A framework for developing your second half demand generation plan

 

You are probably in the middle of developing your demand generation plan for the second half of the year.  Your sales targets for the second half are growing at a faster clip than your demand gen budgets. How do you squeeze more efficiencies and effectiveness out of your demand gen budget to drive your plan that includes virtual events (and perhaps some physical events starting October 2021), online and print advertising programs, digital marketing programs, website, content marketing and marketing infrastructure? Here is a five-point framework to help you.

• What worked well in in the last six months?  Use your analytics to identify which marketing investments performed well in the last six months.  Filter out from that list certain programs because the themes or situations they represented are no longer relevant.   You now have a short list you want to continue for the second half.

• What did not work well in the last six months? Analyze the reasons behind their performance, to ensure you are not eliminating programs or activities whose weak performance was due to factors outside your control. Armed with this analysis, you can filter out programs you do not want to continue in the second half.

• Where would you like to add in the second half?  There may be new imperatives you need to support such as new product launches or entry into new industry segments or new geographies.  Or there may be new things you want to try such as account-based marketing or capturing intent-to-purchase marketing or supplement your content marketing strategy with video-based marketing.  It is always good to have some ‘experimental dollars’ to try some new approaches, tools or platforms in your marketing mix.  Once you add these programs and take out the ones selected for phase-out from the analysis above (bullets 1 and 2), you now know how much you have left to scale up the programs that you want to keep, to support your growing second half sales targets.

• Use a simple planning model and iterate:  Based on the analysis above, create a planning model that helps you capture your entire second half marketing mix and key target metrics.  Ensure that the allocation of spend across your planned marketing mix allows you to meet your overall objectives – in terms of building awareness, generating demand for new customers (‘land’ component of land and expand) and customer marketing (“expand’ component of land and expand – more on this topic in a future blog).  The plan must support these three marketing objectives – awareness, land, and expand across the various personas and regions you are targeting.  You will probably iterate this model multiple times until you feel good about your second half marketing plan. Target metrics in the model may include number of opportunities that need to be created (factoring in your sales cycle length across current and new products by region, target customer sentiment scores, expected social media audience and engagement growth etc. You should then use this model to track your actual performance against target metrics, so you know how you are doing against plan.

• Keep slack in the system: I believe in a well-known quote that even the most well formulated battle plans change on first contact with the enemy.  Ensure 10% to 15% percent of your budget remains uncommitted at the beginning of the second half, so you have enough room to take on a new initiative that appears suddenly or you have the means to switch to plan B when plan A (and related investments) fared worse than you expected.  You also need the flexibility because you do not know yet how soon some of the demand generation practices will switch back from digital to physical, given the vaccine is becoming widely available

It takes a lot of work to create a good plan – aligning with the above principles can ensure your plan stays relevant and focused, while giving you the flexibility to make changes as the year evolves.