Demand generation has become key to many of today’s businesses and is especially interesting to B2B businesses as a means of attracting and engaging with customers and prospects in multiple and meaningful ways throughout the buyer journey. Indeed, marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, Eloqua and Pardot have spurred a new generation of demand generation marketeers and created a flourishing market for marketing operations skills. But, don’t let the technology determine and drive your demand generation initiatives.  It definitely can support a solid demand generation strategy but avoid the pitfall of diving into the technology before you have ticked off a few essentials.

So what is demand generation? Coming from years of experience in the tech sector, I see it as a fundamental marketing mindshift. Marketing has moved away from the traditional “4Ps of marketing model”, which really was more internally and product-focused, and has evolved towards a more customer- or prospect-centered model, one that recognizes the importance of the customer journey and the stages in the buying cycle. Needless to say, this has many dimensions and varies from one business to the next. A fully-fledged demand generation machine is not created overnight – it’s also a journey. The good news is that there are some simple steps to get you started.

After years working in the US with both startup and multi-national technology companies I’m boiling demand generation down into four key essentials. That’s not to say that there isn’t more to consider but if you are at the early stage of demand generation or if you are wondering how to go about it, here are the four things to keep top of mind.

1. Data

First things first, who is your target audience? The more specific you can be about the titles of your prospects, industry verticals, size of organization, etc. the better your sales opportunities and conversion rates will be. Building and maintaining a good contact database is fundamental to successful demand generation. Attracting the right leads via inbound and outbound tactics helps build your database. However, lead acquisition, content syndication, events, and other paid programmes are also options, but only when done correctly.

2. Content

If the customer is king, the content is queen – or so, I like to think! I cannot emphasis enough how important good content and a balanced content mix is – from PR articles, to thought-leadership eBooks or whitepapers, technical demo videos, case studies, blogposts, solution templates, ROI calculators, infographics and more. The content needs to align with the customer journey and should be mindful of the customer needs, be that educational or solution-oriented.

3. Process

Demand generation is not just about generating leads. It’s also about managing those leads over the lifecycle. Bear in mind that the prospect may not be in a buying cycle when they initially engage. A lead generated through a demand gen programme today will wither and die unless it is managed and nurtured. Consider at what point and how a lead will be passed on to a lead management or inside sales team, how it will be nurtured and passed to a sales person and converted to revenue.

4. Tools

Finally when you have the data, content and processes in place you can think about automating things. There are multiple marketing automation platforms to choose from but you may want to start slow, get your CRM up and running effectively, prime the pump with some gated content on your website, build an inside sales team, and use simple affordable tools for running email campaigns. This may need some amount of manual lifting before committing to a fully integrated marketing automation system but it will help you walk before you run.

While this all briefly scratches the surface of demand generation I’ll explore some of these in more detail in future posts.

About the author: Leonie McGloin

I’m program marketing manager with a leading global software company and am based in the US, creating content and running demand generation campaigns for mobile technology. The opinions expressed above are my own.