Integrated Demand Generation Campaign: A Checklist

In today's digital landscape, executing an integrated digital demand generation campaign is crucial for driving business growth and enhancing brand visibility. An integrated approach, combining various digital marketing strategies such as SEM, PPC, SEO, and social media, along with leveraging email nurture programs, blogs, virtual events, and webinars, can lead to significant improvements in lead acquisition and sales conversion. This checklist will guide you through setting up a successful integrated digital demand generation campaign.

Define Your Campaign Goals and Objectives

• Identify the primary objectives of your campaign, such as increasing leads, enhancing brand awareness, or driving sales.
• Really sit down and consider this. A lot of businesses try and "boil the ocean" when setting their integrated campaign's up. Consider a full-funnel approach when setting goals.

• Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.
• This is a vital step for measuring the success of your campaign with analytics.

Know Your Audience

• Segment your audience based on demographics, psychographics, and behavior.
• How do you make segmented audiences?
• Have they done business with you in the past(Returning or Retention)?
• Where did you meet them (event's follow-up)?
• How long has it been since you reached out to them (zombie leads)?
• Why do you have their information (is it compliant)?
• Who are they (male, female, old, young) and do you have a different message based on who they are (it's ok if you don't)?
• What is the difference in your message based on the segment cohort?

• Develop buyer personas to tailor your messaging and campaign tactics effectively.
• You should have an ideal customer profile (ICP) or a target persona. Knowing who your customer is and how your product or solution solves their problems is crucial for making content that resonates with them and builds their trust in you.

Align Product and Sales Teams

• Ensure alignment between your product teams and sales teams to unify the messaging across all platforms.
• This is vital to ensure consistency for your brand. Marketing should be communicating internally and externally. Don't let your sales team learn about your marketing campaigns on LinkedIn

• Facilitate regular meetings to discuss goals, progress, and strategies.
• Being aligned to all of the cross-functional team's goals is important to meet the organizational goals, and to share what's going on and how it's working
• Sales and product teams will have excellent insights to share on messaging from prospects, partners, and analysts

Develop an Integrated Campaign Strategy

• Plan an overarching strategy that integrates SEM, PPC, SEO, social media, email nurturing, blogs, virtual events, webinars, and partner co-marketing.
• Think about all of the channels you want to use for outreach and how to connect the message so it's not redundant but it is consistent

• Ensure that all tactics are interconnected and contribute towards the campaign's overarching goals.
• Internal links, targeted landing pages, blogs connected to social posts, the list goes on.

Execute Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

• Research and select keywords that align with your campaign goals and audience's search intent.
• Intent can be a challenge, so consider what your message is driving the user to accomplish. They are exchanging their time and possibly contact information for your offering, make it worth it to them.

• Design and implement PPC campaigns to drive targeted traffic and generate leads.
• Make sure you write down the type of keyword rich content you want to display in ads BEFORE you open your ad manager. 
• Have images and brand guidelines ready to go, otherwise you'll spend a lot of time chasing down assets that might not be aligned to the rest of your organization.

Optimize for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Conduct a technical SEO audit of your website to identify areas for improvement.
• Page load speed, meta tags, and making sure your content is messaged in the same way as your paid, social, and email campaigns is crucial to success.

• Optimize website content, structure, and metadata to improve visibility and ranking on search engines.
• I use Screamingfrog and SEMRush for this

Create and Distribute Quality Content

• Develop a content calendar for your blogs that addresses the interests and needs of your target audience.
• Choose what channels are the most important and engaged for your audience, it may not be your website or social media channels.



• Produce high-quality, SEO-friendly blog posts that provide value and encourage engagement.
• What do I mean "encourage engagement"? What do you want your audience to do once they've read the content? Do you want them to sign up for something, read something else? How do you want to measure the success of your content?

Launch Email Nurture Campaigns (if you don't have an email tool, do not use BCC)

• Develop a series of targeted emails to nurture leads through the sales funnel.
• Emails should go out in a consistent manner and have an objective. What do you want the user to do after they read the email

• Utilize automation tools to personalize emails and schedule delivery based on user behavior and engagement.
• Most email services have automation built in, use their programs.
• If you aren't using an email platform to send emails in bulk, DO NOT SEND them from your personal account using BCC, or worse CC. Just signup for mailchimp.

Plan and Host Virtual Events and Webinars

• Organize webinars and virtual events that address current industry topics or demonstrate product benefits.
• Discuss the benefits of the product, NOT the features. Talk about the problems your product is solving and how it enables your audience to do their job better, faster, or smarter.

• Promote these events through email marketing, social media, and partner channels.
• Encourage employee and customer engagement for webinars. Your customers probably want to share how much they love your product or solution, don't be afraid to talk to them.

Leverage Partner Co-Marketing

• Collaborate with partners to expand your reach and tap into new audiences.
• Partners are an underutilized resource. They have a HUGE upside potential that can make your organization grow rapidly. Your partners are also trying to reach a new audience, lean in to leverage that.

• Co-create content or co-host events to share resources and maximize impact.
• Problem solving content should lead your webinars. Not a demo, not a marketplace walkthrough (unless it's for retention, but that's a different strategy).

Utilize Social Media and Paid Social Media Strategies

• Develop a social media plan that includes organic and paid strategies to enhance engagement and reach.
• LinkedIn and Facebook are two channels that can be leveraged for organic social, keep in mind that these platforms want to keep users on their platform, so consider how you can create an organic campaign that leverages that information.
• Follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be thought leadership and industry information, 20% should be product or company content.
• Consistency is KEY. If you can't post every day, post once a week. If you can't post once a week, post twice a month, just BE CONSISTENT

• Create compelling content suited for each platform and utilize targeted ads to boost visibility.
• Caveat: if you can consistently post a different version on each platform, do it! Reusing content is ok.
• Consider non-traditional channels for your ads, such as Reddit, Quora, or a reviews website.

Monitor, Analyze, and Optimize

• Continuously track the performance of all campaign elements using analytics tools.
• As soon as it's ready, I'll link my KPI post here.
• I like using Google Analytics, but make sure you have Google tag manager installed.
• Regularly review analytics to understand what’s working and make adjustments to strategies as needed.
• This is where those SMART goals come in: Do your analytics match to your goals?
• What do you want to change to meet your goals. Don't change too much at one time or you won't know what worked.

Conclusion:

Implementing an integrated digital demand generation campaign requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing optimization.

By following this checklist, you can ensure that every component of your campaign is aligned with your business objectives, maximizing the potential for lead generation and customer acquisition.

Remember, the key to a successful campaign lies in its integration across various platforms and tactics, ensuring a unified and compelling message reaches every segment of your targeted audience.