When you run a business, an important B2B strategy is demand generation. It means you want to create new demand instead of gathering leads from the existing audience. When you do that, your brand increases revenue. Your growth gets a boost, and you expand opportunities into new markets. It is quite possible that you are already doing that, but are you doing it rightly?
If you think that tracking website visits and leads would be enough, then you are not extracting the juice out of demand generation fully.
Demand generation is a little complex thing that needs leveraging multiple channels and multiple metrics. It also involves running multiple campaigns. And when you work on these many fronts, it is obviously tough to track them together.
It is the reason, data-driven demand generation is so much important. Without data, you will be hitting in the dark. Your resources on leads and campaigns may not drive the expected ROI. And in the changed consumer behavior, where companies like to buy your product and do not like being sold; the situation is further tough.
So how will you effectively turn data into demand? Let’s try to understand.
Align your team first
The sales and marketing teams of your organization are supposed to be aligned with a data-driven definition of a qualified lead. Why is it important?
It is because they have to use data-specific metrics to define a qualified lead.
They should meet the right demographic metrics. They need to use the software you integrate with. They should interact with your content.
It is quite possible that your definition of a quality lead is different, but the aim is to get the marketing and sales functions on the same page, and they should focus on the same metrics.
Use Intent Data
They must use intent data to know when to engage. With that, you target prospects at the right time. Just like qualified leads, intent data may also vary by organization or campaign. So, it is essential to focus on first-party intent signals. Obviously, because you have more control over it.
Using that, you should assign points to particular actions and use them to calculate the data score.
Intent data scoring system
Date scoring is similar to lead scoring. Scoring intent focuses on qualified accounts only. Sales can reach out at the target time by tracking the actions. Sales and marketing should work jointly on this scorecard.
You can use tools to track intent data with the help of custom feeds. They can create filters to track users on the basis of pages visited by them.
Track the right metrics at the right time
Sometimes, sales and marketers focus on metrics at the top of the funnel. When you use data for demand generation you need an in-depth look at metrics throughout the funnel. It gives clarity on the overall effectiveness of your efforts put into the demand generation. Which metrics are to be tracked to see if the demand generation will give results? Well, there is no fixed answer to it. Demand generation marketing is all about increasing engagement in the beginning. For example, by creating a new informative blog post, you may want to know about its visibility and how many people will read or share it. But tracking per campaign shows what actions will drive demand. Tracking close rates per channel will tell how well early demand generation efforts pay off.
Focus on account-based metrics, not just channels
When you track channel metrics for demand generation, you should highlight high-intent channels. But is it the only way to track the effectiveness of demand generation?
Your sales and marketing can track account-based marketing metrics. Some of the metrics are the number of people visiting a particular account, and the pages they view. The metrics allow the sales and marketing teams to track particular organizations they move to during the different stages of the funnel.
With the availability of cheaper ABM tools, demand generation has become account based. With the help of custom feeds, you can view the activity of a specific account, such as how many times an account visits your website and what pages they browse, and so on.
This data can be helpful in refining the demand generation strategy and it can give you real results.
Build an effective growth strategy with data-driven demand generation
It is tricky to launch a demand generation campaign. Organizations can know what works and why using a data-driven approach. The campaigns can be built around metrics that matter most to the organization.
When the right data points are tracked them at the right time, you’ll track performance in real time — and it gives an understanding of the strategies that are most effective.
Thus, data can be turned into demand if it is worked systematically by your sales and marketing teams.
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