AMA: Addigy Director | Head of Marketing, Laura Lewis on Establishing a Demand Generation Function

This is the million dollar question... literally! I've found that there are two types of Demand Generation professionals, and finding one who has both skills is more difficult: 1. Those who know how to spend money 2. Those who can operate without any money When you're working for an early stage start-up, or when you have limited budget, you have to get scrappy and spend time rather than money. What do I mean by that? * Find communities that your buyers participate in. Get really active on these communities by sharing resources, best practices, and answering questions. Get your product or technical team involved too. * Go to events without a booth. Send a sales rep, or go yourself, and walk the floor. Start conversations with others nearby. Eyeball badges to find a potential prospect to engage. Print out flyers and hand them out as you walk around. * Utilize event apps and AI. Many events don't provide full event attendee lists, but everyone is in the event app to be messaged. Pull the names out of the app, run them through AI to fill in missing info, and add them to your database to be emailed and engaged. * Submit for awards and free speaking opportunities. There are many non-paid opportunities out there that can help to build your visibility as an organization. Find those events calling for speakers, those industry podcasts, those awards in your space, and the media outlets that cover news in your industry. Pitch them on a new topic and get some coverage. Of course, these activities all support building your inbound leads and overall awareness. These take time and won't be a hot ticket item today, but after continued effort will show results.

A program manager is my number 1 hire on a Demand Generation team. This person: * Monitors the funnel, leads coming in, and their conversion to pipeline * Project manages all aspects of a campaign * Launches the campaign messaging on the necessary channels * Monitors success and reports back on progress Without a program manager, there is a strategy gap on your campaigns. You might be launching ads, but what is the bigger picture they tie to? Or you might be sending emails, but how do those emails tie to goals?

Selecting campaign types and their associated channels will depend first on your goals and what you want to achieve. The best campaigns use a mix of channels. Here are a few examples. Campaign #1: Drive immediate pipeline in a new market sector * Channels: Direct Mail, Marketing Email, Sales Email/Call, Landing Page * Process: Send a marketing email alerting people that they have a package coming. Send a package with a fun gift (office supplies, cookies, a caricature of them based on their LinkedIn photo) and a letter that includes some messaging and a QR code to a landing page to book a sales meeting. Once the package arrives, have Sales send a follow-up email and call them. * Metrics: Package arrivals, form submissions, sales meetings booked, pipeline, closed won. Campaign #2: Competitive takeout * Channels: Search and Display Ads, Paid Social, Landing Page, Marketing Email * Process: Target competitor name keywords for search engine ads. Run display ads to accounts that show intent on the competitor name. Pull a list of lost opportunities to that competitor and accounts using that competitor from a database tool like ZoomInfo, and include those in ad targeting on social media sites. Have the ads send to a landing page with messaging against that competitor and a form. Send a short email nurture to known contacts who are targeted by the campaign. * Metrics: Ad impressions, ad clicks, landing page views, form submissions, sales meetings booked, pipeline, closed won. Campaign #3: Showcase company leadership on a new topic * Channels: Blog, Whitepaper, Webinar, Landing Page, Marketing Email, Sales Email/Call, Organic Social * Process: Plan a webinar on this new topic. Send marketing emails to invite prospects to attend the webinar. Prospects register on a webinar landing page. Repurpose the webinar content into a whitepaper and several blog posts. After the webinar, send a follow-up email with the whitepaper, and a landing page to contact sales. Use short video snippets from the webinar on social media and drive clickers to your blog posts and whitepaper. Have sales email and call everyone to attended the webinar. * Metrics: Email clicks, landing page conversion, webinar registrants, webinar attendees, whitepaper downloads, SEO keyword ranking movement, sales meetings booked, pipeline, closed won.

As soon as you have product-market fit determined. My recommended first three marketing hires, in order, are: 1. Product Marketing: to help with that product-market fit assessment. This must come first. Spending money on demand generation campaigns when there is no assurance of revenue afterwards is a recipe for disaster. 2. Demand Generation: to help build pipeline and close revenue. This is a good hire when it is time to pour gasoline on your fire and start scaling. 3. Marketing Operations: to build marketing infrastructure and report on what is working and not. A strong reporting capability early on will set you up for continual success and reduce data challenges farther down the road.

Smaller companies have less budget, and therefore marketers must be scrappier. They need to find ways to build awareness for the company overall, in parallel with supporting short-term revenue targets. Larger companies have more budget, and marketers can focus more on channel optimization to drive leads in support of short-term revenue targets. The larger reach of campaigns, thanks to their budget, helps to keep an awareness drumbeat in the market.

There are three items I would recommend evaluating when joining any small but mighty demand generation team: 1. Reporting & Infrastructure - Identify how leads are flowing from the website and offline programs through to the sales team. Many times there are issues in this process - incorrect scoring, gaps when syncing from marketing automation to CRM, undefined sales follow-up processes, missing tracking on conversion to opportunity. Making sure that you fully understand how this all works is critical and improving pieces here can have an immediate uplift on pipeline. 2. Best Practices - If the team is newer to Demand Generation, help to implement templates, processes, and guidelines for how everyone should be operating. Literally build a process document, a marketing calendar, and a results template. Overview these on team calls and have others speak to their own work in these formats. 3. Optimization - Pick one channel at a time: ads, or emails, or social, or the website. Dig in and find areas to improve these. Perhaps your ads are missing keywords, or your email template is outdated. Work on one channel at a time to improve results.