AMA: Gong Performance Marketing Lead, Bhavisha Oza on Demand Generation Strategy

A demand gen strategy should be a mix of campaigns tied to funnel stages. Content must be created to align with each of these stages 1. Brand Awareness 2. Top of Funnel campaigns 3. Middle of Funnel campaigns 4. Bottom of Funnel campaigns Also see the answer to How do awareness stages influence your demand generation strategies?

Below are 9 best practices for scoring leads 1. Build your scoring model with demographic and behavioral scoring. 2. Collaborate with your Product Marketing team to define the ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona. These will help with demographic scoring attributes such as company size (# of employees), revenue, vertical/Industry, job title, job level. Use data enrichment tools such as Clearbit, Zoominfo etc to populate this info wherever possible 3. Collaborate with your Campaigns team to define behavioral scores for triggers such as downloaded content, registered/attended webinar, visited website, multiple high-value pages visited in the same session (product page, pricing page), opened/clicked an email, requested a demo/pricing. Be sure to give conversions from students or job seekers (careers page visit) negative scores 4. Build the lead scoring matrix. This is typically a table with 16 cells. Low to high Behavior 0 - 100 points. Grade these as 1,2,3,4. Low to high ICP score 0 - 100 points. Grade these as A,B,C,D. Leads would then be graded into 16 buckets ranging from A1 (High ICP score and high behavior score) to D4 (low ICP. low behavior) 5. Collaborate with SDR/Sales teams to define the MQL threshold. You don't want to send premature leads over to SDRs/Sales. When you have alignment document it and train the SDR/Sales team on the model 6. Plan for ReMQL. Sales will want to send some leads back to marketing when MQLs aren't ready to buy 7. Test the lead scoring model before implementing 8. Track MQL to SQL conversion rates. Also, ask the SDR/Sales team for feedback. 9. Refine and optimize the model every 6 months

Below is how I would define the demand gen strategy, create content and plan campaign tactics aligned to the 5 stages of awareness UNAWARE: Demand gen strategy: Build awareness Content strategy: create blogs, media articles, podcasts to drive awareness Campaign tactics: Promote via organic social, YouTube, Spotify/Apple podcast PROBLEM AWARE: Demand gen strategy: Drive top-of-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them solve the problem with How to guides, best practice playbooks, cheat sheets, maturity assessment (online tool) Campaign tactics: Paid social, paid search, thought leadership webinars, content syndication, industry webinars/events SOLUTION AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive engagement Content Strategy: Help them understand how your product can help solve their problem with product tours, video demos, checklists, tips and tricks, Campaign tactics:: Paid social, paid search, demo webinars, email marketing PRODUCT AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive demos, free trials, bottom-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them understand how your product is uniquely qualified to solve their problem with an ROI Calculator, Success stories, Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave, Forrester TEI Campaign tactics: Events, executive roundtables, paid search MOST AWARE Demand gen strategy: Give them incentives to buy

Here are three things I would recommend at the end of a campaign: 1. Compare performance to goals 2. Update your campaign strategy slides/doc with results, highlights and lessons learned 3. Bring the team together for a campaign retrospective meeting. Discuss what worked well and what can be done better

There are three scenarios I can think of here: 1. New product launch 2. Thought leadership campaigns 3. Campaigns with the theme of Business / Technology / Industry Trends In all of the above scenarios, it is important to target both new business and existing customers for your campaign. In case of a new product launch, you would execute a full-funnel integrated campaign with content such as analyst reports (ToFu), best practice webinar (MoFu), video demos (BoFu) and promote it across digital channels to drive new business pipeline and create upsell opportunities. Thought leadership campaigns and campaigns such as “2023 Trends” have a mass appeal. Buyers always want to stay on top of their game and topics such as these are sought after by new business prospects and customers alike.