Demand Generation – Engaging Customers on Their Own Terms

The Internet has forever changed the way customers research, consider, select and purchase products and services. Today’s customer is active, and more often than not driving the sales cycle. Customers are in control, deciding not only what information they receive, but when, where and how they receive it. Savvy business marketers must now engage customers on their own terms.

The Power of Demand Generation

Demand Generation requires a fundamental rethinking and rebuilding of traditional marketing strategies. Demand Generation programs reach out to targeted customers at critical points in their decision making process with compelling, interactive, just-in-time messaging. Each touch-point is calculated to advance the customer one step at a time — all the way to a purchase order.

Demand Generation programs are designed to grab customers' attention before they raise their hand. To create demand for product and services before one is perceived.

Lead Generation

For business-to-business marketing, demand generation typically stops at the point where you turn over a qualified inquiry to your sales team. But what do you call these prospects prior to that stage? Some terms that make sense are:

1. Cold inquiry – a contact from a trade show, a PPC ad, or a website visit
2. Warm inquiry – a contact from a whitepaper registration, seminar registration, or from multiple website visits
3. Qualified inquiry – a contact that matches a pre-defined set of criteria
4. Lead – a qualified inquiry that has invested more time
5. Opportunity – a lead that the sales team decides is worth pursuing

Managing prospects from cold inquiry through opportunity is the name of the game. As prospects spend increasingly more time investigating your product, solution, or service, they become more qualified, more valuable. For example, the initial contact might be downloading a whitepaper from our website. Then the prospect attends a webinar or a seminar. Then an inside sales person books a meeting based on their interest.

Serious Conversations

The major challenge in Demand Generation is gaining the attention of qualified buyers. For most B2B products, services and solutions, legitimate leads require serious conversation. Names gathered from trade shows or free Webinar registrations often amount to little. Breaking down the barriers to serious conversation with the right prospects is extremely difficult in an environment where time is the most precious resource.

One of the most effective responses to the attention problem is shifting lead-generation programs from quantity to quality. Successful campaigns need to invest more energy into how they engage potential buyers. Marketing must nurture prospects by providing increasingly more useful and enticing information, based on a customer’s actions or interest. So a whitepaper download might trigger a webinar invitation on a related topic. Marketing must assist the education of the prospect rather than trying to “sell” too early.

The ultimate challenge is creating compelling enough marketing programs that the right buyers actively seek you out in search of insight, ideas, and solutions.