Top Demand Generation Challenges & Pitfalls

Demand generation is a complex strategy spanning multiple channels, touchpoints, and customer segments. Running into a few roadblocks is inevitable.

Here, we’ll go over some of the top challenges to keep in mind as you design, implement, and monitor a comprehensive demand generation strategy.

Not Talking To Your Customers Enough

Most companies cater to a few different buyer segments. It’s hard enough to create content that speaks to one audience, let alone multiple personas and their different journeys. Brands need to look toward intent data to help them identify the behaviors of the decision-makers they’re trying to reach, and how those buyers work toward resolving the problem.

Customer profiling and journey mapping need to move outside of marketing and become a cross-departmental effort, with defined roles, responsibilities, and documentation that helps you cover all of your bases.

Not Generating Results From Content

You’ve heard it a million times, content is king, and within the context of your demand generation strategy, that’s certainly the case. That said, demand generation depends on developing a tight strategy, with video, blogs, lead magnets, and more aligned to specific personas and specific touchpoints.

If you’re failing to drive the results you were hoping for, revisit your personas. What information do these people look for? What content might they find helpful? How do they prefer to consume content? Where do they go to find information?

Once you’ve defined who you’re talking to and how to help them, it’s important that you create relevant, informative content that gives your audience everything they need to make informed decisions. This means answering questions and providing information readers can apply to real-world situations—so, you’ll want to make sure content stays focused and dives deep.

Your Leads Aren’t Turning Into Customers

Maybe you’re generating a lot of engagement or a lot of web traffic, but not a whole lot of demand. In that case, there are a few things that could be happening.
Your lists aren’t properly segmented.
Instead of nurturing leads through email campaigns and remarketing, you’re getting too aggressive in your CTAs.

• You’re not following up.
• There’s a mismatch between search queries and your content.
• Customers Are Churning Like Crazy

Effective demand generation depends on the understanding that just because a deal is closed, doesn’t mean their work is done. Marketing to your existing clients is just as important, a key ingredient in growing profits through upsells and cross-sells, as well as decreasing churn.

That said, if you are marketing to existing clients to no avail, you might have a persona problem or an issue with customer satisfaction. If that’s the case, start collecting feedback, interviewing customers, and monitoring brand mentions to identify what needs to be done to improve.

Not Having The Right Data To Make Decisions

The best demand generation strategies are data-driven and have the right technology stack in place to execute the best possible results. If you’re not sure which tactics are working—or not—you won’t be able to make improvements or gain a complete understanding of your audience and their goals. As such, you’ll need to define the most important metrics early on, and continuously track them with analytics tools, marketing automation software, and your CRM.

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right attribution models so you can track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and their role in nurturing customers and driving the sale forward.