Which mantra gets you up in the morning and through your day as a marketer? There are classics like:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits them and sells itself.” ~ Peter F. Drucker.
“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.” ~ David Ogilvy.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” ~ David Packard
“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”  ~ Milan Kundera
“Content is King!” ~ Bill Gates.

Or are you “down” with a less certain Information Age style exhortation:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” ~ Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger.

Either way, we can all use inspiration as we seek to create, consume, coordinate and measure our valiant efforts to market into a world moving faster and to customers becoming smarter than ever. So we’ve designed a unique process that will help you to generate demand in the right way, and also gathered a baker’s dozen (and three more) experts to answer the cheeky but realistic question:

SocialAgenda Media: What things should you consider so your 2014 lead generation campaigns are less likely to suck?   😉

Miles Barry, Head of Marketing at MDSL:
(MDSL creates world-leading expense and lifecycle management solutions).

1. Don’t under-estimate the power of PR, particularly when it’s supported by clear metrics for measuring its effectiveness.
2. As above – thorough follow-up is everything, in order to demonstrate ROI and compare campaigns’ effectiveness.
3. Know which analysts are tracking your business and how they see the future for the markets in which you operate – i.e. what will they be telling your customers to watch for next year? Work with Product Development to make sure the new trends, where possible, are on your roadmap and communicate that back to the analysts. If that sounds like: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them it; then tell them what you told them”, then so be it.
4. Content programs are labor-intensive, resource-hungry and high maintenance. Don’t underestimate the resources required, and budget accordingly.
5. Video is increasingly prominent in B2B lead-gen but expensive to produce, maintain and display online. Plan and budget accordingly.
6. Marketing and lead-gen is becoming increasingly spread (thinly, some might argue) over multiple channels and media. Don’t underestimate the resources required to coordinate what can become a series of disparate projects and ensure a consistent message and image is projected across them all.
7. When someone suggests “re-doing the website”, quietly arrange for them to disappear (joke).

Tyler Reed, Manager, Demand Generation & CRM at Control4:
(Control4 builds one-remote, home automation solutions and products).

8. More videos.
9. Landing page creative refresh.
10. Use current customers to produce low effort content.
11. Refine our targeting messages.
12. Optimize and test everything. Landing pages, emails, PPC campaigns, SEO, social, everything!

Sarah Noel, Product Marketing Manager at Flexera Software:
(Flexera enables companies to get more value from their applications).

13. Market research into target markets in which we are trying to grow our business before doing any lead generation activities to them.
14. Do activities that drive leads of a high quality rather than high quantities of leads
15. Don’t go with the hype!  Social media may have a huge audience but it may not be the audience after which we should go.
16. Continue to localise in the international markets to ensure we are “localising” the content we are producing, not just translating it.
17. Work with consultants for very specific markets in which we operate (i.e. Japan and China). Local knowledge is key and you can’t expect to market to these countries unless you have knowledge from people who are in country.
18. More lead nurturing campaigns for non-English speaking countries.
19. Make sure our websites, emails, etc. are mobile-friendly.
20. Continue to produce content that shows we are thought leaders and trusted advisors.  Try to ensure we are telling a story when we talk to our audience.
21. Be unique!  Do something different that makes you stand out from the crowd!  (In a good way, of course…)

Nate Pruitt, Senior Director, Demand Generation at Shoretel:
(Shoretel’s solutions, whether on-site or in the cloud, exploit the power of IP with unified communication tools).

22. If you focus on keywords, content, and conversion – you have a winner.
23. If you are talking about list rentals, 3rd party telemarketing, buyer personas, and outbound email campaigns – you suck

Jeff Asada, VP of Business Development at Viscira:
(Viscira is a leading provider of interactive, new-media communication and technology solutions for the life sciences industry).
Jeff’s answers reflect the movie theme questions that were asked during his interview for the Demand Generation on the big screen: Tragedies, Blockbusters, Mysteries & Horrors article.

24. No “Boiler Room”:  Do your homework with the financials, forecasts and projections and align marketing activities to this.
25. Find your inner “Nemo”:  Dream and think big, and comprehend the value of taking risks and placing bets where they make sense.
26. No I in team…play like “Hoosiers”:  Understand your internal team dynamics, sales and marketing cohesion is critical for success.
27. “A Few Good Men” challenges us to test for the truth, and doing so for any campaign allows us to pivot towards future success.
28. Forrest Gump made the most of his timing:  As marketers, we should try our best to take advantage of today’s convergence of media and make the next campaign better than a box of chocolates.

Susan Vitale, Chief Marketing Officer at iCIMS:
(iCIMS is a leading provider of software-as-a-service talent acquisition solutions).

29. Plan, plan, and plan:  If you are planning more activity during the current month, you need more people on your team. It’s so important to pre-plan. Alloting more time for campaign creation, more time can be focused on optimization and analysis.
30. Consider a multi-touch, repetitive content approach:  Are you echoing your messaging across channels? Research shows that prospects who don’t convert the first time may convert the second, third, or fourth time they see your ads. By implementing a multi-touch, repetitive content strategy across the board, you are engaging in nurture tactics without even intending to (or maybe it is intentional). You may gain more leads that you would have lost otherwise
31. Budget time & funds to test:  When planning your budgets, make sure to include a pocket of funds and a timeline for exploring new tactics and vendors. Online Demand Generation options evolve at a very rapid place. Be sure to put some time and money aside to identify the new vehicles that may become integral to your company’s success moving forward. Be sure to have a means to evaluate testing spend and quickly pivot from techniques that are not effective — but do give your team a runway to try some approaches that are unproven.
32. Get rid of dead weight:  If you want campaign success, go back to the failure analysis. Don’t work with a vendor just because there could be some brand potential. Brand should always be a consideration, but there are so many ways to spend and there may be a better place to invest. Eliminate the vendors/campaigns that aren’t working. Ensure that standard reports are issued so everyone on your team is on the same page regarding what is driving performance and what isn’t.
33. Process simplification: Sometimes firms are so focused on bigger and better things that they neglect standardizing and simplifying everyday processes that staff must go through to get a campaign live and functional. Eliminate the ineffective processes/red tape, etc. and simplify the path towards success.
34. Make sure Sales is onboard:  It’s one thing to bring in leads from a campaign that your team puts together, but it’s a whole other ball park to get those leads to convert. Make sure the Sales staff is trained on the marketing material so they can more effectively and efficiently reduce the time to convert.

Jay Millard, COO, Amadeus Consulting:
(Amadeus Consulting is a company that builds custom technology solutions for their customers).

35. You achieve what your plan dictates:  In the absence of a true measurable lead plan, you will have uncertain results.  Have a plan, take action, and be ready to adjust.  These plans aren’t static; they operate in the environment of the real world.  Changing course is acceptable when not done recklessly in the absence of a plan.  When you adapt for a purpose because you understand both what you intended to happen and what actually happened, your course correction is not only purposeful…it will likely ensure your success.

John Sarich, Vice President of Strategy, VUE Software:
(VUE Software is a software solutions for the Insurance Industry).

36. Get aligned with what is happening in your market, industry, and customers.
37. What specifically is your value proposition?
38. Determine the “why buy now” for each and every product or service you offer, and get that into all of your content.
39. Develop an overarching theme for your marketing initiatives and use that theme in all messaging.
40. Make all messaging relevant to each specific market segment in which you operate.
41. Make certain that sales management is on-board with the entire go-to-market strategy.

Trish Stromberg, Vice President of Demand Generation at Infinisource:
(Infinisource is a leader in workforce management, HR, benefits administration & payroll processing solutions).

42. Create content, but not just any content:  Ensure it is engaging, but most importantly that it provides true insight that the customer wants.
43. Mobile:  Ensure your campaigns are all mobile friendly.

Meagen Eisenberg, Vice President of Demand Generation at DocuSign:
(DocuSign is a provider of cloud-based electronic signature technology that facilitates exchanges of contracts, tax documents and legal materials).

44. Better segmentation for better targeting.  Collect the right information on the lead at the form or list acquisition.  You need personal and company information.
45. What technologies can you leverage so that you better target your communications when leads come in?  At DocuSign, we leverage Eloqua, Demandbase and Mintigo to capture the information we need to better message.  We use Eloqua as our marketing database to capture and normalize the data, such as title to a certain department use case.  Demandbase provides us with the company information through a real-time API call – no need to ask for any location or company info, such as revenue, size of company, industry, country, state, zip, etc.  Only need to ask for personal information on your form.  And we use Mintigo to better understand our existing customer DNA across different segments as well as better score with more information.
46. Better lead scoring.  Implement a model that has two points to reference – a letter for firmographic info and a number for engagement.  Both of those are important pieces of information to deliver to sales to make them more efficient and effective.  Ex. A1 – they meet our target criteria and they are engaged with us on our website, email or within the product.  Prepare to tweak the model based on learnings.
47. ROI model to show and learn from what marketing campaigns are working and what are not.
48. Partner with your sales team.  They are in hand-to-hand combat and have a lot of good insights into what is working and what is not.  Solicit their feedback and improve your programs.
49. Monitor conversions closely.  What types of leads convert?  Build that back into your lead scoring model.
50. Be creative.  Don’t forget the Art in Art & Science.  Channels are crowded.  Find new channels or be very creative in how you get targets to engage.
51. Add social where you can to expand your reach and peer referral capabilities.  Example, make sure all whitepapers, webinars, blogs, posts, etc. can be tweeted, liked, +1, posted, etc.

Umesh Malhotra, Director of Demand Generation at Arena Solutions:
(Arena provides affordable product lifecycle management (PLM) for manufacturers of all sizes).

As Director of Demand Generation, I would do the following:

52. Measure the ROI of all marketing campaigns launched in past quarters.
53. How many of the leads converted into customers?
54. If any marketing campaign was a pricey spend but didn’t convert into a customer, that’s OK. As long as the lead has converted into a medium-to-high opportunity stuck in the pipeline and waiting to convert into a sale.
55. Eliminate campaigns that didn’t work and are not working.
56. Campaigns that are working, increase spend to generate more leads.
57. Experiment with campaigns that were never experimented in the history of the company.
58. Promote campaigns in places where majority of your audience hangs out the most (Sites, articles, events, etc.).

Heidi Bullock, Senior Director Marketing at Marketo:
(Marketo provides easy and powerful marketing automation software with everything a marketer needs: email, social, analytics, lead management, and more).

59. Make sure you are communicating the right message at the right time:  To do this, one critical step is to map content to the buying cycle.  There is awareness, evaluation, and purchase.  Your buyer needs different types of content depending on where they are in this process.  Think about looking at the assets you already have and identify where there are gaps.
60. Segmenting so people get the right message for them:  This can always be refined, updated, and optimized.
61. Running multi-channel campaigns:  Today’s consumers move seamlessly across digital and offline channels, and in general, will access information in whatever way is easiest for them (web, mobile, tablets).  Run campaigns that have a consistent message but engage users in different ways.  For example, if you have a product launch, consider announcing it with a press release, engage your audience with an email campaign and a complementary webinar series, use a referral campaign to drive additional engagement, and promote on social.
62. Testing and really doing something with the data to inform your campaigns: Every business is different – you need to test and optimize for your business and audience.
63. Nurture/scoring:  Get these components right.  The majority of those you engage are not ready to buy immediately – they require nurturing.  Nurturing can shorten the buying cycle significantly when done well.  If you need new ideas, consider the 4-1-1 rule.  This is where you run four entertaining content pieces (or educational), followed by a soft promotion (attend a webinar), then a harder promotion (sign up for a demo).
64. Lead scoring is another area to focus on and continue to optimize.
65. And lastly, try something new!  It is important to test different programs and channels.  Keep testing assumptions – things can change!

Randy Littleson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Flexera Software:
(Flexera provides software licensing management, software compliance, installation and application packaging solutions).

66. As noted previously, we need to do more around content tied to various personas – speak more personally to each persona rather than generally.  We need to get more proactive in leveraging the really strong reporting we have today to fine-tune our decisions.  We need to increase the integration across all of our campaign elements so we have more things “rowing in the same direction” and working to support each other rather than disparate efforts.  We need to conduct more direct research with our market on their preferences and buying process – we rely on too much indirect information today.

Brent Baker, Key Account Manager (former Marcom Manager), Swagelok Northwest (US):
(Swagelok is the home of the unique “One Swagelok” business model, which includes a network of more than 200 exclusive authorized sales and service centers in more than 70 countries).

In order to develop programs that don’t suck the following questions need to be answered:

67. What’s important to the business?
68. What lead generation activities are you good at?
69. What lead generation activities are you bad at?
70. How well do you know your customers?
71. How well do you know your sales team?

Alice Lankester, CMO at Friend2Friend:
(Friend 1Frind is a company that engages fans with brands on social since 2007).

72. Most important, never, ever ignore the mobile experience! On Facebook mobile now represents more than 40 percent of all Facebook’s ad revenue for the most recent quarter, and Zuckerberg indicates he expected mobile revenue to exceed desktop “soon.”  On LinkedIn, mobile now accounts for 38% of all traffic, and Weiner indicates he expects that to be close to 50% in 2014.
73. Any brand that isn’t studying behavior on mobile is putting itself in a dark room, with a blindfold on. Everything that a consumer does in a brand’s digital presence should be studied for mobile habits. Tablet? Mobile? Which mobile phone? Is the same user visiting on desktop or mobile, or both, and when? Every brand owner should study the whole consumer journey on mobile, from start to finish. No point in the journey should lie un-inspected on mobile.

Marcia Kadanoff, CMO at Bislr:
(Bislr is a provider of the intelligent marketing OS for marketing automation, content management, and real-time analytics).

Content marketing is the fuel that fires all lead generation campaigns.  What this means for you is that in 2014 you’ll want to:

74. Create fewer pieces of content but really make sure they get noticed, using a combination of email (the backbone of every lead nurturing program) but also social media.  If your marketing automation program cannot support integrated flows like this, consider replacing it with one that can.
75. Make every piece of content you create arresting in terms of its visual content.  Visuals light up the part of the brain that is more emotional and less logical … giving your brand a distinct advantage.  We like to think that business buyers are (always) rational but the fact of the matter is that B2B buyers are people, not job titles.
76. Walk a mile in the buyer’s shoes.  What content do they need to get to be able to understand the issues in your category and buy with confidence? Forget about self-serving content that talks about you.  Instead, create content that speaks to the benefits of your product in a way that is unique to your brand and also resonates with your prospective buyer.
77. Optimize your lead generation programs not just for conversion but also for mobile viewing using responsive design.  I cannot tell you how important this is.  Already some brands are seeing 50% of their opens and click throughs for emailing happen on email.  In 2014, we expect this number to go up to 60-70%.

Jim Van Meer, Creative Director, Global Industry Services at the American Petroleum Institute:
(API Global represents all of America’s oil and natural gas industry).

78. Insist on quality:  There’s already too much crap in the world. No need to add more.
79. Reach higher:  The low-hanging fruit will always be there, but don’t ignore them. And, be willing to reach higher and go after markets you may never have considered.
80. Let the creative be creative:  Coming from the creative side, I can say that the more creative the campaign, the better the leads. Let the creative people do what they do best. They’ll appreciate you more and they’ll do better work for you, which will give you better results.
81. Use common sense:  The answer to effective marketing is not found in a database. It’s found in the real world, populated by real people with real lives, real problems, and real thoughts. Use your common sense when you generate leads. Address your audience as if they were sitting right next to you.
82. Look at the big picture:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the creative group is out of control, the product engineers insist the technical data be a major feature, and the bean counters are raising fiery hoops for you to jump through. That’s what’s called a normal day at work. But don’t give up. Plow ahead, but don’t look down the road – look over the horizon. Over the horizon is where you can stand and see the big picture. You’ll know it once you’ve crested the hill. Once you see the big picture, you’ll see a campaign that doesn’t suck.

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Also read:

• 50+ Things Every Demand Generation Manager Should Do Before The Next Budgeting Cycle So They Look Brilliant In the Boardroom
• 9 Awesome B2B Marketing Tips: Steps To Undertake To Penetrate Your Sales Channel In 90 Days
• Make Content Your Most Valuable Sales Rep: Marketing-Sales Alignment Tips for Engagement With Your Audiences & Boosting Closing Rates
• B2B Content Marketing Lessons & Strategies for 2014: Interviews With Thought Leaders
• Marketing to the Internal Audience – From Low ROI To Cost-Effective Corporate Training
• Leadership The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation – interview with ex-SVP of Apple, Jay Elliot
• Top 5 Most Important But Not Obvious Principles Of Selling And Business In General – interview with speaker Richard Grehalva