By, Adam Vasquez, Founder & CEO at Merit.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” ~ Steve Jobs
Creating demand is understood as a general objective when launching new brands, products, and/or services. Demand generation, however, is more of a new age concept that serves as a comprehensive long-term plan aligning marketing with sales/services. Demand generation strategies make or break Market Invention as digital transformation rises.
Research, research, research…
“Research is to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.” ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Research is the foundation for all market invention projects at Merit. In order to differentiate, there has to be an understanding of the problems no one is solving in current markets. Research will unveil gaps in demand all on its own and showcase audience factors to fully tailor a demand generation strategy that will disturb old markets and dominate new ones.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~ Peter Drucker
Digital demand generation is a progressive, step-by-step, timeline driven process encompassing many if not all areas within a traditional marketing consultant. Depending on client budget and goals, demand generation plans can become very large in breadth. Identifying a budget for digital demand generation can be a daunting task for businesses, as they rely on mostly suggestions from solicited agencies without any real structure aligning ad spend with ROI.
At Merit, data attribution and data governance have become fundamental in measuring the effectiveness of all channels, sources, systems, and strategies driving demand. A full-service demand generation plan will empower data analysis to determine tweaks at each step, helping to evaluate conversion data and spotlight which channels/ad placements have the greatest effect on your business goals for the program.
Today, demand generation drives Market Invention. If you are looking to go beyond traditional digital strategy, we can help.
