Business Development For Dummies

Chapter 11

Automating Marketing – More Leads with Less Effort

In This Chapter

Creating demand with automated marketing tools

Deciding whether to adopt marketing automation

Executing your automated demand program

Your business needs a flow of new customers on a regular basis, otherwise, bang goes your revenue goal. All marketing is an effort to increase attention from prospective customers looking for services such as yours. As a result, the department can be tempted to busy itself adding value to existing opportunities and customers and neglect generating brand new prospects.

The purpose of demand generation, by contrast, is to reach out to firms that aren’t yet active buyers but are in an early stage of identifying that they have a need and have to do something about it. That’s a tall order. Getting the attention of people you know is one thing, but reaching out to thousands of strangers to stimulate interest is quite another.

In this chapter, I focus on automated demand generation as a subcategory of marketing activity. I look at some automated demand generation techniques, helping you to plan for the use of demand generation tools and technologies and to create and deploy effective ...