What Is the Ideal Demand Generation Team Structure?

Demand generation is how an organization builds brand awareness over time through the carefully cultivated creation and execution of engaging content. 

To support this effort, you’ll want to have a demand generation team in place. 

Each person on your demand generation team should have a unique skill set they bring to the table to foster winning relationships with your desired audience. After all, it takes much more than one person to build lasting, strong partnerships. 

But who exactly should be on your demand generation team? Here’s an overview of the roles you should have, and what they should do to strengthen your demand generation efforts within the ideal marketing team structure. 

What Should Every Demand Generation Team Have? 

There are three qualities your whole demand generation team should have:  

• Leadership: You’ll want a clear chain of command from the top down. There’s no room for disagreement over who has the final say on major decisions. 
• Expertise: While having a confident leader is important, you’ll also want to have a team of experts with specialized skill sets who understand demand generation and can develop content to support it.
• Cohesion: No team works well when they can’t communicate and collaborate. 

With this in mind, here’s the ideal structure for your team, with the roles you’ll want to have represented. 

Director of Demand Generation

The director is your leader, your head honcho, your captain. 

A director with a background in demand generation makes your team more likely to succeed. They’ll be able to direct work while providing valuable, actionable guidance to each team member. 

Your demand generation team director should also function as a marketing manager who knows what goes into effective marketing operations. They should possess a familiarity with martech, which they’ll use to execute and manage campaigns. 

Understanding concepts such as B2B marketing, the buyer’s journey, and how to build a marketing strategy will all be helpful. They should know how to implement strategies and tactics that support effective demand generation marketing campaigns. 

Whatever demand gen initiatives your team undertakes, your director will play a major role in bringing them to fruition. They may not be hands-on in developing the content, but they should have a solid feel for the campaign mission. 

Strategist

Your strategist will build out many of the research assets you’ll need to better understand your ideal customer. These assets include: 

• Personas
• Case studies
• Affinity maps
• Demographic research
• White papers
• Webinars

In some cases, your strategist will be the one developing your content, like when they develop user personas or pull research on your audience’s specific demographics. In other cases, it will be up to them to find existing resources to use as evidence (i.e. white papers or case studies). 

Your strategist will then use these assets to craft a demand generation strategy built to attract and retain customers over the long haul. They’ll come up with campaigns and marketing approaches that will appeal to your prospects over a long enough timeline to ensure they become repeat customers. 

Strategists take a holistic approach to content planning. Rather than adopting a “just-in-time” mentality to content creation, they map out what type of content is best depending on the customer’s experience with your brand. 

In terms of your marketing efforts, your strategist should understand the basic principles of all the different content types you employ to encourage demand generation. That way they’ll know which tactics to advocate for when they build your marketing campaigns. 

At this point, it should be clear your team will have a trickle-down effect: your director will clarify your mission while your strategist shapes the direction of your campaigns. The content creators are the ones tasked with actually carrying out the work.  

Content Lead

Every demand generation team should have a content lead. This person will be responsible for creating — or in the case of larger teams, guiding a team to create — your demand generation content. 

Your content lead is going to write and develop content for the various stages of the sales funnel: content intended for customers just getting started looking for a solution, customers doing research, and customers attempting to make a final buying decision. 

Taking their lead from the campaign developed by your strategist, the content lead looks to create content that supports your mission. They do this with an eye toward building brand awareness. 

Whether it’s a blog post or your website copy, your content lead should either write or oversee the writing of this material in a way that informs or persuades your customers to take action.

Your content is one of the most important parts of your outreach, as it helps you provide additional context on what your brand is all about. It can also help you build a strong connection with your customer over time, delivering consistent value over a long period. 

Demand generation is a marathon, not a sprint, which is why you’ll want a content lead who understands the specific needs of a demand generation campaign.

Lead Generation Specialist

While lead generation isn’t the same thing as demand generation, you’ll nonetheless want to have a team member who possesses lead generation knowledge and abilities. 

The ability to generate leads is critical to demand generation, it just has a longer timeline than traditional lead generation. Your lead generation specialist is going to help you build a customer base that hopefully lasts for years. 

Your lead generation specialist should know how to identify qualified leads, execute nurture campaigns, and engage in lead nurturing efforts. They can then advise the rest of your team and help direct content. 

Social Media Lead

Demand generation represents a longer-term play from a digital marketing perspective, so it may not seem appropriate to consider social media as part of your strategy. This is an incorrect assumption, however. Social media can play a huge role in demand generation. 

Having a social media lead on your demand generation team helps maintain accountability and alignment in the content you post there. You’ll ensure you’ve got a consistent voice across all channels, one that is designed to promote demand generation. 

Social media content is often developed and posted quickly, but that doesn’t mean it can’t play a big part in demand generation. Your social media lead can coordinate content appealing to new and existing customers. 

Additionally, social media is a great tool to elicit feedback from your customers to determine what you’re doing well. Having a social media lead who understands this and recommends this kind of content helps you maintain a proactive approach to handling customer feedback. 

Developing an editorial content calendar and advising creators on content to develop are just a few of the responsibilities your social media lead may have on your demand generation team. 

SEO Lead

Just like a social media or content lead, a search engine optimization (SEO) lead should possess an intimate understanding of what your specific customer wants and needs. 

The difference is that an SEO lead will perform keyword research on the type of search terms your audience members are using. They will then infuse your content with these terms in organic ways to draw in potential customers. 

One of the major tenets of demand generation is building awareness. SEO is one of the best tools to do just that. 

It taps into the single most used digital resource there is (the internet, of course) and enables you to develop content centered around the topics your target audience is looking for.

An SEO lead should work closely with the social media and content leads to ensure they’re including the right keywords in the assets they’re producing. 

They should also understand how to incorporate those keywords depending on the format. How you use SEO on social media varies from how you’d do it via your website’s landing page. 

Sales Team

Your sales team isn’t going to be an actual part of your demand generation team, but they should work very closely with them. 

The sales team will have vital information — lead scoring, sales enablement, lead generation — they can share with your demand generation team. The two teams should work in conjunction, supplementing the other when they need certain information to do their jobs better.

When your customers are at different stages of the sales cycle or different parts of their customer journey, it’s the sales team who will know this. They should share that information with the demand generation team so they can develop content that is well-suited to the customer’s specific pain points.

Welcome Is Here to Help!

When you’re building your demand generation team, you’ll want to include each of the positions listed above. You’ll also want to be sure you empower your team members with the tools they’ll need to work together. 

When teams don’t talk, they stagnate. Picking the right platform for collaboration, project management, and all your marketing needs is critical to your success.

That’s why Welcome is the best platform out there. Welcome offers a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions that will keep your demand generation team ready to tackle any campaign. 

For more on how Welcome can help, reach out for a demo today.