How to allocate the Demand Generation budget?

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Demand Generation is a discipline of online marketing and deals with the execution of marketing strategies to increase the interest and visibility of products or services, usually published on a website. This discipline uses different techniques, which are intended to get a potential client to establish some kind of link, whether commercial (purchase or request for a quote) or functional (downloading marketing documents, downloading software, product demos, etc.) with a given product or service.

Carrying out a Demand Generation strategy involves keeping our company and its offer in the mind of our prospects in order to open conversations. Therefore, it is extremely important, before generating demand, to know well how to distribute the budget available. In this article, you will be able to find out the answer.

Demand Generation: Where to Start?
To begin with, before talking about budget, we must understand the sub-processes that converge in demand generation:

Content generation process
Distribution of content through advertising
Lead generation and cultivation (Lead Management)
Business opportunity management
Now, for each of them, it is necessary to carry out demand generation marketing activities. This finance directors email list includes: a strategy, ideation, communication, writing, design and other actions that, in turn, will require marketing software technology, lead management, CRM, blogging and content generation tools, etc.

In addition, to give visibility to these contents in the digital channels that feed the generation of demand, it is necessary to invest in advertising, that is, the three legs of demand generation are: technology, content and advertising. To complete the chair, a fourth leg could be added, which is the comprehensive strategic coordination of all these actions.

Scope and objectives

When considering a demand generation budget, the first thing we must take into account is the scope and magnitude of the objectives we are setting.

Here it is worth considering whether the generation of demand is limited to just one country, for example, Argentina, or whether we are seeking to generate demand in several countries, whether in Latin America or even Europe.

Once this first scope has been defined, the next step is to define what the objective of the demand generation plan is in terms of lead generation:

We must discriminate whether our objective is to generate a relatively low number of leads (let's say between 10 and 20 leads per month to feed a small sales team), or on the contrary we are looking to generate hundreds of leads for a larger sales team.

On the other hand, it is necessary to define whether the objective is to generate leads that are qualified for commercial conversations (Sales Qualify Leads – SQL) or to generate leads that are in earlier stages and are not yet ready to speak with sales (Marketing Qualify Leads – MQL), but that can enter into marketing cultivation processes.