I am pleased on honored to have this guest contribution from demand generation marketing expert, John Muehling.  (Twitter @JohnMuehling) John’s bio and LinkedIn profile link are included at the end of his article.  Enjoy!

-Cheers, Brian Hansford with Zephyr 47

Let’s face it; we live in the Demand Generation. The Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers have all become accustomed to getting what they want, when they want it, and often in real-time. Today’s businesspeople demand information about your company, your product or services, and your solutions.  But here’s the rub, if you don’t give it to them, they will find it elsewhere, and that place could be your competition.

For B2B marketers, the new challenge is meeting that demand, or better still, creating it! Many of today’s marketing experts agree that, if your marketing efforts are creating demand for your resources or engagement by a salesperson, you are on the right track.  The question is, how do you create demand? What works, what doesn’t? Without the key elements of a solid demand generation program, you may find yourself frustrated by the process.  So what are some of those key elements?

Integration

Before you launch your demand gen program, you should ensure it is integrated; integrated with your company’s channels of communication, integrated with your CRM system and, thus, integrated with your sales team.

It is important to recognize that people have a preferred way to communicate, whether it’s face-to-face, by telephone, through the US Mail, via email or SMS, within social media or anonymously on the Internet.  If you start by asking your prospect, “what channel do you prefer”, then tailor your content to reach them in that channel, the prospect will likely gain a sense that you “get them” and it will feel more natural for them engage you. Companies with unlimited budgets can afford to deliver their messages across many or all channels.  But for those companies, with limited resources, communicating in a prospect’s preferred channel is a more economical way to go, and you will find that it creates a stronger relationship.

I recently posted a question on Focus.com, asking simply “Are the lines that separate marketing and sales becoming increasingly blurred?” Within a few days, there were almost 40 experts who had voiced their opinion on the subject – a productive debate had been sparked.  The relevancy to demand gen is that any good program requires marketing to be aligned with sales, at least in some capacity.  As several experts pointed out during the debate, a marketer’s job is to provide qualified leads to sales; it is sales’ job to close those leads.  That is true.  However, if there is no interaction between the two teams, further defining the request for information and sharing the resulting dialogue between prospect and salesperson, the success of your program could be diminished.  This is where integration with CRM and sales plays a crucial role.  Feedback that is recorded can be segmented into future communications, communications that “magically” answer a question posed or guide a prospect down the path they have defined.  When this is accomplished by a marketing automation system, it allows your marketing team to nurture larger quantities of leads, scoring them and then releasing only those deemed “sales-ready”.

Content

Once you have an integrated program, the focus should be on offering relevant and timely content.  There is a reason why companies are shifting more and more of their resources into content development; content is critical.  This is also a central concept in marketing to the Demand Generation.  Search engines like Google have made finding the answer to a question or accessing information about a specific topic, easier than ever. And because we now have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, competition for positioning content is evermore intense.   Want to “win the battle”?  Here are three easy steps that will get you started:

• Find out what your prospect is seeking (use landing pages, surveys, polls, etc.)
• Identify the “path” that has led to successful lead conversion in the past and duplicate it (use lead scoring)
• Create content that is insightful and useful to your prospect (come from their point-of-view)

The last point may be the most important. The old days of “boilerplate” and self-serving pages of your company’s history are just that, history!  People don’t want to buy your product; they want you to solve their problem.  And if you provide the content that speaks to them about your solution to their problem, you’ve opened up a dialogue that is more likely to end with a new client and new revenue.

I believe the timing of content delivery is as important as the content itself.  Take for example the concept of “real-time communication”.  As David Meerman Scott pointed out on a recent webinar, “it used to be that if you had a big budget, you could control your marketplace. I am now convinced that speed and agility are the decisive competitive advantages.”  By spending an equal or greater amount of time listening to the marketplace, companies are able to deliver messages and content relevant to current events, real-time inquiries or even in response to negative PR.  Social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, can provide tremendous insight into the psyche of your prospects and the marketplace, making them great door openers to opportunity.

Longevity / Evolution

We all know that successful marketing, the creation of demand and the evolution of relationships all take time. Ensure that this is taken into consideration when developing your program.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  It will take time to find the best path; it will take failure to find out what doesn’t work; it will take team work, starting with the executive suite on down through your marketers, your sales team and the CSRs, to evolve your program into something that generates ongoing revenue.  As the Demand Generation continues to evolve, so should your marketing efforts.  New channels of communication will open, content will become more interactive and prospects will become more educated.

The question is, will you be the one educating them?

About John Muehling:

John is an accomplished, 14-year marketing veteran who possesses a solid command of traditional and progressive marketing strategies and tactics. His strong background in sales, combined with his knowledge and passion for marketing has helped him master techniques for aligning marketing with sales. As a consummate CRM and data analytics expert, he is able to identify market and buying trends which lead to more successful targeting and higher conversion rates.

John also embraces the close relationship between marketing/sales and information technology and feels we are on the cusp of a great convergence between human intelligence and automation.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmuehling