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Vendors Highlight Key Demand Gen Trends In The State of Demand Generation 2012 Report

In today’s buyer-driven market, it has become more important than ever for sales and marketing teams to collaboratively provide prospects with meaningful, relevant engagements at every possible touch point.

DemandGen Report polled leading experts in the demand generation space for their outlook on these key emerging trends. As highlighted in the just released State of Demand Generation 2012 Report, thought leaders pointed to the following emerging trends for 2012:

  • Enhanced Involvement in Prospect Discovery — While marketing teams strive with every effort to harvest opportunities across a wide variety of tactical measurements, industry experts suggest that B2B organizations can cultivate a greater role in the research and discovery process.


“Make sure your potential customers run into you naturally during their daily lives and in their product research process,” noted Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot. “The goal here is to have customers know who you are before they select a list of vendors to contact, and to make it easy to find you at the point of need. Blogging is a great way to get started — companies with blogs get 55% more visitors because of the benefits to SEO and social — provided your blog has content your customers want to consume frequently (not product promotion). Adding social media after you blog amplifies your efforts; companies who blog get 79% more Twitter followers.”

Volpe shares case study examples, including one success story of a company that increased web traffic by 1,000% by starting a blog, optimizing for SEO and leveraging social media.

Volpe offers tips on how inbound marketing helps match marketing to customers.

  • Creating Killer Content — In today’s buyer-savvy market, timeliness and relevance reign supreme. By mapping content offers to the buyer’s journey, marketers can more effectively message to prospects and close deals faster.
     

“Every phase of the buying process is now exposed online — from buyers attempting to fully understand their issues and how others have solved them — to deep commentary on solution alternatives,” noted Chris Frank, Marketing Director, Treehouse Interactive. “This has created great opportunities and challenges for marketers. One of the most important opportunities is that you can now get to potential buyers much earlier in the buying process with killer content, thereby securing a position in later buying phases. The greatest challenge, however, is that you need a new content marketing approach to be effective, which takes time, energy and focus.”

Frank offers tips for creating killer content to generate demand via clear value propositions.

  • Socializing The Salesforce — While the social conversation continues to heat up in the B2B space, many organizations have cracked the code of social media and have found ways to capitalize on the channels. By integrating social efforts with marketing automation and CRM systems, companies can up the ante on traditional tactics.
     

“Information from social media can be extremely useful in preparing for a sales call,” noted Adam Blitzer, Co-Founder & COO, Pardot. “Marketing automation and CRM software can give your sales team quick access to data from social sites, including public profile data on prospects and activity logs of their interactions with your brand. For an example, you can provide a link to a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, Twitter page and other networking sites and display it right within the CRM interface.”

Blitzer offers 5 ways to use social media to generate demand in 2012.

These and other trends are explored in The State of Demand Generation 2012. Click here to download the report now.