Demand Generation Planning Strategy to Engage Customers, Prospects, and Partners

Marketing events are a strange beast. While they require significant planning, budget, and lift upfront, they are also fun and engaging ways to connect with customers and other key external stakeholders, regardless of the kind of event you’re hosting (virtual, hybrid, or in-person). However, the bottom line of marketing events is always the same – to drive awareness and interest in your team’s products, goods, or services.

What is a demand gen strategy?

Demand generation is the sum of all marketing activities, programs, and campaigns that capture interest in a brand or product. Contrary to popular belief, demand generation is about more than driving sales. It’s about creating connections, building awareness, and, yes, moving the needle on new or existing deals.

How to engage customers and drive sales

Many marketing teams and executives plan out engaging, exciting marketing events that engage customers, prospects, and partners. But connecting these activities back to demand generation goals can be tricky. Here are a few things to focus on next time your team develops your demand generation plan for marketing events or other marketing initiatives:

• Data: event marketing data is more than just tracking demo requests at a booth. Depending on the type of event you host and your attendee profile, you will have dozens of data points to gather to ensure you’re moving the needle and impacting demand gen goals. Make sure you’re syncing event data directly with your CRM platform to visualize this impact and enable sales teams to take action on these new insights.

• Collaboration: marketing teams, salespeople, field marketers – we’re all working toward the same goals. Demand gen strategy straddles the line between marketing and sales and forces both teams to plan with the other department in mind. The ultimate demand gen strategy streamlines the collaboration and engagement between these sales and marketing to deliver more focused, engaging initiatives to end-users.

• ROI Reporting: if a particular event concept or engagement strategy was particularly successful, why not repeat it? Tracking ROI at a team and executive-level make it easy for stakeholders across your organization to see precisely which demand generation activities helped to move the needle. ROI reporting also makes it possible to replicate successful campaigns to keep the success rolling.

The Circa difference

For too long, marketing events stood alone outside of a larger demand generation strategy for most marketing teams. It’s been challenging to translate big-picture event items (budget, engagement, programs, etc.) into a cohesive marketing strategy – until now. Whether virtual, hybrid, or in-person, event marketing engagement is critical to driving demand generation efforts and building valuable connections with customers, prospects, and partners.

Circa is the ultimate event marketing platform build specifically for demand generation efforts across teams. From planning and engagement solutions for field marketers to reporting and ROI insights for sales teams to follow up on, Circa makes it easy to build and execute events as part of a larger demand generation strategy.