What are the common challenges and pitfalls that you face when running demand generation campaigns?

Running demand generation campaigns can feel like juggling—it’s easy to drop the ball on a few things! Common challenges include targeting the wrong audience, which wastes time and resources. Poor messaging can fail to connect with prospects, while inconsistent follow-ups may cause leads to lose interest. Budget constraints are another hurdle, making it hard to scale. Lastly, tracking ROI can be tough if you don’t have clear metrics in place. - Targeting the wrong audience - Weak messaging that doesn’t resonate - Inconsistent follow-ups - Budget limitations - Difficulty tracking ROI Example: I once targeted too broad an audience, leading to low-quality leads. Tightening our focus improved conversions!

Running demand generation campaigns often comes with challenges like targeting the wrong audience, poor sales and marketing alignment, weak lead nurturing, and inconsistent mesaging. To overcome these pitfalls, focus on building detailed buyer personas, ensuring collaboration between sales and marketing, nurturing leads with personalized communication, and maintaining a long-term strategy with consistent messaging across channels. Tip: Prioritize sustainable growth over short-term wins to see lasting success.

Common challenges in demand generation campaigns include targeting the wrong audience, insufficient lead quality, poor alignment between sales and marketing teams, rising costs of paid channels, and ineffective nurturing strategies. Additionally, measuring ROI and adapting to rapidly changing market trends can be difficult.

Here's how to get it wrong from the start: how many leads to expect. Demand gen targets the 95% of companies that are not ready to buy, not the 5% that are. Demand gen metrics are not clicks, CTR, or leads. Demand gen metrics are not meetings sat, or pipeline generated. Demand gen metrics are frequency and reach. Demand gen metrics are engagement. Demand gen metrics are shifts in brand search volume. Demand gen metrics are half-year shifts in cost-per-customer. Demand gen is about reaching the highest numbers of target roles and companies with the most enticing, value-laden content possible, for the most efficient cost. Measure demand gen :::campaigns::: month-to-month. Measure demand gen :::programs::: at best bi-annually.

I don’t think it’s necessary about just the wrong tactic. Launch and leave never really works, you need to optimise campaigns consistently when you’ve gone live. Tweak content, adjust audiences, don’t just set a campaign live and wait until you’ve spent your money to say whether it’s performed or not. Ultimately, you need to be where you can target your audience, and your message needs to be right. But don’t throw a platform away too hastily. Adjust and optimise first.

What I’ve found important is identifying the right tactics at each funnel stage (i.e. LinkedIn ads for awareness, website content consumption for decision, etc). From there, orchestrate the experience/messaging and fluid hand-off - example: download an asset to sending a personalized email with more recommended content driving back to your website with a CTA at the top and bottom of the page.

You. Must. Create. And. Optimize. For. Consumption. Period. As the above point state, this requires you to know your customers, their pain points, and their struggles. You have to understand their world to understand how you your product best serves them. But in this context, "quality content" is content that will get read, watched, shared, discussed, and commented on. Not because of the bumps in the algorithms. Because at this stage of your relationship with prospects, this is the only way you get to be part of the conversation. And make no mistake: in 2024 and beyond, this part of the buying process is CONVERSATIONS. Just not with you. Create what people want to consume. Give them a POV to talk about. Find ways to be MEMORABLE.

Here's a hot take on nurture: depending on your org and sales cycle, nurture may not be a marketing activity. Sometimes nurture is helping your sales reps build relationships with prospects. In high-touch selling processes, prospects want relationships with PEOPLE as much as they want relationships with brands. If the right way to make sure that prospect comes to you first when they start shopping is to make their territory sales manager the smartest person they've ever met, then by gosh make that sales manager looks brilliant. It's the same work: building trust. Building a desire to collaborate. But you're doing it for a human at your org instead of the org itself.

Demand generation means reaching out to an audience that doesn't yet know your name. So the biggest challenge with a demand-gen campaign is usually getting your content consumed even though the audience doesn't know your name. And the second-biggest challenge is getting your name remembered after the content is consumed. And the third-biggest challenge is getting your audience to take an action you want after they've consumed the content. Easy to understand. Not easy to do.