6 Demand Generation Mistakes to Avoid to Ensure Flawless Campaign Execution
With the advent of marketing automation platforms, business owners and marketers started scaling their marketing campaigns by integrating multiple touchpoints across the customers’ journey. Automation platforms can enable you to improve your team’s capability of engaging prospects and customers significantly.
Hence, the use of marketing automation can simultaneously help you with multiple marketing campaigns, which was impossible before migrating to an automation system.
6 Demand Generation Mistakes to Avoid
Though most companies prepare their marketing teams for automation technology, the marketing process can be flawed, with multiple obstacles. One of the most common drawbacks includes demand generation mistakes that most marketers commit. Here we will highlight the most common demand generation mistakes and how to avoid them.
1) Existing Demand Generation Bias
Irrespective of their years of experience in demand generation, most marketers cannot avoid the existing bias that arises from the long trails of failures and successes. You may only use marketing techniques based on positive results your campaigns have generated. But, it is vital to identify both negative and positive biases developed from your demand generation tactics.
For example, do you have a positive bias towards paid campaigns, that they drive demand for your business? Similarly, do you have negative thoughts about the inability of social media optimization and marketing activities to generate demand?
One way to get rid of such demand generation bias is to analyze previous and ongoing campaign data to evaluate your campaign decisions. Look for significant funnel metrics such as cost per acquisition, cost per impressions, cost per click, etc. Also, consider other metrics tracked throughout the funnel, such as opportunities created, pipeline created, conversions, ROI generation, etc.
At the same time, while analyzing negative bias, you need to analyze bottom-of-the-funnel parameters such as net new opportunities resulting from those campaigns. Then, compare the cost of that marketing campaign toward which you had a negative bias in creating opportunities against other marketing programs. Thus, you can calculate and find out if that negatively biased campaign has been a cost-effective source of new opportunities.
2) Starting Demand Generation Without Creating a Content Repository
This is another common demand generation mistake most marketers commit when beginning the demand generation process. Most of them start with data and technology, with little or no focus on the content requirement. Such issues affect businesses that entirely operate based on their internal teams that are already grappling with various content requirements from different directions.
To overcome these challenges, you can start with an existing repertoire of content. Repackage and reuse existing content to offer your subscribers in the form of gated and downloadable content pieces such as infographics, whiteboard solution videos, ebooks, whitepapers, and case studies.
You can repackage your blogs on similar topics into ebooks, whitepapers, infographics. You can also transform old webinar videos into solution guide videos that your prospects and customers can keep in handy to solve their problems and trust your business to address their challenges and meet their product requirements.
Analyze the level of resources and budget required in both creating new content repositories and repurposing existing content sources to analyze the impact on your demand generation timelines and effectiveness.
3) Inaccurate or Lack of Attribution Analysis
Proper attribution analysis is crucial in accurately measuring the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns. Accurate attribution analysis will guide you to avoid wrong assumptions and determine effectiveness in generating opportunities for demand generation efforts.
In addition to top-of-the-funnel metrics including cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), you also need to monitor all engagement data from all marketing campaigns, including middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel data.
Make sure you consider first-touch and multi-touch attribution analysis to get a comprehensive view of how your demand generation campaigns are performing. By including the costs of bottom-of-the-funnel to top-of-the-funnel, you will be able to optimize your marketing campaigns and its impact on your business more accurately.
First-touch points indicate the marketing channels and campaigns work most effectively to attract the right types of audience to the sales funnel. In contrast, the multi-touchpoint attribution shows the channels and programs are effective in driving the audiences through the funnel.
4) Adding Untested Templates in the Demand Generation Campaigns
Running demand generation campaigns without testing digital assets can cause troubles for marketers. Not all HTML email templates and landing page templates you receive from the creative team will look and function flawlessly as intended. That’s why you need to cultivate consistent testing and audit practices to determine the efficacy of templates.
You can keep multiple templates ready by designing and testing to ensure they will work correctly across various campaigns to save time spent in designing and testing, while you can ensure flawless rendering.
5) Lack of Clear Call to Action.
Many ad campaigns use the word “solutions” instead of “services” without a clear call-to-action phrase to guide user actions. Therefore, people may not click the link even though they watched that ad. Include useful and easy-to-follow content for download in your ad to encourage people to sign up for your brand.
They may not pick up their phone and call you, but they will love to take up the offer of free downloads of whitepapers, articles, ebooks, and infographics. They will watch a solution video or attend a webinar. From there on, you can start nurturing them based on their interests, expectations, and needs. Thus, a clear-cut call-to-action can guide them to download your content and encourage them to express their interest in products or services.
6) No Segmentation of Customer Database
Many marketers are, even now, not segmenting their customers, resulting in sending generic emails that fail to connect with your subscribers. Lack of segmentation leads to a lack of personalization and starts repelling your audiences.
Not just in email messaging, segmentation plays a considerable role in the selection of content offers, marketing channels, frequency of campaigns, and many others. The best way to perform accurate lead segmentation is considering these following insights –
- Demographic data refers to personal insights such as age, income, location, address, gender, departments, and job title.
- Behavioral data includes trackable behavioral insights such as emails opened, registration for webinars, attendance in webinars, content downloads, and website visits.
- Firmographic data reveals insights related to the contacts’ company details, such as annual revenue and team size.
Based on segmentation data, you can decide the type of content, email message, and the right people to target with that message and enhance the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns.
Conclusion
According to market research by BPM Forum, more than 80% of leads are wasted with the lack of follow-up, or mishandled and dropped. Have you prepared your team for timely and effective nurturing?
If you need an expert team instead of spending heftily on hiring, onboarding, and training, get professional assistance in lead generation and nurturing services with our certified and experienced experts.
While you are here, check out our services or send us a “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com or chat to us about ROI-driven demand generation techniques via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.