Hey ,

Demand generation is one of the hottest buzzwords on LinkedIn...with precious little practical advice shared here and there.

But let’s get this straight, dear . Demand gen is different from running ads to ungated content, posting on LinkedIn, or podcasting.

Although these activities are important to your demand generation mix, they are not the full-funnel demand strategy. Here’s a step-by-step guide you can follow instead. 

Step 1: Researching how your customers are searching, learning, and buying. Very important point. 

Step 2: Plugging the leaks before pouring more water into a leaking bucket:

• Reducing friction points (long forms, missing information, unnecessary handoffs)
• Implementing one process for proactive demand capture (retargeting of engaged accounts, intent data, etc.)

Step 3: Defining the content and activities to consistently create awareness and demand, including the ones mentioned above, co-marketing, guest posting, events, etc.

Step 4: Getting the buy-in from the key people in marketing, sales, and the executive team.

Step 5: Prioritizing the content and campaigns, and mapping out the resources.

Step 6: Learn how to walk before running. Launch pilot campaigns with a small, highly-motivated team, focused on one channel, starting with one content format, paying attention to early signals.

Step 7: Operationalizing before scaling. After your campaign gets traction, document the process and onboard or hire a team member to maintain the campaign.

Step 8: Over-communicating. Reporting with a mix of self-reported, digital attribution, and anecdotal and qualitative feedback (e.g. via sales conversations), to show the impact of marketing on pipeline and revenue.

Step 9: Gradually launching and documenting new demand generation and demand capturing campaigns. No need to get too excited and launch 20+ programs. In reality, 6-8 programs and 2-3 channels where you excel will be more than enough to grow your brand presence, generate demand, and marketing-sourced revenue.

Step 10: Expanding demand generation from the top of the funnel to full-funnel marketing, helping to accelerate the pipeline with nurturing and buyer enablement, leveraging customer advocacy, and helping with deal expansion and up-sells.

Step 11: Building out the demand generation team. Don’t hire for the process that doesn’t exist in the beginning. Bring people to maintain the existing campaigns, refine them and give some space for experimentation.

Upcoming community events

Event Information

Almost everyone in the B2B marketing space talked about dark social and communities in 2022.

​Lots of folks asked us about starting, running, engaging, and supporting businesses with the community.

​So we decided to arrange a panel discussion with folks who nailed it down.

​Join Andrei, Katie Ray (metadata.io), Nick Bennett (Alyce), Arthur Castillo (Chili Piper), and Stefan Smulders (Expandi) sharing their experience of building great & engaged B2B marketing communities.

W​e’ll discuss:

• ​How to develop a community strategy, differentiate it, and incentivize people to join it and engage
• ​How do you decide the type of content you want to source and how to incentivize creators?
• ​How to leverage the community to support and grow your business without spam & promos. What are reasonable expectations to set for the business on when to expect "results"?
• ​How to measure success?

​Seats are limited (100 seats), so make sure to sign up & add the event to your calendar.

​See you there.

Best shares from Trenches Community

• How to plan marketing campaigns for B2B companies with a long sales cycle
• 8 places to learn about your ICP
• 9 playbooks we use to capture the demand of buyers in the market while nurturing the others
• Step-by-step guide to re-create a buyer journey and build a marketing function based on it

Questions from fellow Trenchers

Dear , your help is needed. If you can answer any of the questions below, please click on the link and share your ideas.

• Hi Guys, looking for someone experienced in tracking & tracing. We have a problem with a big client tracking wise & can't seem to figure it out 🤦‍♂️
• I have a list of 60k subscribers (I inherited it) and we over-emailed them during the lead-up to Black Friday. Engagement is lower now. Both opens and clicks are going down, unsubscribes are going up. So I'm trying to think of ways to regain the trust of the list, but I'm low on ideas. I'm thinking of one email a week for 1-2 months, and sending value - asking nothing in return. Is this the right way to do it? 😕
• Guys, who work for high ACV SaaS, I’m curious how you align GTM strategy with product roadmap/product strategy. Who owns it? Marketing/IT? How do you align with the IT department?

NOTE: If you found this content interesting and useful, chances are you have 1 or 2 colleagues (well, maybe 03) who'd enjoy it as much as you do. Help them by sharing this and earn some exclusive perks.

See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO