A marketing strategist and a demand generation marketer walk into a bar…

Is demand generation strategic? Who builds the digital strategy for an organization? Aren’t they the same thing, or close to it? It seems that marketers, sales teams and even their organizations have some confusion over the two terms and what they mean. Demand generation is strategic only when done correctly. Otherwise, it is too often disorganized email marketing mayhem. Additionally, an effective digital strategy incorporates much more than just demand generation programs and needs to drive more than just demand.

This month jump starts 2018 with the first big event of the year: the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, Ariz. This year’s event boasts top B2B marketing and sales professionals, analysts and authors across six different tracks to help hone marketing skills and deliver best practices. Tracks cover topics such as account-based marketing via ABM in Action Live!, content marketing in Content2Conversion and everything channel related in Channel Marketing. However, the Demand Gen Summit and Digital Strategy tracks are what got me thinking about the challenges marketers face when developing and defining programs and strategies to drive revenue in their organizations.

Three ways demand generation and digital strategy are different, yet similar:

Demand Generation Is Not Just Email: Demand Generation is any activity — digital or otherwise (press releases, events, podcasts, or content) — that drives demand (revenue) for an organization or product. Most marketers equate email campaigns with demand generation and they aren’t wrong.

However, today’s demand generation is much more than email, as our buyers use every channel available to them, including voice. Marketers and sales need to adapt. The Demand Gen Summit track offers sessions on everything from Lenovo’s focus on Intent Marketing, to Cross-Channel Marketing with EMC and Oracle + Bronto to Balancing Community, Conversation and Conversion.

Digital Strategy Means Print, Too: Nothing is forever except what is “printed” on the Internet. Digital content can’t be recycled in a bin like an old Time Magazine from 1952. But when you think about your digital strategy, don’t forget about the printed versions of digital publications (there are some that are relevant to your buyers).
Digital strategy means the integration of all programs, campaigns, content and conversations that are online. Without a documented strategy that also considers print or other offline components, organizations run the risk of duplicating content, wasting valuable media spend or worse, annoying their buyers due to irrelevant content. The Digital Strategy track delivers insights into how to build an Agile Digital Strategy with Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas; Empathy: The Hallmark of the Customer-Obsessed B2B Marketer with Laura Ramos from Forrester and Next Level Native with BuzzFeed’s Edwin Wong. Digital strategy means anything your buyer can access digitally, but we need to think tangentially.

Most Marketers Aren’t Equipped To Do This Stuff, Yet: We keep innovating and changing so much in marketing and sales that teams struggle to keep up. With almost 6,000 martech solutions and new best-practices introduced every day, marketing and sales has to focus on their day job of driving revenue, but learning new skills, concepts and technologies are vitally important too. When do we expect our teams to learn what they need to for success?

The six tracks available at #B2BMX offer insights and valuable education into the newest and best ways to succeed in our roles as marketing and sales professionals. Case studies and Behind The Scenes sessions help show how our peers are implementing new programs or finding out the hard way that something doesn’t resonate with their buyers. Networking opportunities give attendees personal references for new talent to build out their teams or move to a new organization.

Hands-on time with leading martech vendors enables us to bridge the gaps in technology or skills to become confident with new roles or solutions. Education helps lessen the confusion around rapidly evolving demand generation and digital strategies that we need and use each day.