I love demand generation. It's the perfect blend of quantitative and qualitative output. Not only do demand generation teams need to know how to logistically put together a campaign, but they need to make sure the content they're sending out into their markets is compelling, or else the results will be terrible. The two most important considerations when building or evaluating your demand generation strategy: team (responsibilities) and audience research. Without both of the foundational pieces in place and functioning well, the message and the channels and the mediums won’t make a difference. The result will still be terrible. if you can figure these two variables out, then the rest is just a matter of fine tuning.

Team

Demand generation campaign success only comes when a compelling campaign is executed perfectly. In well-organized teams, you will have a “triangle team" consisting of a content creator, a campaign executor, and someone responsible for looking at the results and providing the analysis to other team members. What I've seen is that often demand generation teams, if they aren't built well, have creative content, or it’s executed perfectly, or they analyze poorly designed and executed campaigns to death. The “triangle team” keeps things balanced.

One of the ways to make sure you are headed down the right path with your demand gen efforts is to hire correctly, making sure each team member compliments the other. A perfect executor and analyzer should work well with a person who can come up with creative, compelling content.  

Audience Research

The second way to insure success in demand generation is to make sure you've done your research. As you know, I am a big fan of collecting data, and making sure to analyze it correctly. The great thing about data is that is can guide your compelling content and also the execution of the content. Once you have the right team, and you are making decisions based on data, you really can only continue to learn and get better with every test. 

For example, if you know that your target audience is young professional millennials who work in marketing, there are certain podcasts, associations, LinkedIn groups that those folks pay attention to. You could have sourced that data from persona research or from the previous test campaigns. With that insight, you are able to communicate using a specific tone and message that’s appealing to your audience. You can also stop wasting your budget on channels that your audience won’t use.bKnowing who, and where your target audience resides makes communicating with your creative team members that much easier, it also takes the much of the guess work out of the execution part of lead generation programs.

So, with the right team, and a clear understanding of your audience, lead generation is just a matter of testing and tweaking.