Take a cold, hard look at your demand creation materials

Sometimes the best thing we can do to improve our marketing efforts is to gain fresh perspective. One exercise that I often do with clients is to walk through their library of campaigns as if we are prospects. We do our best to put aside everything we know about the campaigns from a marketing management perspective, and look at each lead generation piece with new eyes—eyes of the potential customer.

I know what you’re thinking. Look at our campaigns? As if you’re not doing that enough? Even if you’re mired in demand creation campaigns all day long, sometimes it takes the simple act of spreading everything out on your conference table, and pretending to be your prospect.

Select one prospect segment (by vertical, perhaps) or one solution, gather up everything you’ve worked on in the last 2-3 quarters, and take a good look at what you’re sending out into the marketing universe. With your customer and prospect hats on, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your content company and feature-centric or does it focus on customer needs and challenges?
2. Do you provide a wide variety of offers so that you can test internally what offers engage prospects?
3. Can you use your content to segment your prospects’ level of interest and start their journey towards a lead nurture program that is relevant to their needs?
4. How does your site perform as a demand generation tool? Are you able to measure its’ impact?
5. Are there logical, relevant, and respectful entry points embedded in your campaigns for prospects to provide further information about themselves in exchange for content deep-dives or offers (such as white papers)?
6. Are you able to track users’ behavior and measure it in a meaningful way to indicate their propensity to purchase and qualify a handoff to sales?

Your answers to these questions will most likely highlight for you what areas of demand creation output need improvement from a content, metric, or information collection standpoint.

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If you’d like a helping hand in performing this assessment, or if your areas for improvement become painfully clear, feel free to give us a ring. Transforming one-off demand creation tactics into thematic, multi-touch campaigns that double as powerful lead generation tools, is just one of the many marketing tricks we have up our sleeves.