The Road To Push-Button Demand Marketing - Turbify Resource Center - Get the information you need to succeed online

You put $10,000 of demand gen fuel into your newly designed demand marketing engine and out pops $100,000 worth of new revenue. Sweet!

Many marketing teams have built and are using these lead-to-revenue models. Now you need to scale these efforts and deliver $3 million in revenue by the end of the quarter. Will the same formula work?

So you connect your MarTech “stack” (your company’s systems, process and data) to the Internet, and this engine kicks into another gear. Programmatic hyper-targeted ads, search key words, content personalization, message retargeting, and first- and third-party data mashup yields a big data bonanza. Pure inbound “cloud” heaven.

What happens when your inbound marketing machine runs out of gas and you need to go outside your website-produced leads to generate demand? You turn to third-party sources, events, and media partners to help drive the additional inquiries and leads required to hit your revenue goals. Woops, not so automated, yet.

I view this holistic effort as the march to “push-button” demand marketing. We’re looking for the fastest, least convoluted path to delivering predictable sales pipeline and customer acquisition results. The need to engage and create new customers has demand marketers looking for the “easy” push button to make it happen.

While the automated demand marketing rocket ship has launched and is now orbiting around you, your competitors and your customers, we all know it’s not really as easy as pushing a few buttons to make demand happen. Technology isn’t perfect, we’re all trying to upgrade our skills to master this, and most of our systems and processes are more siloed than integrated.

Moreover, while we’d like to have all traffic and engagement organically directed to our website and landing pages – a.k.a. “inbound” – the reality is many marketers require third-party sources and outbound fulfillment partners using content marketing syndication, targeted lists and affiliate marketing to deliver inquiries, leads, and traffic to get the volume required to feed the demand engine and create happy customers.

The good news is we’re making solid progress. For a sense of perspective and to ground ourselves, let’s review where things stand, the industry trajectory and the promise of more automated, push-button-like control for demand marketing:

Table of Contents

Advertising Technology (Ad-Tech)

Digital Advertising via real-time bidding (programmatic) and retargeting is becoming mainstream; what once was scoffed at has turned into a juggernaut, and marketers are working on optimization versus “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

Status: We are a decade in to this movement; it is standard advertising strategy.
Promise to Demand Marketers: Easier to buy, manage, and scale.

Customer Engagement Platforms

Marketing Automation is being deployed for prospect engagement, nurture and scoring; Eloqua, Marketo, and others pioneered the concept of revenue platforms that are becoming marketing tech hubs used to integrate and measure customer engagement activities.

Status: 7-year-growth run being adopted by marketers across multiple verticals; tech is moving from “email system on steroids” to customer data and engagement platforms.
Promise to Demand Marketers: Marketing program and prospect data all from one dashboard with an ecosystem of connected providers to execute and measure efforts.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive Marketing is gaining steam for targeting and segmentation as customer data gets better organized and more useful. Predictive lead prioritization, segment targeting, and account prioritization, for example, based on historical and projected data.

Status: A relatively new, headline-grabbing, fast-rising priority item; big “cool” factor.
Promise to Demand Marketers: Better results because marketing based on data, predictable models.

Automated Demand Marketing

Outbound demand generation is activity done off your web site/pages (content marketing syndication, events, data/lists) gaining steam. Automating the use of third-party sources to scale and optimize activities for more effective prospect and customer acquisition.

Status: New kid on the automation block, first-movers are deploying.
Promise to Demand Marketers: Integrate outbound demand marketing to add to and scale your lead quality and volume with pay-for-performance demand marketing programs.

Automated demand marketing promises to be the next “push button” appliance to fuel marketing and business, from automated digital marketing to outbound demand marketing. Some of these demand approaches are further along than others.

In order to scale, we must combat the law of diminishing returns by leveraging multiple channels and marketing methods. No one channel can deliver it all; we need a combination of channels – inbound and outbound. The faster we automate and integrate, the more rapidly we can deliver demand marketing in a scalable, more predictable way.

As not to make this too long, we will go deeper on this topic in the next few blogs which will explore how to deliver the scale, data, integration and customer experience required and how marketers are making outbound demand marketing more push button like their inbound sibling.