How do you determine which types of campaigns to include in a Demand Generation strategy?

Typically, most campaigns can fall into one of the two buckets: awareness or performance. We need to create campaigns that have a balance of brand and performance as we can’t have brand work that doesn’t perform and performance work that doesn’t elevate your brand. Your campaign should have brand expertise as well as showcasing your product offerings in solving your customer’s challenges.

•  Brand campaigns are meant to create demand through inspirational content
•  Performance campaigns are meant to capture that demand by converting the audience

The type of campaign prioritized depends on your business KPIs and brand saturation. If your brand/product has fairly low awareness, it is important to build a full funnel approach balancing both types of campaigns to drive awareness, consideration and conversion across your marketing funnel.

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?

This is a deceptively difficult question to answer. Simply speaking, assuming you have the data to know the answers to the following, I would use the following factors to determine the mix of channels/tactics to include in a campaign strategy:

1. ROI - what is the return on the investment of a specific channel. In my specific case I look at bookings ROI. If you have a more direct conversion funnel it would mean some other form of a purchase ROI. There is a time component to ROI as well as marketing typically doesn't immediately return on the spend. You should need an agreed upon ROI timeframe to set appropriate expectations as part of this calculation.

2. Scale - does the specific channel or tactic reach the right amount of people, teams, or organizations. If you rely on high volume/low ASP sales you would want a channel with very large reach. Conversely if your sales are low volume/high ASP, high touch 1 to 1 or 1 to few tactics would be effective. My mix usually includes both.

3. Reach - highly related to scale, does the channel and tactic reach the right people and teams within an organization. Understanding personas and their buying decision behaviors is key to understanding which channels and tactics will reach the right audience.

Ultimately, having ROI data by specific channel and tactic is key. Absent that data using experiments across channels and tactics to test scale and reach and tracking the ROI of the experiment would be the best way to understand what your mix should look like for your demand generation strategy.

Determining what types of campaigns/tactics to include in your strategy starts with you understanding every milestone metric in your funnel. What is your acquisition cost? How much does it take to bring a lead in? How much does it take to get a sign up- everything you do need to map back to how much you spend? Having clear answers to these questions will allow you to optimize and get more efficient overtime. 

Let's dive into some examples.

For example, You might find that facebook drives you a ton of traffic and newsletter sign-ups but it doesn’t help you drive trials. Based on your data, Trials are your highest converting offer. So what do you do with Facebook? Do you cut your spend? No, you set the strategy based on what it’s designed to do. If it’s effective in driving contacts for your email database, you judge the effectiveness of that channel by that metric. Here’s how you do the math. You take your CAC, customer acquisition cost and back into all the various metrics upstream and this backwards math can help you figure out what the maximum dollar amount you can spend to acquire each email subscriber.

So you’ve got people in your database, while it’s great to get sign-ups if your traffic doesn’t convert, it hurts your bottom line.

So you have to look at activation and your 1st time purchase metrics. 

If you are a B2B company, you need to know whether or not the deals you are driving from your marketing programs ultimately make it to closing or if you have a more e-commerce like product, you might be measuring app usage and digital transactions. 

Let me give you an example, you might find out that specific non-branded search terms might cost you a fortune because there isn’t a lot of volume. However, if you have the right reporting structure in place, you might find this has the highest returns because you get revenue from it. The point is, look beyond that form complete.

Now the last piece here is Retention.

Lastly, at a SaaS company or any company in fact, if you can’t keep your customer’s happy, you fail. LTV is something I’ve been obsessed about at every role i’ve taken because I think that’s a metric that we should all strive to hit. It tells the full story.

For example, just because you acquisition cost is high to start, don't cut a program right away. You need to factor in assumptions for LTV. You will have segmentations of customer that are going to be with you for a few years, and/or grow into using more products/features - that value of the customer dramatically increases and the initial cost per acquisition can sometimes be misleading. 

You should determine which types of campaigns to include in a demand generation strategy based on the objectives you are trying to achieve. Think through where your organization currently is in the market. Do you have product market fit? Do you have a household name?

You have several different types of tools in your toolbox. I typically see this in three separate groupings:

• What mix of campaigns do you need to make potential customers aware of the value you offer?
• What mix of campaigns do you need to capture existing demand for the problems you help solve?
• What mix of campaigns do you need to keep delivering value to customers so that they refer other users?

I recommend thinking even further along the path of what product developments are on the horizon that will help support your demand gen strategy? At the end of the day, all of the campaigns should tell the story of how you can help the customer and deliver value.

Before you start any Demand Generation strategy, step back and ask, what are the company goals? Have they changed? Review your UVP and ICP. Do these still ring true? It's also important to review/audit what has worked well in the past and what has not. Tactics and inform strategy. This can involve conducting internal (ie sales, customer success, and product team) and customer audits and running clearly defined experiments. Analyze results, their strengths and limitations and formulate your demand generation strategy that is grounded by reality.