way that works for the firm and its customers, into something much larger. Indeed, they serve as much better examples of this idea of forms of demand generation that scale than our own efforts.
- HubSpot: HubSpot has attracted millions of leads with its inbound marketing strategy, which centers around the use of educational content. They do a great job of nurturing leads with not-so-easy resources that point to them as not-so-easy solutions for achieving inbound act-aligned objectives.
- Salesforce: Salesforce takes advantage of this tactic by utilizing targeted webinars as part of their demand generation strategy. In this case, they attract leads through knowledge-sharing sessions that demonstrate the value of their platform and, in this way, convert attendees into customers. At least this is how I understand it.
Moreover, these firms prove that effective scaling demands uniformity and imagination. Keeping a pulse on market shifts—and adjusting accordingly—can also yield dividends.
Metrics to Measure Success
It is essential to grasp the effectiveness of your demand generation endeavors by their measurement. Basic performance indicators (PIs) to consider are the following:
- Lead Quality: From different channels, analyze how well leads convert.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Assess the expense involved in gaining a new customer.
- Leads that have met the conditions set by your marketing team and have thus reached a specific level of “qualification.” You should have a “target” number of these that you develop over a given time frame.
- ROI: Evaluate your revenue reaction from demand generation relative to how much you spend on marketing.
As a result, these measurements yield visibility into the specific components that necessitate enhancement and the particular approaches that merit expansion. When we assess these measurements with sufficient regularity, they allow us to make much more precise decisions that are driven by the data.
Conclusion
In summary, knowing how to scale your demand generation efforts is crucial to ensuring sustained business growth. Most demand generation teams are working with an overwhelming lack of data. That makes it entirely too easy for them to work in silos and for their audience to not understand what on Earth demand generation is and what it is driving toward. Here’s what you can do to circumvent much of that: use data that you do have to segment your audience; improve the collaboration that you have with the sales teams; and, on the basis of all that, increase your engagement and conversion rates.
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