Written by Ajit Belani – Assistant Vice President of Marketing at Aricent
…in the era of data-driven marketing
It’s been quite a journey for me and my team over the last 4 years in my current role as demand generation leader. We have been able to deliver 100-150% year on year growth on our demand generation objectives. We of course started with a low base but are now delivering at a consistent pace and will continue to target 25-50% growth. The best part of the experience is that we have been achieving targets at a flat budget and headcount. Here are a few things that worked for us.
1) Are you hungry?
This is probably the most important thing that a team needs to have. The question to ask is, are you driven to over achieve your goals or are you fine with status quo. It’s a well-known fact that only those of us who are hungry for growth have that internal drive to achieve our goals. Anything less won’t work especially in a function that requires you to be on your toes and keep your eye on the target.
2) Are you thinking like a sales person?
Even though we are part of the marketing organization it is important for any demand generation professional to think like a sales person. Ask yourself these important questions – What are they selling? Where do they generate their leads from? Which are the leads they promptly follow up on and which are the ones that languish?
Make it a point to spend designated time each month with the sales team and they will be the best coach for you to do your job well.
End of the day you are helping drive sales and so it is in their best interest to coach you.
3) Know your business inside out
For those of us in tech industry, the question to ask is, have we taken the effort to understand the business? Many a times we just take content we get, run campaigns and expect it to work. But how many of us take the effort to really understand the business we are in. Our world gets more complicated everyday with new buzzwords and technology areas popping up. If you are into product or solution selling, do you understand your value proposition? Who is your customer, who is the influencer, who is the buyer…et al. Is your content tailored to talk to the right audience or is it generic in nature?
A good understanding or analysis of your current customer base will help you answer some of these questions. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your product teams or SMEs to understand more about your offerings. This is probably the best investment of your time. One other thing that very few of us do in marketing, is to spend time with our customers.
Use the opportunities you get like events, customer visits, etc. to understand your customer’s pain points and how your organization can help them.
4) Content is the key
Although this sounds clichéd, it is actually true. Your campaigns and efforts will not be successful unless the content is relevant to the audience you are targeting. You may or may not be responsible for content creation but you should take personal ownership of content that gets created and be a key stakeholder in the discussion. As the individual responsible for taking this content to market only you know what works and what doesn’t
5) Plan-Execute-Track-Refine-Repeat
As you go through the drill of running campaigns, remember to always track important metrics and monitor performance. Keep your eyes open for any indicators, repeating trends, triggers etc that you see in your campaign performance.
Over time you will get intuitive and will actually know whether a campaign will work or not even before you launch it
This may sound bit odd but it’s true. You will observe certain repetitive trends in the kind of content that works for you, the topics/offering areas that work for your business or the channels that work for you. This however shouldn’t stop you from experimenting and trying out new things but it should stop you from doing things that don’t work.
6) Data Quality
The campaigns and programs you run will only be as good as the data. Do you have complete visibility into your target database? Is the data clean, accurate and even relevant for your business? Campaigns would only work if right contacts are targeted with the right message. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution and this would be an ongoing effort. Depending on the seniority of contacts you are targeting your database will churn between 20-40% every year. Keeping your data accurate is hard work but thankfully we have tools and vendors available today to help you with the task.
7) Tools & Tech
Thankfully, today we have suite of marketing automation and other tools available to help us execute and track the effectiveness of our campaigns. Take the time to pick the right tools based on your business needs. Don’t just use the tools for reporting but for deeper analysis into what works and what doesn’t. Be “data driven marketers.” There are host of metrics that can be monitored now, pick the ones that are most relevant to you and track them on a bi-weekly basis.
I would love to hear from you on what has worked for you!
About Guest Contributor: Ajit Belani has over 15 years of experience in B2B Marketing and Demand Generation. He is passionate about his current role as Demand Generation Leader at Aricent and has also worked in senior marketing roles at IBM & Capgemini in the past.
