But, at what cost?

When talking to marketers, their approach to creating a new campaign is often to replicate a program, swap out the header graphics and change the calls to action.  Really, is that what’s going to engage their target audience? Surely one lead generation program can’t simply be re-purposed. What about audience insight and understanding? Who are they, where are they in the buying cycle, what are their needs from your content and what’s your unique proposition that’s going to excite them?

We need to get back to the fundamentals of defining the creative and business requirements of a campaign. Only then do we develop creative concepts that will support these requirements and deliver the best piece of marketing communication possible, whilst at the same time defining the optimal contact strategy for implementation through marketing automation. It’s my belief that effective campaign execution can only be realised through a combination of left– and right-brain thinking.

So, if you find your automated campaigns are delivering less value for you over time, maybe it’s time to take a step back and breath some creativity back into your campaigns. You never know, it might just work…

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of binary terms. Brand or demand. Strategic or tactical. Even marketing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never binary. Every piece of demand activity you produce is an embodiment of your brand. Likewise every brand communication should drive demand.

To focus on demand generation for a moment – there is a tendency in the industry to think purely in terms of the numbers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this communication achieve? It often leads to a nail the problem, hammer the offer, forget the brand approach (well, we did follow the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The problem is that this tends to focus so heavily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end obliterates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we generate demand and what it means for the brand, something interesting happens.

For one thing, the customer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the problems they face and less about simply what carrot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the results – we still need to hit the numbers. But we begin to consider the legacy of what we create. What effect will it have on our reputation? What will the recipients say to friends and colleagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see something from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand generation here, the benefits also extend the other way. By making more brand-focused communication responsible for growing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands trying to capture lofty ideals that are irrelevant to the context their customers find themselves in (the world peace syndrome).

The result will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loyalty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

Changes are afoot though, driven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop creating campaign sites in favour of driving people to their social media communities on Facebook and YouTube instead.

Unilever is following suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Sharing campaign last year were already driving people to their YouTube community as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gearing up towards the trend: the latest news from Facebook is an Omniture partnership to provide (among others) corporate Facebook communities the web analytics expected before for campaign sites. Why the change? Well, marketers have had enough of creating disposable campaign sites (which I wholeheartedly agree with) that are dumped after the company has moved to the next quarter or the next big push they are focusing on. Secondly they want to drive people to existing communities where their audience is already, in a mindset ready to share and engage. I get that too, however am in a quandary about driving the organic rankings of social community site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of certain size and don’t necessarily sell online would want to do that.

We are testing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our clients (campaign due to launch in a couple of months, will keep you updated on the progress!): instead of the usual corporate landing page, we are creating a socially supercharged aggregator site. The site combines client and user created social content from YouTube, Facebook, Slideshare, Scribd etc with the client’s corporate content (trial download offers, reviews, webinars and tutorials). This way, the experience for the user coming to the site is much more valuable, the social back-links are building the SEO rankings for the client, not for social sites and hopefully, with the improved experience, the conversion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of campaign sites is social and that long-term, “green” thinking needs to be integrated into marketing.

With the next Demand Generation Summit just a couple of days away, one question to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For classic B2B sales this often ends up in a conversation around the hand-off process to sales and closed loop marketing. But just as important a question is: is your website playing its part?

Over on Conversion Rate Experts they have an excellent article of the worst offenders when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

• The ‘empty cart’ button positioned where you’d expect the ‘submit’ button
• The ‘too easy to click’ button (or hover state) where you have to have the precision of a ninja to select what you need
• Session expiries (I’m glad this one is on because it sends me postal)

It’s a great article and they are also looking for submissions for a hall of shame.

Image by Mugley on Flickr

As part of the feedback process on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the content and speakers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what topics they’d like to see covered.

Perhaps predictably, it was the day’s agenda and calibre of the speaker line-up that attracted most people to the first event. Not to mention it was free to our invitees. Of course our speakers scored very highly, but coming away from the day almost all commented on how much they’d valued the opportunity to network. I’m sure they found it cathartic to share some pain and understand that others out there were trying to overcome the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feedback came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in putting together the agenda for the forthcoming summit:

1. People want more practical content and less of the theoretical. There’s an appetite for stories of bloodied knuckles, as well as a hunger for real learnings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very conscious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side marketers telling their stories. This time round we’re trying to encourage our speakers to tell their success stories, and what mistakes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is coming along to tell the story of how he and other marketers transformed sap.com from a largely brochureware site to a ‘demand generation machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more opportunity to network and learn from their peers. We had some great table conversations at lunchtime last time round, and we tried to allow generous breaks. For the most part people resisted the lure of their BlackBerries, made conversation and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit further and we’ve made the afternoon sessions entirely interactive. Attendees will have the opportunity to attend three out of four workshops on social media, accelerating sales, using webcasting and online video, and measuring and optimising campaigns. We’re going to have people capturing learnings from one group to another so that through the course of the afternoon we generate a body of knowledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the content, there was a lot of call for tips on making the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and proving a return on marketing activity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cassidy, is an ex IBM marketer now at European company StepStone. In his previous life with a budget of millions, his greatest challenge used to be how to spend marketing budget fast enough. He’s now in a position where every penny (cent) has to be accounted for. Jim will talk about what he’s prioritising, how he’s making a case for spend with the board, and how he’s making his marketing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Jobbins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hopefully that gives you something of a taster for what’s to come on the 30th April. If you need any more encouragement, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stunning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remember, we’re only accepting registrations from client-side marketers from the B2B services, technology and telecoms sectors. No offence intended to others, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hopefully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twittering kind, you can get regular updates by following us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or subscribing to the RSS feed

Of course, just now, optimism is in pretty short supply around the world.

So what of the year to come? Well, it’s unlikely to be a wall-to-wall party. And even the supposed economic gurus really have very little idea of what might happen. But let’s not reach for the razor blades just yet.

The lessons from previous recessions (this will be my 3rd in the industry) are that those companies that continue to invest in marketing will come out of the downturn exponentially stronger (and do so for less overall cost). And, in a tough market, every company will need every single edge it can muster to win the war for a greater share of diminishing budgets.

Within this context, demand generation activities will come increasingly to the forefront. If the sell-out attendance of our recently co-sponsored Demand Generation Summit is anything to go by this is already happening. It will also be more important than ever for those in marketing to work hand in glove with those in sales (see Amanda Jobbins’ presentation at the Summit). Measurability and agility in the face of changing circumstances will be more crucial than ever.

There is of course speculation about whether demand generation is anything new or just a new term for something far older. Personally, I hope that the industry embraces demand generation in a wider sense than simply a series of disconnected short term activities designed to fill the sales funnel (aka traditional lead generation). Tactical activity is important, of course it is, but tactics alone can lead to a disjointed, piecemeal approach to acquiring and maintaining customers over the long term.

Demand generation today is as much a philosophy as an activity. It’s about delivering ever changing, ever improving communications, interactions and experiences. It’s about using smart technology to automate and integrate these programmes wherever possible. Ultimately it’s about creating and sustaining momentum from prospect to sale and beyond.

What will 2009 bring? Search me. But it’ll be the businesses that adapt to the challenges (and re-adapt as they change) that are likely to be the winners come the inveitable upturn.

The good news is that we’ve already had 42 people register. I know because I’ve counted them in, one by one. Hang on a minute, it’s 43…