You have a brand, a compelling offering and a digital presence. Now what? How do you generate demand? It’s time to think about your demand generation strategy.
The good news: You’re only 10 steps away from creating a marketing formula uniquely tailored to your audience, your brand and your product or offering.
A couple pro tips before you start on this path:
- Have a clear understanding of your overall business goals and be prepared to use your pipeline/revenue goals to inform this process.
- Be prepared to dedicate time to these steps.
OK! Let’s jump in:
Set measurable goals - Creating a measurable, actionable, timely definition of success is the foundation of a digital marketing plan. Use your business goals to inform and guide your marketing goal-setting process. Not sure where to start? Use a demand generation waterfall to map out how you’ll need to fuel your pipeline to meet your revenue goals.
Identify target audience(s) - Define your target audience(s). A good place to start is by looking at your current customer list and/or mapping the pain points your offering solves with the people/organizations most likely to be experiencing that pain. Don’t be afraid to get specific.
Conduct research - Learn where you’ll find your audience, how they interact with brands and consume media, and the needs and challenges each audience segment faces. Keep tabs on what are other players in your space are doing to engage their audiences. Welcome opportunities to stay up to speed on current industry best practices.
Flesh out messaging - Create a messaging framework built around your value proposition and the pain points you solve for your target audience. Remember, messaging isn’t static so come up with options and be ready to test them.
Map out a marketing funnel - Outline the marketing journey your prospects will take and then think through how you’ll get prospects into and move them through that funnel. This funnel should address awareness through closed/won stages and consider how marketing and sales will work together throughout the funnel.
Allocate budget - Be prepared to spend some money. Create a budgeting worksheet that details exactly where you will spend your budget and what results you expect based on your previous results or industry standards.
Create a channel strategy - Use the knowledge of how your audience consumes media and where they interact along with conversion data by channel to inform your channel strategy. Your channel strategy will be a combination of paid, owned and earned channels.
Generate content - The foundation of all solid demand generation strategies is content. Look at your marketing funnel and channel strategy to identify what content you’ll need and where. Use your messaging and the intel you have on your target audience to produce meaningful content that will spark engagement.
Get started - Ready, set, go! Deploy your marketing campaign and start testing and experimenting.
Monitor and calibrate - Continuous monitoring and reporting on results will help you calibrate your marketing strategy data-informed decision making ensuring you aren’t wasting time and money. Use your findings to make adjustments. Marketing is a journey not a destination. A marketer’s job is never done. Things evolve, what resonates changes, trends shift, new channels and technologies emerge, and current events happen, which all may result in needing to adjust your strategy to ongoing market conditions.