Demand Generation: Campaign Plan in 5 Easy Steps

You may have heard the term “demand generation” thrown around more and more in the last few years and thought to yourself, “what is demand generation, and how does it work?” In this article, you will walk away knowing exactly what demand generation means and how it is used. We also share a five-step process for running a successful demand generation campaign.

What is Demand Generation?

Demand generation is the process of generating awareness for your products or services. It’s reaching users who aren't familiar with your brand, or for whom your brand isn't top of mind, and adding your brand to their consideration set.

Situations where a demand gen campaign would be useful include:

• Launching a new product/service.
• Breaking into a new target audience.
• If you are going through a rebrand.

In context of the buyer journey, or what most refer to as the marketing funnel, demand generation would be at the very top of the funnel: when your prospect is in the awareness phase of their research.

Successful demand generation is similar to great content marketing. In both cases, a business provides the right content to the right people at the right time. Demand generation is one way your business can generate excitement and awareness of your offerings, while also educating and building trust.

Demand Gen Campaign Plan in 5 easy steps

1. Goals

Just like any other campaign, the best way to get started is to look at what you want to accomplish with your demand generation efforts. You want to identify the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) you wish to achieve by the end of your campaign.

For demand generation, the goal is to drive awareness so that your goals increase engagement on social, increase organic website visitors, or grow your owned audience.

Set hard goals:

"We will increase our blog subscriptions by 25%”

“We will grow organic visitors to our website by 20%”

“We will gain 2k followers across our social platforms”

2. Target Audience/Persona

Identifying your audience will be critical for your campaign to be a success. You can build out your target audience through a variety of characteristics like geographic location, gender, age or income. To take it a step further, you should also be building out a buyer persona. A buyer persona goes beyond demographics. A buyer persona digs deeper into their wants and needs. The persona humanizes the buyer by assigning them a name, and even including a photo (even though the name and photo are a composite, not an actual person). You can see the example below.

Once you know the audience you are targeting you can get started on writing the content that will resonate with them.  

3. Content 

Now for the fun part! At this stage of the plan, you should be identifying what kind of content you will produce for each of the stages in the buyer journey. You most likely need to be thinking of creating content for all three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. For your demand generation campaign, your goal is to introduce your brand to the prospect, which means content that builds awareness is especially important.  

During the awareness part of the buyer journey, your content should be focused on great thought leadership that addresses your audience’s needs (this is why so much business-to-consumer content at this stage focuses on “how to” issues, and business-to-business thought leadership addresses business problems and issues). 

This kind of content is known as top-of-funnel content. For your campaign, this content could consist of blogs, social media posts, video or infographics. This is your first chance to grab the attention of your prospects and have them interact with your brand. 

The best top-of-funnel content is strictly informational, not driving the viewer to buy from you but instead to help answer their questions.  

4. Channels  

Once all your content is written, designed and produced, it is time to choose what channels you want to use for distribution. At this step, it is important to remember the buyer persona you created in step 2. You want to choose the channel where your prospects hang out. For a business-to-consumer company, this may be using paid ads through Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. A business-to-business companies may choose LinkedIn.  

The actual channels you use may include, but are not limited to: 

• Events 
• Email Marketing  
• Social Media  
• Webinars 
• Podcasts  

5. Test and Iterate 

The only way to improve is to always be testing. The key here is to never have the mindset of “set it and forget it.” Once your campaign is up and running, you want to be continuously tracking your progress. You may be A/B testing different emails, calls to actions, or ads. If one ad is outperforming others, this is the time to pause the others and push the budget into the more successful ad. Investis Digital has a Statistical Significance calculator you can use to determine if your A/B tests are valid. Your demand generation campaign should always be evolving as you gather more data about your target audience.  

At this stage, your demand generation campaign is up and running, but your strategy has just begun. Once your campaign has high interactions and is generating interest, it's time to capture and nurture these leads. In other words, now it’s time for lead generation. 

If you are looking for a step by step on how to run lead generation campaigns, check out our new guide, “How to Succeed with Demand Generation & Lead Generation,” to uncover six easy steps for demand generation/lead generation campaign planning.  

Contact Investis Digital 

At Investis Digital, we help companies with every stage of the demand gen campaign process. Whether it’s starting with a digital strategy, content creation, website design, implementing a paid media strategy, or increasing organic visibility with SEO, we do it all – and more. Reach out today to speak with an expert to help identify opportunities for improvement on driving demand.