Want a 429% better chance at demand generation success?
According to a study by Convince & Convert, here’s the secret: Set clear goals.
You might be thinking, “How do I set concrete goals?” That’s a smart question.
“In our work with thousands of B2B marketing teams, we’ve found that goals can vary greatly depending on the maturity of the marketing organization. While documenting annual goals to guide your demand strategy is important, it’s essential to define target outcomes for all core demand generation activities and programs. You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going.” –
Triniti Burton, Marketing and Communications Director at Integrate.
The best marketers understand how to set themselves up for success by defining clear, achievable goals and crushing them. While goals change from organization to another, we’ve cherry picked five goals growth-oriented B2B marketers should adopt in 2019.
5 Demand Generation Goals
Before deploying a demand generation campaign, consider the following:
- When it comes to demand generation, what is your organization currently lacking?
- What are the quickest fixes that will bring the biggest change and ROI?
Orienting yourself around these qualifiers helps you construct realistic and objective goals. Furthermore, we know that goals vary based on your sales/marketing lifecycle. Rather than focus heavily on numeric metrics, we’ve outlined the baseline goals and objectives that align with all stages of growth:
1. Maximize Marketing-Influenced Leads
The first (and obvious) goal of high-impact demand generation campaigns is to increase marketing-influenced leads. Today, inbound marketing initiatives — content syndication, display advertising, blogging, social media, email and paid search — reign as some of the leading methods for procuring a high volume of marketing-influenced leads. More importantly, there needs to be some clarity around how you define marketing-influenced leads — top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel. Moreover, you need to be able to correlate a specific marketing function to the lead effectively.
2. Onboard New Technology Effectively
Strive to fully adopt new technology quickly and efficiently. When a marketing team fails to comprehensively onboard the right MarTech tools, disruptions to marketing activities are more likely occur.
Moreover, a failure to transfer insights from one marketing solution to the next may result in a loss of critical data—intensifying the need for your entire MarTech stack to be integrated, with all tools working in conjunction and sharing accurate information.
3. Build the Right Marketing Team
Commit to creating high-powered and demand-focused B2B marketing teams. There are many different methods to build the right marketing team. However, as a baseline, businesses should try to fill the following roles (one person may fill multiple roles):
The Leader: Someone to lead the team to victory. This person should be able to manage and coach the team, but also, roll up their sleeves and get work done.
The Search Expert: Someone who is a SEO guru. This person should know SEO best practices and work to position your business as expert in your industry—while optimizing search engine results.
The Content Expert: Someone who writes. This person should have a masterful command of writing —email, blogging, social media, etc.
The Developer: Someone who knows web development. This person should be well-equipped to construct web experiences to drive meaningful demand generation.
The Analytics Expert: Someone who understands data. This person should be able to review data and provide demand generation recommendations based on incoming insights.
The Customer Advocate: Someone who understands your target personas. This person should advocate for the customer in all marketing activities, ensuring the messaging you produce is relevant and valuable for your target audience.
4. Increase Conversion Rates & Efficiency
After you’ve captured a lead, your goal should be to convert that lead into a happy customer. Start by identifying “choke points” in the funnel. Is there anywhere where conversion rates are impeded or lower than desirable? Identify those roadblocks and look for opportunities to bolster your nurturing sequence during each customer lifecycle stage. Doing so will increase lead velocity and generate more meaningful conversions with sales.
Additionally, look for ways to increase your conversion efficiency. To calculate efficiency, add your total working hours and divide them by the pipeline value. This simple calculation may reveal some startling revelations about your organization’s overall marketing efficiency. These insights will allow you to pivot and avoid major catastrophe later on.
5. Commit to Clean Data
Finally, the best digital marketers commit to clean data in their demand generation efforts. Quality marketing data is the key to unlocking marketing’s potential to drive maximum business value and create happy, high-value customers. Data-driven marketers should dissect, organize and disseminate insights across stakeholder groups. There are a number of causes and consequences of dirty data including:
- Duplicate data
- Missing fields
- Invalid formatting or values/ranges
- Invalid email or physical address
Digital marketers streamline demand generation practices, deliver valuable lead nurturing and boost revenues by doing routine analysis and assessment of data.
Become a Demand Generation Superstar
Demand generation efforts are nothing without clearly defined goals and objectives. Ask yourself: What should my demand generation campaign accomplish and how will I get there? With a clearly defined roadmap in place, you can become a demand generation superstar.
Take your demand generation efforts to the next level with the Demand Marketing Assessment Guide
