As we enter a new year and a new era of hyper-digital marketing, where many of us can only be reached or reach others in an online capacity, there couldn’t be a more important time to reimagine your demand generation strategy. While demand generation’s main goal is to create awareness and attract people to your business, lead generation focuses on turning those people into qualified leads, preparing them for the next step in the sales funnel. When it comes to effective demand generation, where do you start? How do you know where to cast your net to ensure the best catches? Well, here’s 3 key aspects you can focus on to ensure you get it right in 2021…

 

The right leads

 

To continue the analogy, you need to determine what type of fish you want to catch, before you go fishing. When planning your demand generation activities, it’s vital to understand what kind of leads you want to generate – and what will attract them. To ensure you’ve identified your most valuable prospects, you’ll need to combine industry leading martech such as Marketo, with a wealth of research and insights.

 

Next, you should delve into each individual segment, ensuring you’ve developed a thorough understanding of their unique challenges and goals. This includes personality profiling, where you create a profile for each prospect to determine the messaging and formats they will be most receptive to. In addition, it’s critical you understand your prospects’ pain points, values, information sources, personality types and personal interests using a combination of desk-based and primary research, like surveys.

 

The right strategy

 

When it comes to demand and lead generation, few things are as valuable as sales and marketing alignment. If your sales and marketing teams are confused about the nature of your prospects, this can create endless conflict and lost opportunities. Research has revealed that 50% of sales’ time is wasted on poor prospects.[1] This is why you need a comprehensive picture of your audience – one that everyone agrees on.

 

With a formalised persona(s) in place, you can create a knowledge-sharing relationship between your teams that strengthens the overall impact of your strategy. As part of this alignment, your sales team should collect information and insights from face-to-face meetings with leads and feed this back to marketing, giving you a comprehensive view of your prospects’ challenges, goals and desires. In turn, marketing will be able to update their messaging with these insights and create truly engaging communications.

Top tip: when sales attend meetings with leads, marketing should provide a comprehensive pack with information on each lead’s engagements up to that point – thereby empowering sales like never before.

The right tools

 

Yes, it’s time for tech. Marketing teams are inundated with technology these days, but when it’s truly integrated and aligned, great things happen. From content production to email assistants and chatbots, AI is meandering its way into all aspects of B2B marketing. These AI solutions can help you analyse large datasets to enable personalisation at scale, uncover actionable insights and improve productivity via automated processes.

 

The critical question to ask when evaluating how AI can help demand and lead generation activity in 2021 is “How good is the data I’m using?”. Artificially intelligent solutions are only helpful if you feed them reliable and quality data. If AI tools are in your marketing technology stack (or are expected to be soon), ensure you have a healthy culture of experimentation and you test out common sense responses of your AI engagements. With the right data, planning, analysis and expert understanding, this innovative technology, along with your existing programs, has the ability to revolutionise your marketing efforts.

 

Do demand generation right with Really B2B

 

At Really B2B, we’re experts in strategy. Our formula includes vigorous research, the best buyer personas, a deep dive into the data, segmentation, and value proposition mapping. Not forgetting the power of our in-house planning hub, Enigma 2.0, which has crunched over 14 million rows of live campaign data to accurately forecast the results you can expect. We have tried and tested techniques for each channel and we know which channels work best depending on your unique needs, and which do not.

 

So, if you want to kick-start your 2021 with the right strategy and activities, speak to us today on 0845 519 8517 or email info@reallyb2b.com.