Marketing Insights - The Art and Science of Creating Demand

Today’s organizations still struggle with understanding what mix of tactics will ultimately maximize Customer Lifetime Value. Plain and simple. We are still unable to confidently answer questions like “What return can we expect with our marketing spend? Should we hire more inside sales representatives or ramp up campaign execution? Should we focus our efforts on customer development or new lead generation? Which sources of traffic to our web site are delivering our target buyer personas?” And, despite all of the data points we have access today, we still can only answer these questions with a “gut feel” or “it depends”.

And, this cannot just be a conversation about adopting better marketing best practices. This cannot just be a conversation about more efficient sales processes. This must be a conversation about how a business can develop a core competency in Demand Generation that:

1. Transcends the traditional silos of sales and marketing teams;
2. Profiles customer information and behavior accurately;
3. Engages the customer in a meaningful dialogue; and
4. Can be measured and managed at every stage.

Based on the demand generation practices of over 700 Eloqua clients, The Demand Lifecycle™ is a proven way to establish a high performance Demand Generation function in organizations of any size.

The Demand Lifecycle begins with the business processes, operational resources, and technology required to effectively predict and manage demand creation for your organization. Adoption of The Demand Lifecycle requires investment across each of the 4 disciplines of Demand Generation:

1. Lead Management: The discipline of managing and processing inbound responses to the organization. How aligned are your sales and marketing functions? Do you have a documented lead flow process? What are the key handoff points between sales and marketing? How do you communicate lead activity to sales? How do you empower sales to respond?
2. Contact Management: The discipline of segmentation and targeting your customer. Do you leverage buyer personas? How do you acquire and manage the data required for segmentation? How do you mange contact communication preferences?
3. Campaign Management: The discipline of planning and managing the dialogue with the customer. How do you plan your campaigns? Are you executing to a campaign checklist so they are executed consistently? How do you identify opportunities for automation?
4. Effectiveness Measurement: The discipline of benchmarking and optimizing CLV strategies to scale the business.How are you rolling up campaign performance reporting? How are you tracking tactical campaign asset performance? What is your revenue attribution model?

This blog will feature many recommendations and best practices, organized topically by each of these 4 areas.

Adopting The Demand Lifecycle

Developing a core competency in Demand Generation is easier when you know where you are – and where you want to go. A thorough assessment based on The Demand Lifecycle essentials, can assess your organization’s current state of maturity in Demand Generation:

• Stage 1 – Ad Hoc Execution: The business understands the need to develop core competencies in demand generation but currently communicates to the market as needed. A demand generation function has not been established within the organization.
• Stage 2 – Domain Expertise: The business has established a demand generation function by investing in a core set of resources, process definition, and technology to scale customer engagement.
• Stage 3 – Adoption & Governance: Demand generation expertise is adopted and consistently managed through global collaboration and refinement of best-practice solutions. The business is able to engage the customer in a high-touch, yet high-volume approach that increases overall demand by 4x.
• Stage 4 – Continuous Optimization: Demand generation is in a state of continuous improvement against business growth objectives. The business is empowered to uniquely engage with the customer at the right-time, with the right-message, delivered via the right-channel

Quick check – Where do you think your organization is today? Where do you want to go?

Benchmarking Performance

Industry benchmarks are always a helpful guide – but the best way to chart progress is to benchmark yourself against your own performance. This will help you set the realistic and achievable improvement targets quarter over quarter and year over year.

What are your demand generation benchmarks today? If you don’t know the answer to this question, your answer today quite possibly may be 0. The goal is get to a state where you can measure your demand generation effectiveness and then watch the trend lines from there.

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