17 Apr Why Demand Gen Marketing Firms Cost So Much

Let’s say you’re interested in finding more business from your existing customers and you do not want to do the work yourself.  So, you turn to a demand gen firm or consultant.

If you engage a traditional demand gen firm (or consultant) to connect to your customers using an integrated marketing campaign, expect it to take longer than you thought and come with a hefty price tag!  Why?  Because the only way a traditional demand gen firm (or consultant) can do this for you is by using a variety of different marketing software tools.

What do I mean?  Well, let’s take a simple case where you were trying to reach your customers via email, texting, and targeted social (Facebook).  And each digital channel takes your customers to one or more web landing page(s).

Ignoring whether the demand gen firm (or consultant) is using marketing software tools it has licensed or they have access to yours, at a high level, they would have to:

Use a web landing page creation tool (Joomla, WordPress, etc.):

1. Create one or more web landing pages that could be tracked by Google Analytics or some other analytics tool
2. Test the web pages, etc.

Use an email marketing tool (MailChimp, ConstantContact, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.):

1. Load a database with your customer’s email addresses, cleanse the database, and maybe even augment it
2. Create your email content (including links to web landing pages)
3. Setup the campaign - who to target, when to run it, etc.
4. Run the campaign and gather the stats

Use a text marketing tool (SlickText, Twilio, Plivo, etc.):

1. Load a database with your customer’s cell phone numbers, cleanse the database, and maybe even augment it
2. Create your text content (including links to web landing pages)
3. Set up the campaign - who to target, when to run it, etc.
4. Run the campaign and gather the stats

Use Facebook Ads Manager:

1. Set up a Facebook Ads account (if it doesn’t exist)
2. Provide Facebook Ads Manager with a list of customer email addresses
3. Create your Facebook ad (referencing a web landing page)
4. Setup the campaign
5. Run the campaign and gather the stats

If this was not enough, they would also have to use Google Analytics to gather stats relating to the web landing pages. Lastly, they would use Word or Excel (or something else) to pull together all the stats into a single place to report to you on the effectiveness (clicks, opens, impressions, etc.) of this single marketing campaign that used 3 digital channels to reach your customers.   And no where in this report will you know how many leads or how much business you generated.

For a traditional marketing demand gen firm (or consultant),  to run this integrated marketing campaign for you requires expertise across a variety of marketing software tools and a whole lot of manual effort.  This is why it takes more time than expected and comes with a hefty price tag!

Unlike the traditional demand gen firms, at eRelevance, we have developed proprietary technology that automates the process described above; dramatically lowering the time it takes to execute an integrated marketing campaign.  And, lowers the price tag a great deal too!