What Is Demand Generation?

I seem to be the master of acquiring uncommon titles. First, there was audience development. On a regular basis, co-workers found it amusing to ask me how developing audiences was going. I had to defend myself. "Hey, there is an entire magazine devoted to audience development." Now, my title is demand generation and perhaps even more obscure sounding.

To help educate my co-workers and attract support from other divisions, I've been on tour at our company explaining how demand generation is going to help. If you're scratching your head about demand generation, read on. 

First of all, lead generation is not demand generation. It's simply part of demand generation. Demand generation happens before and after a lead is generated. 

Demand generation is about becoming a thought leader in your industry through content marketing. It's a marketing program designed to attract prospects to your products and services and nurture them into marketing qualified leads that will turn into new revenue for your sales team. By the time a prospect is ready to buy, your brand is their first thought. 

Additionally, we're collecting valuable data on new prospects and enhancing our data on existing prospects. 

Your brand can become the thought leader in your industry by providing helpful content. Think whitepapers, webinars, eBooks, infographics, reports, and data. If you're a marketer, then you know all about LinkedIn's guide to sophisticated marketing. This is a great example of an eBook designed to help you do your job better. I'd also recommend reading Jason Miller's book called, Proven Tactics to Turn Your Social and Content Marketing Up to 11. You'll be reaching prospects through all of your regular digital marketing channels including digital advertising, social media, email marketing, SEO and paid search. You'll be tracking both anonymous and known visitors to your website and monitoring activity. To do this, there are a few great tools to use including Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketo and Pardot. 

The prospect will be driven to a landing page where you will collect all of their valuable information before providing them access to your content. Then, you'll use your marketing automation tool to nurture them with more valuable content to further prove your status as the thought leader in your industry. All the while, you will be scoring them on their demographics and behaviors until you designate your prospect as a marketing qualified lead for the appropriate line of business. Note that you might have someone with the perfect demographic but in the wrong stage of the buying cycle. Maybe they are just researching and aren't quite ready to buy yet. Once they are marketing qualified, you'll pass the prospect on to a lucky sales person who can then have a consultative conversation with the prospect using all of the marketing intelligence outlined in front of them. If your product or service needs to be offered on a timely basis to close the deal, there may be no time for nurturing. Instead, you'll focus on thought leadership and strike while the iron is hot through channels like paid search and SEO. For example, if you're a contracting company specializing in restoration after a flood or fire, then you will want to be the first brand someone thinks of. Additionally, you'll want to act quick and close the deal. 

At the end of the day, you can run a report in your CRM tool showing how much revenue was attributed to your marketing program, demand generation. You can also start to learn what demographics and behaviors attribute to a sale. It's fantastic business intelligence. 

Happy demand generating!