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If your marketing charter is anything like ours, you’ve got some massive goals ahead of you. Your team is likely tasked with engaging the right decision-makers at target accounts, generating a specific number of opportunities and impacting a defined revenue goal. But what do you do when you face challenges hitting your mile marker targets for marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads (MQLs and SQLs)?
When expectations are steep and time is short, it’s important to leverage the best performing demand generation tactics that can reach qualified audiences at scale and gain traction quickly.
Because let’s face it… influencer marketing is the long-game and creating premium webinars takes a lot of resources. So even though they may be some of your highest-converting demand generation strategies, they can’t be your go-to tools when you’ve only got a quarter to generate full-funnel demand.
You need digital campaigns that you can get to market quickly and scale based on budget.
Easy-to-Launch Demand Generation Tactics
Regardless of the sense of urgency, there are plenty of tactics you definitely shouldn’t turn to simply because you’re under pressure:
- Don’t buy a cold list for email marketing campaigns.
- Don’t inflate your pipeline with leads who aren’t ready for sales.
- Don’t weaken your targeting parameters to generate quantity over quality.
In other words, you can’t get so desperate to scale that you’re willing to put just anything into your database.
So, what should you do?
The solution is to increase your investment in key paid demand generation tactics (to drive scale), while homing in on the right audience through specific targeting parameters (to ensure quality). We find the following three demand gen channels can generate qualified pipeline quickly when approached with a quality-first mindset.
3 Demand Generation Tactics You Can Scale Quickly
1. Content Syndication
Content syndication can be a powerful channel to reach niche audiences, but it requires the right content, partners and clearly defined targeting parameters. However, chances are, generating more demand via this channel will require you to think beyond your current publishers and lead providers.
Unfortunately, identifying new partners can be exhaustive and risky. To scale volume efficiently, you may want to consider turning to a data marketplace that can connect with with new qualified data sources. Integrate Data Marketplace, for example, is an access point to more than 300 vetted third-party media partners who collectively engage hundreds of millions of B2B prospects.
With access to more lead- and data-sources, B2B marketing organizations can better engage and convert the right prospects into actionable, opt-in leads.
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2. Paid Social Marketing
Paid social marketing is another channel that you can tap into to generate marketing-qualified leads in a short amount of time. The specific social platforms you should consider largely depends on your budget, buyer personas and target outcomes.
From the standpoints of user demographics, engagement and return on investment, LinkedIn is likely the smartest go-to for generating qualified leads and increasing traffic to your website and landing pages. In fact, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, according to the social media network’s own data. Additionally, nearly half of all social media traffic to B2B websites is from LinkedIn.
Twitter and Facebook may not be B2B marketers’ first choice for paid social promotion, but these networks shouldn’t be outside the realm of consideration. They may be the right way to increase short-notice demand. Social Insider highlights remarkable examples of B2B Facebook marketing among brands such as Cisco WebEx, Oracle, Kalibrr, and Canon.
3. Display and Programmatic Advertising
The 2018 B2B Advertising & Marketing Outlook report, sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet, revealed that 63% of B2B marketers are investing in programmatic advertising and 64% of them projected to increase budgets this year. So your peers at large seem to agree this channel is a good bet.
Just keep in mind that increasing your budget only makes sense if your current display strategy is effective. However, if this channel isn’t quite up to par when it comes to performance, using it to generate more qualified pipeline is more complicated than just running more placements.
When programmatic and display advertising aren’t yielding the right prospects, the issue isn’t budget; chances are it’s targeting criteria, data quality or possibly even content. There are a few tactics to consider that may have a positive impact on your display-driven pipeline:
- Incorporate an account-based approach into your programmatic strategy.
- For conversion-focused campaigns, make sure you’re validating the data before it goes into your database.
- Test multiple asset sets to identify what resonates most with your audience.
If however your current programmatic campaigns are on point, engaging the right audiences who continue to move down funnel, then crank up the volume so you can reach those quarterly metrics.
We know that balancing quality and quanity is hard. While the transition can have definitive growing pains, there are solutions which can help B2B marketing and sales organizations meet their success metrics even when time is short.
How do the most highly effective B2B marketers generate demand, when expectations are high and timelines are short? Download your copy of the free eBook and get 155 Tips & Tactics from Demand Marketing’s Top 40 Game Changers today.
