Demand generation is becoming increasingly complex, particularly for companies in the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) spaces. Buying committees are evolving and expanding. We’re facing economic uncertainties. Sales cycles are longer. Generative AI is becoming more prevalent in sales.
Long story short: Running more campaigns simply won’t work.
As marketers and strategic communicators, our challenge is to create demand gen plans that help capture buyers’ attention and generate demand. In this blog, I outline five key questions to help you build and focus your plans.
What are our strategic goals?
It’s critical to anchor your marketing and communications strategy to your company’s overarching goals and specific business outcomes. These goals should be measurable. You can use the S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals framework to help structure these. For example, if your company wants to increase the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) in your pipeline, a S.M.A.R.T. goal could look something like this: “We will increase MQLs by 25% compared to Q4 2025 by March 31.” This goal statement can be further strengthened by adding more specificity around the audiences that you’ll target and the channels you’ll use to reach them. (More on both of these below.)
Every campaign you run should tie back to these strategic goals and business outcomes. With the understanding that these goals may shift to maintain alignment with business objectives throughout the year, it’s important to clearly articulate how a specific campaign is working to help your company achieve its goals.
Who Are We Trying to Reach?
As mentioned earlier, buying committees are growing larger and more complex. Forrester Research highlighted in its “What It Means” podcast that younger generations – millennials and Gen Z – are engaging more in the B2B tech buying process. In the federal space, agency downsizing and staff reductions mean that sales teams must establish and build relationships with new contacts.
Every company has (or should have) target audiences and/or Ideal Customer Personas (ICPs). These are the people that your sales and marketing activities are focused upon, including the decision makers, decision influencers, advocates, end users and gatekeepers. Companies can use audience data from their CRM, social media metrics or intent signals to keep ICPs current and actionable. The sales team can further inform these ICPs based on their engagements with prospects.
Your marketing and communications tactics may be focused on a specific person or multiple personas. Planning your content and outreach around each of these personas enables you to obtain consensus across the entire organization – with the aim to proactively address every potential objection or concern that may arise and ultimately speed up the sales cycle.
What messages are we sharing?
Equally important to the personas that you’re targeting are the messages that you’re sharing with them. Evaluate your current messaging: Is it resonating with prospects? Where is it falling short? Are there industry-specific or new technological considerations (e.g., new executive orders, industry mandates, etc.) that you need to proactively address? Evolve your messaging to align with the current challenges that your prospects are facing today, and how you’ve helped people like them solve problems.
My colleague Joyson Cherian succinctly summed it up well in a recent blog. While his comments are primarily geared towards a public sector-focused audience, I think it resonates well with B2B focused communicators as well: “The story you tell and the messaging you create shouldn’t be a perfect destination. It should be a living journey that evolves with you as your company grows and matures, as new technologies come to the market and as your customer demands change.”
What should we repeat, revamp or try out?
Over time, you’ll likely find that certain programs resonate really well with your target audiences. A paid media investment resulted in a strong list of new federal contacts. A social media influencer campaign went viral. The communications team landed a thought leadership piece in a top tier publication. Review these successes and determine if you can scale or emulate them to reach your ICP in the year ahead.
Similarly, review the campaigns that underperformed and evaluate why they didn’t meet expectations. You may decide to revise and run a campaign to see if it performs better, or you may determine it’s a better use of resources to shift away from those programs for the time being.
Finally, leave room to experiment. You shouldn’t bank your entire demand gen strategy on untested and unproven programs, but you should leave room for creativity. Can you ethically use AI to enhance your campaign effectiveness? What about trying a new platform? Look for inspiration within and outside of the B2B or B2G market that could help you reach your target audiences in a new way, and build test programs to evaluate their effectiveness. (Don’t forget to set S.M.A.R.T. goals!)
How do we measure success?
It’s important to ensure you know what success looks like within your specific organization. Key stakeholders across the organization are almost guaranteed to differ on their definitions of success, depending on their specific roles. However, it’s critical to set specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to show how your marketing and strategic communications campaigns are helping the company achieve its business objectives and strategic goals.
Additional important questions
There are always more, equally important questions to ask and answer, such as budget and resource investments, sales and marketing alignment, and more. But these questions can set you on a solid path to building your demand generation plans, as well as evaluating and refining them throughout the year.