A Demand Specialist heads up the demand gen strategies within an organization, developing, executing, and measuring the campaigns to create new buyers and drive qualified leads into the marketing pipeline. They work closely with the sales and marketing teams to nurture target audiences, profile thought leadership and build brand loyalty to aid company growth.
A specialist in demand gen will be familiar with every stage of the customer engagement journey all the way from curious stranger to delighted customer, overseeing ideation, implementation and analysis. A typical day might consist of creating content and marketing campaigns, segmenting customers to determine outreach strategies, evaluating and maintaining marketing databases, software and platforms and measuring the results. They should have the ability to use metrics to adapt and test the chosen strategy in order to hit marketing goals. In short, they need to be both tactical and strategic.
When should you hire a demand specialist?
You may need a Demand Specialist in your marketing team if you’re moving from a traditional marketing model to a strategic digital marketing approach, or if you’re not optimizing the use of your CRM and marketing automation platform and need someone to head up this process.
Firstly, identify your most pressing lead gen issue: is it the quantity, quality of the leads that’s the problem? Or is it that the leads aren’t being translated into opportunities? Or that you need better reporting and analytics? Depending on the issue(s) you can bring in a demand gen specialist who can focus on customer acquisition, driving traffic to your website to improve the quantity of leads; a specialist in lead gen to create a content and engagement strategy, omni-channel campaigns to improve quality of leads, or a technical demand specialist who can take on marketing operations to handle the lead management process, look after the day to day workflows of your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform and create reporting dashboards.