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 ...Read More

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 wi ...Read More

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 y ...Read More

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 - ...Read More

It somewhat depends on the specific strategy, but in general there are two things to look at: 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 ...Read More