Driving new leads is essential for business growth. However many organizations stumble when designing their Lead Demand Generation Strategy. Don't let your company make these common mistakes:
Not Linking to Business Goals
The first misstep is failing to align lead gen efforts with overall business goals. Lead demand generation strategy works best when marketing and sales leaders collaborate to identify targets that support growth. Make sure your strategy has clear metrics and objectives that ladder up to broader objectives around revenue, market share, and customer acquisition.
Prioritizing Quantity over Quality
Don't get distracted by vanity metrics around lead volume. The real goal is quality leads that convert to sales. Focus your lead demand generation strategy on attracting and nurturing high-potential prospects that match your ideal customer profile. Volume without alignment to your target customer is a wasted effort.
Glossing Over Buyer Personas
Truly effective lead generation stems from a deep understanding of your customers. Yet many companies lack well-defined buyer personas to guide strategy. Profile your best customers, identify their pain points, and determine what messages will resonate. Tailor your content and outreach to appeal specifically to each persona's needs.
Relying Too Heavily on Outbound Tactics
The most effective lead demand generation strategy utilizes a balanced mix of tactics. Don't rely solely on tradeshows, cold calls, and generic email blasts. Employ a variety of digital campaigns, social media, and thought leadership tailored to reach modern buyers. Track results and refine your mix for maximum impact.
Not Optimizing Your Website
Your website is the hub of any successful demand-generation effort. But often it's not properly optimized for conversions. Audit your site to remove friction and ensure your copy, calls-to-action, and lead capture forms facilitate lead generation. Make it easy for prospects to take the next step.
Forgetting About Existing Customers
With so much focus on new leads, companies often overlook opportunities within their current customer base. Develop targeted campaigns to generate upsells, cross-sells, and referrals from existing happy customers. This requires understanding customer needs and orchestrating multi-touch nurturing.
Lacking Lead Nurturing Processes
Finally, a defined process for lead qualification and nurturing is essential. Set standards for lead follow-up and develop email/content tracks to build relationships over time. Guide prospects through their buyer's journey with personalized messaging that addresses their questions and concerns.
How can you calculate market demand?
There are a few key methods companies can use to estimate overall market demand for a product or service:
- Industry data analysis - Examine industry reports and statistics to identify total available customers and market size for your offering based on factors like demographics, psychographics, and existing penetration rates.
- Surveys - Conduct surveys with current and prospective customers to assess interest levels and intent to purchase your type of offering. Extrapolate survey data to estimate potential demand.
- Lead generation results - Track lead generation efforts over time to gauge interest and estimate conversion rates. Apply these rates to your total addressable market to approximate demand.
- Sales forecasts - Collect input from your sales team on expected sales pipelines and forecasts. Aggregate forecasts to determine expected market demand.
- Test marketing - Run trial marketing campaigns and promotions and assess response rates and sales. Use test results to estimate demand if scaled to the entire market.
- Economic models - Build models factoring in market size, historic growth rates, pricing, competition and economic projections to forecast expected demand.
Combining these approaches provides a data-driven way to calculate your total addressable market and forecasted demand. This demand modeling then informs your marketing and sales plans.
Avoid these missteps as you build your lead demand generation strategy. Get executive alignment, focus on quality, understand your customers, use a balanced mix of new approaches, optimize your website, engage current clients and nurture leads. With a thoughtful strategy, your marketing programs will deliver the pipeline growth your business needs.
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