Great content brings in a great audience, and no one knows this better than our team at Position². We hosted a webinar in collaboration with SiriusDecisions – ‘The Secret Sauce of Demand Acceleration Is in Your Content’. Here are the 10 steps we follow to help grow your business.

Skill sets: An often overlooked step zero is identifying the resources that can execute the functions. Every step has components that require very different skill sets, and one of the first things you need to do is decide what can be done in-house and what can be outsourced.

Step 1: Goals

Set goals for each stage of the funnel. A basic step is to establish what business marketing wants to be responsible for. Then, work backward from that to see what you need at each stage. You can start by setting goals based on industry benchmarks and tweak them as you learn more.

Step 2: Match to Funnel Stages

Each component of Demand Acceleration (Content, AdTech, and MarTech) needs to be adjusted by the sales stage and the state of your funnel. The content you need at each stage is going to be different and therefore must be prioritized based on where your biggest leads are. Similarly, the ads you want to run will change too, and the nurture and programs you want to execute will also vary.

Step 3: Personas

Identify personas and define the content, ads, and nurture for each persona. To get off the ground quickly, start a campaign targeting one persona before you do the work for the others.

Step 4: Mind the Gaps

Inventory existing content and identify where the gaps are. Based on what you have available and how long it will take to develop what you don’t have, you can form a strategy for programs that you can kick off now and those that need more time.

Step 5: Amplify

Amplify the content that exists by repurposing. Take one or two startup pieces of content and break them into a smaller, more snackable set of assets. Match the assets to the personas and the sales stages, and because they are quick and easy to produce, you now have a way to fill out your matrix.

Step 6: The Theme

Campaigns typically do well when you have a visual theme. As your audience receives multiple communications from you about a single campaign, it will be clear to them that they are on a journey together with you.

Step 7: Media Mix

As we mentioned earlier, great content deserves a great audience, and a central piece of any campaign is the use of paid channels to bring new visitors to consume your content. Start with the total number of leads you want at the end of the campaign and work backward to figure out the ad spend media mix.

Step 8: Deploy AdTech

Optimize your spends to get the most out of your money. Start a lead level optimization to figure out how many leads you’re getting from each of the different channels. What paid channels are producing leads that make it through the pipeline to MQL and opportunity? Which ones are doing so at a good velocity? This information will give you valuable insights to make some marketing mix adjustments.

Step 9: Optimize Deeper Into the Funnel

Use the data you get at every stage of the funnel to adjust and fine-tune your sales funnel, differentiating between MQL, SQL, and SAL opportunities. This will help you restructure your budget and bucket campaign spends in different lead gen stages.

Step 10: Map and Share

Choreographing Content, AdTech, and MarTech, and mapping out how they play together is what the last step is all about. Use charts and hand-drawn sketches to map it all out and answer questions about the campaigns. What channels are bringing in leads? What should happen to the leads once they come in? If they do not convert on a landing page, do we use retargeting? By doing so, you will avoid a lot of confusion and make it clear to everyone working on the campaign what the next step is going to be.

The Demand Acceleration Framework is designed around the buyer’s needs. At Position², we use the ten steps to deliver significant improvements in our clients’ B2B sales programs across awareness, engagement, and purchase stages.

View our recorded webinar for a more comprehensive view on Demand Acceleration.