5 Quick Wins for Driving Revenue While Building Out Your Demand Generation Engine

Over the past three years, Digital Transformation has accelerated dramatically, and one area of the business have benefitted most is Marketing. By incorporating new digital technologies into their workflows, marketing departments have been able to take advantage of automation, personalization, and seamless operations to enhance productivity, cut costs and improve the customer experience. This evolution has enabled Marketing and Sales to align their efforts and build an “always-on” demand generation engine that generates new revenue while maximizing customer lifetime value.

However, Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither is a high-performance Demand Generation Engine! It takes time to plan and implement all of the technologies, processes and best practices required to create a high-functioning lead generation machine that drives revenue. The last thing you want to do is cut corners – it’s important to plan out and build your engine with care and precision.

But business can’t come to a halt – you still need to generate leads and fill the pipeline. So, what do you do to keep the leads coming in and continue to generate value for the business as you modernize your systems and processes to be highly performant for years to come?

Here are 5 quick wins for driving leads and revenue that will jumpstart your motor, and buy you some time while building your powerful DG engine:

1. Assess your current state.

Before you can begin implementing the right systems and processes to get you to the next level, assess where you are on the Marketing Maturity Model. Part of this process is assessing your current Marketing Technology (MarTech) stack, which provides insight into where you are on your digital transformation journey and how to shape future strategies.

By conducting a technology audit, you’ll understand what tools and technologies you have in place already, and what you need to round out and improve your Martech stack.  

It’s a good idea to leverage the expertise of a third-party vendor that can provide a dedicated focus to the project and deliver rapid value. Such a partner will have in-depth expertise in MarTech stack implementation and integration that you may not have in-house, and can customize the solutions to meet your needs. 

In addition to assessing your technology stack, an advertising and campaign assessment can help you identify where your money is best spent, and reallocate funds from underperforming campaigns to building new ones optimized for maximum impact. This may also involve assessing how you’ve segmented your audience, and whether you need to find new sources for leads and data. 

BDO Digital can help you go from Nascent to Best-in-Class

2. Put the basics in place. 

Once you have your assessments underway, you should make sure you’ve got the basics in place so you can continue generating leads as you build out your long-term strategies. This is particularly critical if you’re starting from scratch. Pay-per-click ads, social media and display advertising are relatively quick and easy – and inexpensive – to start up.

These activities can help you start filling the pipeline right away, with little effort on your team’s part, and provide immediate value, even as you’re working on additional implementations and integrations for your new demand generation engine behind the scenes.  

3. Automate what can be automated.

Perhaps you already have a marketing automation system in place, but you’re not using it to its full potential. A strategic partner can help you identify quick integration points that automate mundane, time-consuming tasks, freeing your team to be more productive and to focus on refining the campaign strategy. 

4. Create best-in-class marketing templates. 

Templates accelerate campaign development while ensuring consistency and repeatability. Using a template, team members are more likely to stick to the brand style guide and create cohesive communications and content that help to build and reinforce your brand image. While templates may take some time up-front to create, they’ll save time and headaches down the line and help to accelerate the creation of new campaigns as needed. 

Below are some common best practices for effective marketing emails:

F-pattern

Inverted Triangle

Z Template

5. Identify stalled leads and create a long-term nurture. 

Is your Sales team spending too much time working on leads that have stalled? Why? That time is better spent focused on prospects that are more likely to convert sooner than later. Identifying stalled leads and pasing them on can save your sales team time and supply your marketing team with better data to improve lead generation and qualification efforts. By handing the leads back over to Marketing, you can create a long-term nurture focused specifically on keeping them warm. That way, you can keep the communication going while alleviating the pressure of talking to sales, and nurture the leads until they’re ready to move forward on the Buyer Journey. And, Sales doesn’t have to worry that the leads will disappear. 

Prove Your Contribution to Revenue Faster

For Marketing, it’s all about demonstrating contribution to the growth of the business. The fastest way to demonstrate value is by filling the pipeline. The five tips outlined here will get you on the right track, while you build out the three “gears” of your demand generation engine: 

• Demand Creation: Drive top-line engagement by nurturing new prospects and creating demand for your product or service.
• Demand Management: Continuing the engagement with prospects to convert as many as possible into customers. 
• Demand Expansion: Expanding customer lifetime value through onboarding, retention, cross-sell, and upsell efforts.