Customers are the heart of a business. In the efforts to satisfy customers, growth hackers, product owners, analytics masterminds, and communication specialists have only one common goal, i.e., to amplify brand-to-customer relationships. A vast number of marketers spend their lives creating complicated client acquisition and engagement engines to do just this. Marketing has evolved into a specialty-driven field, and PPC managers are always looking to find new users through online ads. There is one marketing concept that sets the tone for all marketing activities: demand generation.

Demand Generation acts as the umbrella of marketing programs that will encourage and inform customers about services and products. Demand generation programs enable organizations to reach new markets, create a consumer buzz, generate PR, re-engage with customers, and promote new features. However, the concept of demand generation is much more than just branding. Demand generation programs target the sweet spots throughout conversion, optimization, and sales. The objective is to build and nurture critical prospects and customer relationships for an extended period. Leadrop presents some repeatable demand generation activities that drive revenue.

Demand Generation Activities that Drive Revenue

1) Defining Precise Marketing Goals

Marketing goals can vary depending on business strategy and maturity of the marketing organization. Demand gen goals include the following:

• Driving a set number of leads, SQLs and MQLs
• Reaching specific conversion rates within different funnel stages
• Impacting or generating X% of revenue
• Engaging new contacts or impacting opportunities at target accounts

While formatting annual goals for guiding the demand gen strategy, it is essential to define the target outcomes for all the core demand gen activities and programs. A business organization needs to know its objectives.

2) Creating Helpful Content

Content is the foundation of demand generation. Undoubtedly, it is the most powerful tool for engaging audiences and creating demand. The content toolbox includes things like blog posts, infographics, e-Books, whitepapers, guides, videos, nurture emails, landing pages, and more. Considering the vast amount of content that customers have to go through regularly to get their desired information, it is better to avoid low-quality content to fill up space. A well-defined content strategy starts with buyer personas, understanding their requirements, goals, and challenges. Once a business organization gets to know these, it becomes easier for them to align the content and messages to the various buying stages for each of those personas.

3) Repurposing High-Performance Demand Generation Content

Creating engaging and exciting content takes time and resources. This is why it is essential to get as much mileage as possible out of your investments. While identifying the pieces of demand generation content that are effective in generating new contacts or shifting the prospects through specific stages at the funnel, marketers tend to look for ways to repurpose content. This is directly related to the amplification and distribution of content. Demand generation marketers put forth a lot of time and effort to create high-quality content. Then they sit on the proverbial shelf and wait for people to find it.

This approach is great for libraries, but not good or efficient for marketers. For any business organization, if you want your content to drive results, the strategy needs to include a variety of promotions that will get the work done and shown to the people who will benefit from it. A proper content distribution plan consists of the following:

• Regular sharing on social media: This is especially effective with short, precise, and easily digestible content and visual multi-media assets as well.
• Emails to known prospects and customers: This strategy is effective in deepening the relationships with existing customers. At times, 50% of participation for a demand generation program comes from contacts that are already in the database.
• Syndicating through third-party sources: It is not an intelligent strategy to wait for all potential prospects to stumble on the latest e-Book that you have written. Working with trusted media partners that have relationships with your target audience is an effective way to scale up the demand generation results.

4) Try to Get Face to Face with Prospects

Nothing increases the value of a product or service like a face to face interaction. Field events and industry conferences at a regular interval are a worthwhile addition for any demand generation plan. Make sure that you invest the right amount in the event branding and promotion. That will enable you to collect a copious amount of data on events and with attendees as well. Manually processing that data is not a demand gen activity and that won’t drive results as well. It will only drain productivity and destroy event ROI. It is vital to streamline the event marketing process to make sure that you can get more out of your event leads.

5) Refine Contacts and Account Targeting

It is not suitable for demand generation marketers to opt for a “set it and forget” approach. It affects the target audience if they don’t get updates or any information on the services. The core buyer account personas might largely remain the same, but you shall be able to obtain insights on the sales process and customer data. To refine contacts, it is important to do the following:

• Make sure that the sales team is in sync with the evolving target audience and the target account list.
• You ought to evaluate the buying committee. Develop new personas as required. Ask whether you are still engaging with the same participants, if so, then the focus needs to be on expanding the horizon.
• To offer better and informed campaign targeting, analyze the demographics of the highest value customers.

Demand generation is a data-driven strategy. Along with choosing themes and marketing channels that your leads and customers love, it is essential to make sure that you are targeting the right people and providing them with the most appealing offers. Once you are acquainted with the buyer’s requirements, anticipate the marketing trends, and then fuel the marketing programs with enhanced levels of personalization. The success of all demand generation starts from the ability to connect with customers.