6 tips for setting up and running a demand generation campaign

      Anticipating your audience's buying behavior, purchasing decisions and how to interact with your leads has become essential. Companies can successfully shorten the sales cycle by qualifying and prioritizing prospects, attracting well-informed customers, which determines an increase in revenue.

      To reach these goals and gain competitive advantage, marketers must leverage resources, processes, and new automated technology to successfully drive awareness and interest to their company's products and/or services. This in term means combining clearly defined and targeted marketing programs with a structured sales process.

      Here are the top 6 tips for setting up and running a demand generation campaign:

      1. Define your ideal lead - start with a list of all the typical characteristics of a good lead: job title, location, company size, industry, and so on. Look at some of your existing customers as they can be good sources of inspiration. If you target multiple types of leads define each category separately.

     2. Create highly targeted campaigns – to get high response rates from your campaign you need to target it to a particular audience. Don’t try to reach all leads with the same campaign: leads don’t respond to irrelevant campaigns. If you only have time for one campaign, start with the most important segment first.

     3. Focus on the customer’s needs - once you have defined your segments, you are ready to define the campaign’s content. Answer this question: What are the main challenges my potential clients face in their job? Create content that would highlight solutions for some of these issues.

Don’t push your product. Instead give them some ideas they can use right away, with or without your services.

     4. Use several channels to reach your audience – use several ways to stir up interest. If you buy lists, make sure they are targeted, and if needed do a manual cleanup.

You can work with media partners to improve targeted lead quality, but the cost per lead is often higher. Another way to reach your prospects is to work together with partner companies who sell non-competing products to the same audience. Finally, you can use search advertising to get highly targeted leads.

     5. Nurture leads - often, new leads may not be ready to buy. Once leads are interested to talk to a sales person, they may have to wait until they can replace an existing product, or until the new budget is approved.

It is essential to keep touching with them at least once a month. Keep this up for at least a couple of months. If competing products have 1-year contracts, continue nurturing for a full year to make sure you touch them when the product replacement decision comes up.

     6. Align sales & marketing - to ensure the most effective follow-up, sales and marketing need to agree on what the most valuable leads are.

Create a list of new leads and rank them by priority. If ranking is sub-optimal, work with sales to refine it. A close collaboration between your marketing and sales department will give you valuable feedback that you can use to improve your overall demand generation campaign.

What are your tips for setting up an effective demand generation campaign?