The Importance of a Comprehensive Demand Generation Strategy
Buyer demand for your products and services is the lifeblood for every company. Generating demand can be an arduous task, but without it, a business will not grow and expand. In today’s world – which has been highly affected by Coronavirus, it is more important than ever to connect with the right businesses and the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Remote working, budget constraints, and dissolution has made it harder to build accurate pipelines that will sustain, not only growth but secure the survival of business throughout 2021.
Opportunities generated through an extensive demand programme often represent more meaningful opportunities than other forms of marketing activity, such as multiple, one-off campaigns designed to generate leads quickly. This is because a comprehensive demand generation strategy encompasses every single touchpoint; it should start by building your brand identity and creating awareness of your brand through the publication of educational and helpful resources; the next step should focus on inbound marketing with refined messages; followed by sales enablement initiatives that aim to convert prospects; and finally, methods that aim to keep customers (Guido Bartolacci). This results in higher conversion rates and loyal customers.
The Importance of Data
The recent pandemic has reinforced that brands must communicate with buyers based on their circumstances and what’s important to them. The best way to know this is by leveraging data (Harvard Business Review, Janet Balis). Data has become a critical part of any strategical demand generation activity and will be a fundamental success factor for businesses moving forward.
The advancement of digital platforms, which we have seen speed up since the pandemic, has created a means of distributing marketing communications that are increasingly personalised. The success of your business is now directly related to how closely you listen to your customers (Data Driven Marketing, Progress). We have all somewhat accepted that our data is being captured in almost all online activities. This has skyrocketed buyer expectations in terms of what companies can do for them- they expect ultra personalised experiences across the whole customer journey (Harvard Business Review, Janet Balis). If you don’t have the correct data architecture in place, along with the correct information architecture, you risk losing prospects.
Customers, and the competitive landscape, demand truly optimised and personal experiences; however, businesses now need to catch up (Data Driven Marketing, Progress). There are thousands of data capture touch points out there, but most of them only extract raw, unrefined data. Insights from data should drive action and transform processes, not just be stored in a data warehouse and be used as a way to connect with prospects in the future. If you are not using this data to understand and optimise your customer journey, then is it worth capturing?
How Data Should Be Used in Demand Generation: The Optimised Customer Journey
Having a map of your customer journeys allows you to predict very early on who your potential customers are. This allows you to prioritise both customer segments and marketing activities, creating an optimised journey (Data Driven Marketing, Progress). The purpose of data-driven marketing is to optimise each step of these journeys. We’ve seen a rise in data technology over the recent years and, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, CMOs now realise that as they invest more into new AI and technologies, the better they’re able to sift through the data numbers for a bigger picture of their audiences (Gartner Report, 2020). But it’s how we use this data to gain insight and drive growth that’s important.
In data-driven marketing, you learn from customer success and apply it to customer acquisition and conversion. By capturing data from multiple digital channels, at every touch point of the customer journey, and using AI to predict and recommend actions, brands are able to create demand generation strategies that tailor marketing content around the prospect’s individual buying habits, providing a customer experience that is unique to individual needs, which we all know, is what customers expect. It’s then down to your data analysts to identify patterns to establish which prospects are the most important. This is often based on their engagement and interactions with your brand so far. Analysing these engagements even means that you can determine which interaction points are working and which can be improved. This can be broken down to reflect differences between customer segments. (Data Driven Marketing, Progress). At this point, you should have a full alias of a prospect, their needs, fears, interests, contact information, opt-in permissions, and more.
Final Thoughts
The value of this comprehensive data driven approach is as you would imagine. Not only are you generating leads, but you are using data to review and optimise your user-journeys in real-time to increase efficiency and drive down cost per leads (CPL). The more you review, listen and scale up campaigns, the more effective they become.
Your analysis should start with your most successful customers, then filter down the most unsuccessful. Data analysis carried out in this way means you can become more successful in acquiring new customers. This resurfaces new insights on alternative routes to optimise (Data Driven Marketing, Progress). Your brand is always at the forefront of minds because your audience is receiving progressive, relatable, and useful information at all the right times.
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by Listencat
