1. The power of personas

There is absolute power in the persona, and it’s the secret sauce for a successful integrated campaign. Every company of any size needs to understand their customers, their pain points and what they need to be successful. Marketers need to build detailed message maps for personas and treat these message maps as living, breathing documents that we continually update.

2. Know your segment

Next, you need to be thinking about the segment of the market. Are you talking to prospects or customers, small businesses or global enterprises, and which geography?

3. Create smart content

Having a well-developed persona and a clear target market also will help you move content marketing from a standalone function to one that is fully integrated into the broader marketing mix and marketing technology stack. 

4. Create once, promote everywhere (COPE)

Once you have smart content, it’s time to test it in the marketplace. As you continue to grow in scale, the next theme that we often talk about is COPE.

1. Centralize Lead Sources & Automate Top-Funnel Processes

2. Adopt More Sophisticated Account-Based Marketing Tactics

3. Focus on Data Quality & Automate Data Governance Efforts

4. Measure and Report Lead Velocity Rate (QLVR)

5. Communicate Frequently with Sales & Customer Service

6. Interface Directly with Clients

7. Co-Create Content and Events with Other Brands

8. Understand & Prepare for Expanding Data Privacy Regulations

Here are a few actionable tips to help B2B marketing leaders improve their demand generation strategies for existing clients.

1) Refine your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. There is no question ABM is redefining B2B marketing. While some B2B marketers are using ABM to better target new business, most are still getting their heads around this B2B marketing trend. Marketers looking for more revenue should ensure they enhance their target account lists with offers for relevant products and services to existing clients.

2) Be smarter with analytics. While many marketing leaders have data and the analytics at their disposal, most aren’t leveraging them effectively. Marketing leaders need to get a better handle on their customer data, targeting key accounts and using better analysis to identify opportunities for growth. For example, marketing leaders need to look for opportunities to cross-sell more products to existing clients or look for upsell opportunities. By mining purchase patterns and content consumption history, marketers can unearth new insights that they can leverage for more business.

3) Better align sales, marketing and technology. Alignment between sales and marketing in B2B organizations can be an elusive goal. One of the biggest challenges for sales and marketing usually centers on lead quality. But, this is where technology can help, if used properly. Thanks to improved demand generation through ABM and multichannel marketing, marketing and sales can better define leads from the beginning – and improve lead quality and sales conversation. Applied to existing clients properly, this can be a path to more revenue thorugh better collaboration between sales professionals and marketers.

Despite the hype surrounding account-based marketing, most marketers still are using traditional demand generation practices – and most experts agree they won’t forego one for the other. That’s the conclusion of the “ABM Benchmark Survey Report,” from Demand Gen Report and sponsored by Everstring and Domo.

While the technologies behind ABM, including predictive marketing analytics, behavioral advertising, email and web personalization, are becoming more mainstream, 59 percent of those participating in the survey said that they had been doing ABM for less than a year, and 29 percent said they have been doing it for less than six months.

More than a third (36 percent) of those participating in the survey said most of their efforts still are focused on demand generation tactics despite the hype around account-based marketing; 37 percent said their efforts are evenly split between ABM and broader demand generation efforts; and 23 percent said they still are employing demand gen, but that the majority of their effort now is focused on ABM. Just 4 percent said they practice only ABM.

Learn about the newest member of the Demand Waterfall family and how it can help b-to-b companies
drive demand and revenue creation performance optimization throughout their organization.

The customer lifecycle doesn’t start with an inquiry, it starts with identifying new targets. Shouldn't your measurement efforts start there too?

The "B2B Demand Marketing Assessment Guide & Orchestration Workbook" provides demand generation professionals with: 

• An effective tool to assess your current demand marketing efforts and identify needed areas of improvement
• A comprehensive introduction to demand orchestration, an emerging B2B marketing approach used to coordinate top-of-funnel marketing activities to scale pipeline and boost marketing-attributed revenue 
• 12 customizable worksheets to guide you through every aspect of demand orchestration

B2B marketers are tasked, and expected, to produce higher-quality leads en masse. But new research conducted by Demand Gen Report and sponsored by SnapApp shows that the majority (82%) of B2B marketers are only “somewhat confident” or “not very confident” in the effectiveness of their demand generation campaigns.

A quarter of enterprise B2B marketers noted that limited resources were their biggest obstacle to meeting their demand gen goals, according to a new study from Annuitas. The demand gen consulting company said marketers also cited lack of budget (18%) and lack of a defined strategy (15%). In addition, more than half of these organizations (57%) have a dedicated demand generation team, but 61% say that this team is run by the corporate marketing or product marketing teams.

Close to two-thirds (65%) utilize buyer personas to plan demand gen program;
Only half (50%) of demand gen marketers are leveraging their KPIs to optimize program performance; and
Roughly a third (32%) of those leveraging KPIs review them monthly, followed by quarterly (21%) and weekly (19%).

This post is going to look at how B2B marketers can create a comprehensive demand generation strategy. We’ll break down every phase of the demand generation funnel, with an emphasis on optimization and sales creation.

This means specific touch point tactics such as:

• Lead scoring
• Display re-targeting
• Sponsored research
• Partner webinars

We suggest you evaluate your marketing mix as part of your annual planning process and revisit the mix at least quarterly. Here are some suggestions to get that mix just right:

• Establish the number of inquiries you need at the top of the Demand Waterfall® to meet your revenue objectives. 
• Determine which tactics will work for your buying audiences. It does not make sense to market to people using tactics that they are not interested in or will not respond to. 
• Consider your internal capabilities to nurture leads, further qualify them, and engage your prospects. 
• Don’t starve your Waterfall. 

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