Software + Services Marketing Best Practices

Key Success Factor: Demand Generation

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Key Success Factors: Demand Generation (PDF)

Demand Generation

Demand Generation are the activities a company performs in order to create customer interest in their solutions and drive response to an email, traffic to their website, or inquiries to their call center, etc.

Key Questions to Think About

How does a prospect currently find your offer?
Is that web page the lowest trafficked on your site?
Should you lead your go-to-market campaign with email, applications, or services?
How do you decide?
What are some methods you can use to draw attention to solutions wrapped around specific customer needs?
What are some fulfillment strategies that could encourage great word of mouth promotion?

Today, driving solid Demand Generation is crucial to stay competitive; implementing a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is just a fumbling first base hit. Too few firms take the time to pro-actively adjust their PPC and search-engine optimization (SEO) work iteratively using the analytics learned from each to provide feedback to the other. This kind of feedback loop can provide handsome returns on time invested. It's also important to ensure that the demand generation activities undertaken across various methods maintain a consistent voice, tied to customer personas created for your various segments, in order to retain authenticity of voice. Keep in mind that these days it's all about the conversations with customers that are taking place through every touchpoint you maintain - so be sure they ring true.

Drive down the cost of online demand generation by using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising to define and optimize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) implementation and management.

What it means

The majority of operators use PPC as an island of demand generation without using SEO and other available analytical tools to drive leads through more effective and less costly means.

Why it's important

SEO is a more effective and cost efficient tool for driving demand than PPC, and is generally less expensive. SEO is poorly understood; it's not about fancy tricks as much as it's about understanding key basics like site architecture, page design and page content, and monitoring rankings with vigilance.

Applications of the Best Practice

	Expedia		Trip Advisor
	PPC	SEO	PPC	SEO
Zurich Hotels	3	NA	NA	4
Marriot Zurich	NA	NA	NA	3
Hilton Zurich	NA	NA	2	2
Geneva Hotels	2	NA	NA	2

In a search for hotel properties located in Zurich, Expedia was losing the conversion battle to Trip Advisor, as shown above. Though Expedia spent more PPC ad dollars to bring customers to its site, the fact is that many eyeballs are wasted.

Trip Advisor wisely is using their PPC to inform and instruct their SEO strategy, leading directly to more effective and less expensive lead generation campaigns. Bottom Line: the most effective demand generation campaigns include both SEO to build long term search ranking increase and PPC elements, and use the latter to inform the former intelligently.

Next: Online Customer Experience