How to Increase Demand Generation with a General Strategy

What is a General Strategy

A general strategy is the foundation for every beginning of marketing efforts. Without it, reaching goals is almost impossible and the entire marketing team would just be beating around the bush. Building it and having it visible at all times, turns tactical efforts into something measurable, scalable and easy to quickly correct - easy to optimize, as some geeks or experts in technology, would call it. So it basically is a general building plan, one that sets:

• Limits
• Tops to be reached
• Times to fulfill
• Specific margins/edges

The digitalization of a company, a trend these days, must include it. Artificial intelligence and automation are on our side.

The Experience of Marketing Directors

Having talked to hundreds of marketing directors, they've told us that they usually have to wait for a long time to know if their strategies worked or not. Either this, or after their tactical plan is finished, they have to spend even more money just to know how good -or bad!- the results were. The waiting time for them (to learn about the results) has been long, of around 6 months -at least. Thus, if it didn't work well, that is, if it didn't throw the expected results, little or nothing can be done by then to change the course of things.

For some experts on digital matters, these directors shouldn't have to wait that long to evaluate results, since marketing automation platforms, such as Hubspot, allow:

• To have this results visible at all times for your whole team
• The Director to know where the strategy is at, at every moment

With Inbound Marketing you can - and should - give a proper follow-up to your strategy, day after day. This is what has been called a Game Plan (I infer it was named like this to make it less ostentatious and more accesible).

How Would Having a Game Plan help?

We won't ask the obvious, we won't delve into the way in which it would improve:

• Your work processes
• The way it would help you measure them
• The results

Suffice it to say that if your real concern as a Marketing Director is to help the company grow in good time and proper manner, and not to spend the entire budget that's allocated to this area so that the following year it doesn't get reduced, it will help you.

What Should this Strategy Include?

I will only mention some key elements:

• A self-evaluation: To know the situation of our starting point, without making up numbers
• Create ideal profiles of buyers or Buyer Personas
• Build an engine
• Campaigns
• Join the Focus team with the client, to create something similar to a profit team

What Does a Game Plan Measure?

A personal quality that any Marketing Director should develop, is knowing how to see beyond the numbers to make decisions that would help the company move forward. Some Digital Directors focus heavily on KPI`s that are as insignificant as the CPC of a Google Ads campaign ... I mean! Of course these numbers indeed show something yet they don't consider data as important as being able to evaluate:

• If the marketing team has understood well how to carry out this marketing strategy
• If you can improve the ways with which you can reach the right customer

And the Demand Increase?

It will come, it'll take time, but it'll come. At least in 6 months, minimum. First, visitors will arrive to your website (which should be prepared to turn them into qualified prospects and segment them according to their interests) and, from that then on, the necessary processes will be automated to accompany them throughout their buying journey, until the sale is closed.

If you want to learn more about this general strategy with which you must start running all of your marketing and sales efforts, download DataBranding's Game Plan for free: