AMA: Demandbase Head of Digital Marketing, Matt Hummel on Demand Generation Strategy

This is a great question - however, there's no one-single channel - maybe other than your website - that is critical towards the success of a demand gen strategy. Each campaign and audience is different - sometimes Facebook is a cash cow, sometimes it's a waste of money. Same with LinkedIn. Paid Search is generally effective, but can also be expensive depending on your budget and goals. At the end of the day, there are only so many levers to pull - however, the one that should be consistent in a successful campaign is good strategy (knowing your audience intimately), and having powerful and differentiated messaging supported by strong and valuable content.

First and foremost, should we do this again? Of course that requires you to setup the campaign correctly, ensuring you have outlined clear goals. Sometimes it's easy to see, i.e., did we get pipeline/bookings - while other times it's not quite as straight-forward. For example, if it was a campaign intended to drive awareness you have to go back and look at how you set up your original goals. Whatever you do, share the results with sales and also get their insights, as there is always a 'story within the story.'

I start by identifying the audiences that will drive revenue and then work with sales to understand where the greatest need / where Marketing can make the biggest impact. I'm a firm believer that there's no "one-size-fits-all" demand strategy, which means you may have a particular audience (e.g., prospects) that require more of a full-on support - multi-channel - approach from marketing, whereas for upsell it could be more sales-led with some messaging support from Marketing. Long story short - know your audiences, where the revenue is forecasted to come from, and where sales needs the most help. Remember, Marketing can do anything but can never do everything! So make sure you always put your time and money into where you can make the biggest impact!

It somewhat depends on the specific strategy, but in general there are two things to look at: 1. Inspect regularly: bear in mind, some things take time to materialize, so know when to look. But you can also speed that up by looking at both leading and lagging indicators. Are things working initially as expected - e.g., are you engaging the right target audience. Keeping an eye on things early and often will help you know if you're on the right track vs. waiting potentially too long before realizing your strategy didn't work as expected! 2. Get sales feedback: make sure you review performance and get feedback from sales; depending on the strategy, they may have talking to prospects in which you can get valuable feedback. So often marketing's metrics think things are working as WE want them to, but sales may be super frustrated because for some reason something is missing the mark or expectations weren't aligned. A classic example of this could be a lead gen program such as content syndication. Leads may be flowing through and sales thinks they are ready to begin prospecting - we know with CS leads that's rarely the case as they need further nurturing. So while that doesn't mean the strategy was a failure, if you didn't check in with sales you may not realize that they actually think it's been a total failure and waste of their time!

The key for agency success is establishing goals, no different than you would if you used internal resources. I recommend thinking in terms of both leading and lagging indicators - for example, if paid media is involved set targets for things like CPL or conversion rate, but then don't stop there. I'd recommend connecting all of your programs into your CRM (e.g., SFDC) to make sure you can track full impact to pipeline and revenue. In a world where every marketing dollar matters, it's critical your agency can deliver on your goals. If they don't know your goals that's really tough. Any good agency should absolutely want to know your goals and align with you. I've had success in doing this, but it also comes down to not "setting and forgetting." Agencies require a strong partnership - they need to hear feedback and also be held accountable. No demand program is perfect - so the key is making sure to continually be inspecting then optimizing as you go.