Demand Generation is quickly becoming a serious contender for marketing buzzword of the year, much like Account Based Marketing (ABM). Lead Generation is out; Demand Generation is the future. While it's not entirely black and white, it is clear that Demand Generation and ABM are on the rise. This naturally leads to the question of how exactly to approach them. Demand Generation may sound appealing, but it is significantly more challenging than your standard lead generation campaign. Here are three tips to make it a success.
Demand Generation: a leap into the unknown?
Demand Generation feels like a leap into the unknown for many companies. Why should you suddenly make your 'precious' content available for free? And what about the leads that sales wants right NOW?
The challenge is that Demand Generation focuses on the future, while Lead Generation focuses on the here and now. If you stop Lead Gen and switch to Demand Gen, there will be a gap. This is where many companies struggle.
Tip 1: Do both
The tip, therefore, is not to stop Lead Generation. At least not as long as it's still yielding something useful. Both can coexist perfectly fine. The trick is to start cutting back on your Lead Gen budget to make room for Demand Gen. Keep only the campaigns that actually deliver results and maintain them to some extent. For the rest, focus mainly on Demand Generation. And yes, it might still feel like a leap into the unknown, but less frightning.
But how?
Next, you can get started. That is if you know how to do it, of course. Well-executed Demand Generation is easier said than done. There are quite a few challenges involved, but we have some more tips.
Tip 2: Prospect lists and tools
Perhaps the most significant challenge of Demand Gen is building a good prospect list. After all, you can't exactly reach the entire market with your content. To do it right, you'll need to come up with a well-defined list of companies that you'll focus on in the coming years. It's an extremely important moment. Because if you choose the wrong companies, you'll be wasting your marketing budget for the years to come.
Creating such a list is done based on your best existing customers. Based on that, you can use a prospection tool to make a list of accounts who have a similar profile. For example, if you have many customers with a revenue of around 100 million in the logistics sector, it makes sense to look at similar companies that are not yet customers. Are you focusing on cross-selling? Then include your existing customers as well.
Tip 3: Streamline leads and company data
Leads are great, but sometimes they can also be challenging. While Lead Generation focuses mainly on individuals, Demand Gen and ABM focus on companies. The problem is that marketing often has no idea which company their lead actually works for.
The reason for this is simple: you are (too) dependent on the data that the person fills in themselves. This is especially tricky with large companies. For example, someone could fill in that they work at Etos, while in your Demand Gen campaign you're targeting Ahold. With a bit of luck, you might know that Etos is also part of Ahold, but your ROI reporting doesn't know that. And neither does your marketing automation, putting you at risk of this person ending up in the wrong funnel.
And if the person fills in that they work at Albert Heijn, you still don't know if this is Piet from the Albert Heijn headquarters in Zaandam, or Piet from the Albert Heijn in Oldenzaal. It sounds the same, but for the sales department, it's a colossal difference.
The solution: Third-party data
To solve this, you can use so-called third-party data that you can directly integrate into your web forms, your marketing platform, and your CRM. You can discover how this works on the forms on our website. For example, through this contact form. Enter your company name, and then you'll see a list from which you can choose. Based on that choice, we'll send all the data we have about this company from the form to your marketing platform. For the identification of the company, we use a DUNS-number. That's a unique code available for over 500 million companies worldwide.
If you have this DUNS number available in your CRM, then you can be sure that the person who filled out the form on our website indeed belongs to this company. This way, you can easily match and know immediately whether this lead belongs to an existing customer, your Demand Gen campaign, or simply a lead gen entry for your nurturing flow.
