Blog Post

Demand Generation

7 Misconceptions about Demand Generation

Demand generation is a full-funnel approach that’s designed to provide information at the moment of need.

Demand gen is critical to success today in B2B marketing. It’s a strategy that builds brand awareness and demand for your products and services. Today, demand generation uses multiple channels and approaches with decentralized information used across platforms.

Despite the power and efficacy of demand generation, there are many persistent misconceptions. Here’s a look at 7 myths about demand generation and why they’re inaccurate.

Misconception #1: Demand Generation and Lead Generation Are the Same Things

People incorrectly believe lead generation and demand generation are one in the same. However, they are very different in scope and practice.

Lead generation is a much more basic sales strategy that’s focused on a singular goal: obtaining more leads. It’s a basic approach that’s designed to collect contact information from customers who might be interested in your product or service.

Lead generation takes a blanket approach to market to the masses. One example: using blogs or webinars to entice readers to leave contact information on a web form.

This is not to diminish lead generation. There are effective ways to garner more leads. Many businesses, impatient with the time needed to deploy demand generation, turn to lead generation instead.

Demand generation is a more comprehensive approach to sales and marketing. With demand gen, you will attract, convert and keep customers.

Demand generation is about nurturing relationships at each stage, as opposed to lead generation, which is more transactional. Instead of passing leads on to a sales team for follow-up, demand gen looks to meet prospects and customers where they are.

With demand generation, you identify what a customers’ needs are and provide solutions, whether it’s content, free tools, or product guides. These solutions are dependent on where a customer is in their journey. They can be personalized using data gleaned from the customer relationship.

Misconception #2: Demand Gen Is a Top-of-the-Funnel Activity

It’s a common misconception that demand generation focuses exclusively on the top of the funnel. Generating demand, however, is not just about acquisition. It’s about engaging and re-engaging customers.

Demand generation takes the long view. It’s about obtaining new prospects and converting those prospects. It’s also about reinforcing your brand and continuing to provide value throughout the lifetime of a customer’s relationship.

Misconception #3: You Can Control the Buyer Journey

Demand generation marketing is not about controlling the buyer. In fact, today, the buyer has more control over the customer journey than ever before.

Why? First, the expectations are different. Customers want relationships with the brands they use. They expect brands to know the extent of the engagements, their preferences, and their needs.

In addition, buyers today have lots of information available, including independent product reviews, message boards, and social media channels. These forums give buyers far more insights into your products and services and the ability to do their own research.

With buyers having information and freedom, demand generation is the right choice. You cannot control the buyer but you can be prepared to meet them where they are.

Demand marketing focuses on having high-value information available at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Creating great content and using your CRM to manage buyer engagements results in better outcomes for buyers and your brand.

Misconception #4: Demand Generation Is a Singular Approach

Demand generation is not a singular strategy to use for your marketing. Instead, it’s the collection of multiple marketing initiatives, across multiple channels.

These activities are coordinated, integrated, and driven by shared data. They also are evolutionary and iterative. If one approach is not working, such as search engine display ads, demand gen allows for rapid pivots. You can shift out of one strategy and try another.

The key is to develop a strategy that engages prospects and customers across channels. Social media, web, SEO, email, video, and other channels all factor into engaging your target audience.

The reason for this approach is evident. Your buyers do not operate on one channel only. Your marketing should not, either.

Misconception #5: There Are No Targets in Demand Generation

With its multi-channel approach, demand generation sometimes suffers from an assumption that targets are not necessary.

The opposite is true. You should use targets for each challenge used. Targeting likely buyers on the right channel at the time of need is the smart move. It leads to higher levels of engagement and higher conversion rates.

Setting these targets requires some work. You need to know who your ideal customers are. You need to understand when they will be looking for solutions and where.

Misconception #6: Content Format Is Irrelevant

Not true: Walls of copy rich in information and stuffed with keywords is the way to go with content.

Remember, the buyer is in control of the relationship. And your brand will not be the only one creating content.

You need to cut through the clutter and noise. That means creating content in the format that your customers want. Increasingly, customers are interested in content in different formats – infographics, videos, and podcasts.

The good news is that often you can repurpose content. A Q&A video with a product manager can be converted into a blog post. A new product announcement can be used to create a graphic that explains key features and enhancements.

Misconception #7: You Need Channel Specialists to be Successful at Demand Generation

Channel specialists are certainly valuable. They know how to effectively manage one channel and bring expertise and experience to your business,

However, they are just that – a specialist who knows one channel, albeit well.

Demand gen requires the use of multiple experts who understand the big picture. You need a team that can work together on strategy messaging, execution, and measurement.

Matter Made helps B2B SaaS businesses grow. Our demand generation, go-to-market, growth marketing, and paid media services help brands attract more customers and convert more sales.

To learn more about how Matter Made can optimize your demand generation strategy, contact us today.

Blog Post

RevOps

Demand Generation

How to Automate Your Processes With RevOps 

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a framework that helps SaaS brands to streamline growth marketing, sales, and customer success through data. This approach facilitates revenue growth by improving the customer experience.

The challenge for companies is that they are lost on where to start, as RevOps is a new concept. For instance, you don’t know what kind of customer data you need to collect in a typical customer lifecycle.

Honestly, it is challenging, considering the complexity of optimizing revenue generation.

But don’t worry. A lot of those internal processes consist of repetitive tasks, and with the help of the right automation tools, you exceed your revenue goals.

Below, we have explained how you can collect relevant data, analyze it to integrate it with your process, and use it to improve the revenue of your SaaS brand.

RevOps Automation Benefits

Internal processes and business functions improve by leveraging automation in revenue operations in the following ways:

  1. Improve revenue. Automation lets you do more with fewer resources. For instance, with marketing automation, you can simultaneously nurture many leads to motivate them to take the next step in the customer journey.

  1. Reduce reliance on human labor. This will decrease or eliminate bottlenecks or dependencies within your team. For example, sales teams won’t be waiting for approval to implement a new strategy for increased revenue generation. 

  1. Embrace marketing innovations. RevOps teams can implement new operations processes quickly. For example, if the data shows that email automation is necessary, transitioning to it will be simple.

How To Embrace RevOps

Now let’s take a look at how marketing, sales, and customer success teams can use automation solutions to adopt RevOps.

Use it in Email Marketing

You can implement it in two ways:

  1. Automated emails. The right RevOps strategy will automate multiple processes by automating customer interactions. For instance, sending follow-up emails can be tedious if you are doing it manually.

  1. Targeted emails. Send the right message to the right audience. For instance, it doesn’t make sense for you to send the features of using Product A if a lead has signed up from a landing page featuring Product B.

It will help to use email automation platforms like HubSpot.

Source: HubSpot

Smarten Your Sales Calls

Sales reps are humans in the loop who carry out a crucial part of the sales process: making direct contact with the prospect by calling them.

This step is important as it helps you establish rapport with your potential customer and make the sales pipeline efficient. However, it can be challenging due to factors like the volume of calls or managing the details of each lead you are calling.

RevOps software like WhatConverts can help sales teams reach their leads on time with features like automated data entry and profile updates.

Source: WhatConverts

Take Up Task Tracking

Teams that follow agile methodologies must constantly adapt to changing conditions. It becomes even more challenging when there are multiple departments involved during processes like project management.

RevOps automation tools such as Zapier and Process Street help cross-functional teams complete their tasks within deadlines.

Source: Zapier

Automate Lead Scoring

One of the most tedious tasks that operations teams have is estimating the likelihood of a lead converting. If this step is not carried out properly, the sales team will not only spend a lot of resources but also will have a hard time closing deals.

As data comes from multiple sources, tools like Zoho CRM and Freshsales use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to forward the hot leads to sales.

Source: Zoho CRM

Use it in Customer Health Scoring

Customer health scoring is a technique to gauge and improve customer satisfaction so that they keep returning for more.

The challenge here is that this process will add more powerful tools to your tech stack that you need to spend time and labor on. Fortunately, ops teams can rely on process automation to make this step easier.

Need Help With RevOps? Try Matter Made

RevOps automation helps brands save resources such as time and labor by automating certain tasks through data. Operation teams can embrace it in their sales, marketing, and customer success process in the following ways:

  1. Nurture leads and market better to your existing customers by automating email marketing with the help of CRM tools.
  2. Call your leads with the relevant details at the right time to get to the deal stage faster through calling tools.
  3. Ensure all the team members are aware of tracking and capable of finishing their tasks through AI-powered task management tools.
  4. Collect information from various data sources so that you forward the qualified leads to sales.
  5. Track how happy your customers are, as customer retention is crucial for growing revenue.

To get the full benefits of RevOps for your company, you need an experienced team that can identify areas of improvement and build data-backed automated processes that drive efficiency. 

That’s where we come in.

Matter Made has unlocked the full potential of many brands through RevOps automation. Be it streamlining marketing and sales ops, building PLG sales funnels, managing multiple promotional campaigns, or building end-to-end pipelines — we have done it all.

Interested? Let’s talk.

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