What you need to know about building a demand generation campaign.
How can you power your demand engine?
Wait, let’s back up…
How can you build a bigger business? That question is a much better place to start. Why? It gets to the heart of the matter. Nobody launches a brand and hopes to stay small. After all, there’s no prize for anonymity, is there?
Whether your goal is to access more avenues for your philanthropic efforts, become a millionaire by the time you’re thirty or achieve total world domination (or at least rule your industry like the baron of business you were born to be), you must grow for any of those things to actually show up.
Growth marketing supports your success by helping you attract new visitors, increase your engagement and convert casual readers into customers. Each custom-designed campaign involves a prelaunch period of two weeks during which we:
- Outline a strategic plan with your pain points and goals in mind
- Design a plan with all the necessary bells and whistles
- Develop an organizational structure and implement checkpoints to ensure we can collect, analyze and capitalize on data at will
When building your demand generation program you’ll use PPC campaigns and other paid channels to gauge audience reaction. You’ll also gather valuable feedback, which can later be rolled into an inbound marketing campaign powered by a content-first approach.
Scale, obtain sustainable growth and achieve and maintain success — that’s what growth marketing and demand gen programs are here to help you do.
5 Reasons Why a Demand Generation Program Will Jumpstart Your Lead Generation Engine
You need fuel for your entrepreneurial fire, vitamins for your expanding empire and leads to feed your ravenous sales team. You need something to jumpstart your engines before your competition laps you completely. You need a solid demand gen strategy.
- Strategy is Essential: When you go Christmas shopping, do you just go store to store tossing around cash willy-nilly, or do you go armed with a list organized by person? If you answered the former, your wallet is likely screaming for help right about now. In life and in marketing, protecting your finances requires a plan. Put a paid digital advertising strategy in place, and you can trust that your expenditures are being put to good use and driving demand for your products/services.
- A Functional Digital Experience: Your website is your #1 sales rep. Therefore, you need it to look nice, but more importantly, it must be designed to convert visitors. Draw in new leads (and keep them from bouncing away) with landing pages and other consumer-facing content that loads quickly, informs and entertains.
- Automation Is There Even When You Aren’t: Interact on your customers’ schedules and deliver information when and where it’s needed. That’s a dream scenario for everyone involved. Demand generation programs help make it happen by incorporating automated versions of everything from push notifications to social media posting to emails. It’s on-demand nurturing, and it helps your entire network mature.
- Content Strategy Inspires Connection: When you want to reach out and convert someone, use the right words. When you really want those words to count, ensure they’re part of a larger strategy. A well defined content strategy helps you realize the full potential of blogs, podcasts, social media posts and downloadable ebooks by ensuring everything has a purpose and inherent value.
- Reporting and Analytics Rock: How do you know if you’re bringing in more leads unless you know what “more” even means? Measuring growth requires a starting point, and continuing to grow requires constant rechecks. A properly built and executed demand gen program has milestones in place so we can quantify results rather than guessing. That data is then examined so we find out what’s working, what isn’t and how we can do better on the next go around.
What Is a Demand Generation Program?
Our team of savvy marketing strategists will work with you to develop a demand program that reflects your needs. Whether your vision involves promoting a new product, setting up a free trial, sharing a webinar or disseminating a new piece of content, we’ll make certain to consider the buyer’s entire journey. We’ll also develop a campaign that educates, converts and respectfully nudges your prospect further down that expertly paved decision-making path.
What’s Included in a Demand Generation Program:
- 1 x Short-Form Asset: An ungated (open-to-all) piece such as an infographic, data sheet or checklist that piques interest
- 1 x Long-Form Asset: A more detailed piece such as a whitepaper, guidebook, playbook or ebook that exists beyond a “gate,” so you can gather email information and other data in exchange for access
- 3 x Blog Posts: More casual blog-style content that relates back to the long and/or short assets, increasing viewership and click-throughs
- 1 x Paid Channel: Funded advertising via attention-getting platforms such as Google AdWords, Twitter or Facebook
- 1 x Landing Page: A beautiful and supremely functional page used to capture leads as consumers access the long-form asset
- 1 x Thank-You Page: Acknowledge your audience’s investment and show your gratitude for any action taken.
- 1 x Nurture Email Campaign: Cultivate mild curiosity into a genuine connection (and hopefully a sale or two) using a series of four emails designed to nourish the brand-consumer rapport
- Analytics & Reporting: We take the temperature of the campaign and gauge user response, so we can make changes as needed.
All of this occurs over a six-week timeline. The first two weeks are spent building the custom demand program. Over the next two weeks, we pour our energy into launching and experimenting with the program to optimize every aspect of the strategy. Finally, we spend two weeks maintaining the program we’ve worked so hard to construct.
How to Get Started with a Demand Generation Program
Demand generation program aren’t for everyone. You need to be ready. You must be free from fear (or at least not burdened or restricted by it), excited about experimentation and eager about all the opportunities that lie ahead. A healthy dose of curiosity is essential, and ambition is terribly helpful. Most of all, you must be willing to go with the flow (+ the flux) while we chase down the leads you need to help your business succeed.
We like to get to know our clients so we can tailor our approach to each brand’s specific needs. Basically, we want to understand where you’re at and where you want to go so we can offer our own interpretation on how we should proceed.
- What marketing challenges are keeping you up at night?
- How much financial investment have you made?
- Is automation already a part of your game plan?
It’s just the beginning of our personalized approach, but your answers truly do matter.
Wondering whether you’re prepared for the next big thing? Take our Growth Funnel Readiness Quiz and find out.
FAQ’s – Frequently Asked Questions
How Can We Send Emails?
Our demand gen programs rely on email automation. We take advantage of software to automatically dispatch messages at any time of day without having to be there to press “send.” Sometimes these emails are scheduled for delivery to strategically space out information while urging customers down the sales funnel. Other times, automated emails are triggered by a consumer’s action, such as a thank you email following a sale or a welcome email that arrives after a prospect has joined your mailing list or requested a download.
How Can We Build Landing Pages?
Landing pages generally have one main purpose: introducing prospects to a gated asset, product or service and then inspiring them to take action so they can gain access. In the world of growth marketing, we’re generally looking for leads, so the landing pages we build might contain intriguing information about a long-form article on the history of high-top sneakers.
We offer just enough of a tease to keep readers interested and then ask them to enter an email address as their “payment” for reading the entire titillating asset. In essence, we’re constructing a digital soft sell that gently encourages people to delve deeper into your site.
How Do We Promote Our Content?
When we drone on and on about the importance of content strategy, this is why! Think about it philosophically — if we write content and nobody sees it, does it really exist? We suppose it does, but just because it exists doesn’t mean it matters.
Content is meant to be shared, and we do that by promoting blogs, ebooks and other important assets via social media, email campaigns, paid platforms (Facebook ads, Google AdWords, etc.) and other channels that expose your brand to your target buyer.
What if We Don’t Have Marketing Automation?
Some companies already have integrated marketing automation software, and we can piggyback on that system as we build a new demand gen program. Other businesses will be brand new to this crazy world of growth marketing, so we’ll be working with a clean slate — and that’s totally fine!
We can introduce you to marketing software that will make your life so much easier. Once you can fill your consumers’ needs and open the channels of communication without having to be tied to your desktop 24/7, you realize that prosperity and expansion don’t have to come at the expense of your sanity.
What Happens After You Build Our Demand Gen Program?
If you build it they will come, right? Well, yes and no. Designing and constructing your demand generation strategy is just the first part of the campaign. Once things are up and running, we stick around to fine tune things and ensure everything is not just working but working well.
First, we build your program, and then we spend a few weeks manning the launch and experimenting. Those little tests can lead to big, rapid adjustments that improve efficacy and efficiency and help you scale that much faster. Finally, we take another two weeks to maintain the campaign, keeping an eye on the campaign we worked so hard to create.
How Do You Measure Success?
We’re all about the data. No guesswork, no supposition — if we’re going to report back on the health of a campaign, we want to have quantifiable inputs that show in black and white what’s really going on with your program. As for measuring success, we gauge outcomes according to the goals we’ve set in tandem with individual clients because the goal line looks a little different from brand to brand.
We want you to be at your best, and what signifies victory for someone else might not resonate with you. The most important takeaway? We’ll always be upfront about the mileposts we’re aiming for and how things are progressing along the way.