Marc Daigle, VP Marketing Services
As the uncertainty around Covid-19 remains and live events are yet to return in full, digital marketing continues to be a primary focus for many marketing teams. If your position has anything to do with sales, marketing or growing revenue at your company, you’re likely aware of digital demand generation. Or maybe you have run demand generation campaigns in the past. Demand Generation is not new, but its proven results make now the right time to embrace it.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what Demand Generation is, the value it can deliver, and what makes it different from lead generation.
What is Demand Generation?
Digital demand generation can be defined as a set of marketing tactics that target and drive qualified B2B customers during the buyer journey to your website or digital assets. Similar to lead generation, it’s a process by which marketers generate awareness and demand for a business’ products or services. But it differs from lead gen in that it drives sales by targeting prospects and leading them through each stage in the buyer journey with personalized content and messaging.
Why is Demand Generation critical?
Demand Generation-based marketing campaigns increase ROI by 313% and NPV by $1.6M on average, according to a joint 2020 study from Forrester and Terminus. Demand generation stands out from traditional marketing lead-focused tactics in three ways:
- First, Demand Gen is holistic. It marshals the intelligence and coordination of sales and marketing teams who can create a multi-channel experience for customers based on the entire buyer journey, from the first impression all the way to purchase and into brand loyalty. In particular, the right content is critical for effective demand generation, whether you’re trying to educate your prospects about a problem or informing them about how your product solves it.
- Next, the most critical difference demand generation has introduced is its tight level of integration of digital channels and audience data. Buyers today are engaging with your brand, product, or service online and across numerous digital channels. Without the proper combination of marketing automation tools, customer buying preferences are not so easily collected—and even harder to convert to wins. With the right tools, demand generation campaigns help synchronize digital marketing efforts across teams so they can can reach targeted buyers faster and shorten sales cycles.
- Finally, demand generation doubles down on the ability to track measurable data at each point in the buyer journey. This capability has encouraged marketers to ditch passive ‘spray and pray’ tactics for evidence-based analysis. Scoring and grading of lead quality plays a central part in the measurable success of demand generation campaigns.
Demand Generation Delivers
A successful demand generation campaign can deliver a quantum leap in funnel growth in the new, post-pandemic market. And for B2B technology companies, we believe that Mainstay offers a unique combination of proven demand generation strategies and enterprise technical knowledge to create meaningful engagement with prospects.
Learn More about Best Practices for Demand Generation
Read our next blog on our 5 Best Practices for running a Demand Generation Campaign or contact us to learn how Mainstay can help support your marketing and sales efforts with a bespoke campaign. If you’re interested in taking the next step, please contact me at marcd@mainstaycompany.com
