The Demand Generation Manager Job Description

The responsibilities of demand generation managers are vast. By HubSpot’s definition, “Demand generation captures the umbrella of marketing programs that get customers excited about your company’s products and services.” Demand generation programs are designed to build brand awareness, launch into new markets, and promote products and services, as well as create buzz and establish customer loyalty.

Today the demand generation manager must be a revenue-centric marketer with seasoned skills in inbound and outbound marketing. The days of just creating landing pages with forms to capture leads are over. Additionally, most businesses require demand generation managers to have a proven track record of success with their marketing programs.

With budgets being restrained and impacted by the pandemic, that track record of success needs to focus on the bottom line more than ever. The demand generation strategies that go beyond impressions and clicks and directly result in conversions and customers are the areas where a demand generation manager should be specifically focused.

Whether it is through paid search, paid social or SEO, identifying the keyword strategies and audiences that are most likely to become customers is where demand generation managers can help clients the most. Making sure the demand generation team is locked in on those goals with clear conversion-related KPI’s is more critical than ever.

Aside from the need to create buzz and orchestrate multi-channel marketing programs that drive demand and revenue, the demand generation manager has countless responsibilities. Here’s just a handful of skills needed from demand generation managers:

• Develop, maintain and execute demand generation plans aligned with business goals.
• Develop a deep understanding of customers, products and the buyer’s journey.
• Work closely with other departments to build cross-functional cohesion.
• Present to upper management to get buy-in and secure budgets, as well as report results.
• Create personas tied to specific customer needs and preferences.
• Grow distribution across all channels, not just owned channels. Must be skilled in content creation supported by SEO/SEM optimization and PPC strategy.
• Ensure that content reaches the right part of the sales funnel at the right time.
• Collaborate with sales and marketing to build programs that support sales enablement.
• Leverage marketing automation and lead management to streamline, automate and measure all marketing tasks and workflows.
• Measure, analyze, and report campaign performance.

With such a list of required responsibilities, finding an experienced demand generation manager is challenging for a lot of businesses.

Where The Challenges Lie

Successful marketing campaigns require successful marketers. Successful marketers are bred after years of experience across various areas of marketing and channels.

Today, an experienced demand generation manager will cost you. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for this role in the United States is $84,000. The low end is $58,000 and the high end is $124,000. Most businesses can expect to pay closer to the high end if they’re located in a moderately sized city.

That’s a lot of money to spend on one role, especially for smaller businesses. The demand generation manager earns their salary, but it’s not always immediately favorable to the bottom line of most companies.

Another thing to consider: Just because you hire a demand generation manager, doesn’t mean they won’t need help with content, design, marketing automation, sales enablement, and press and media relations. If you’re lucky, you might find someone who’s skilled in several of those areas, but one person can only do so much. If you want quality marketing programs, you need to hire more than just a demand generation manager. If you expect your demand generation manager to wear too many hats and do all the work, you should expect to shell out.

The Hiring Alternative That Amplifies Results

Agencies are the unsung heroes of many award-winning marketing campaigns across the globe. They’re equipped to offer a broad range of services aligned to your specific business goals. Here are a few advantages to hiring an agency over an in-house demand generation manager:

Saves you money

When you hire a marketing agency, you don’t have to train, onboard or manage it. That alone saves you time and money. You also don’t have to pay payroll taxes, benefits, healthcare costs or paid time off. These things add up and take money away from your potential marketing budget.

Gives you broader expertise

An agency is equipped to give you a team of marketing experts, not just a demand generation manager. One of the greatest advantages to this is the ability to focus on strategy across all marketing activities. A strategic approach ensures that adequate attention is paid to all of your high-value marketing activities. For example, investing in SEO and PPC for specific keywords and phrases that are meaningful to your brand, goals, and content. Or leveraging different tactics for different buyer personas. When you have a team of marketers behind your programs, you have more time to focus on each area.

Most agencies have dedicated demand generation teams, which allows them to tackle the long list of responsibilities across more than one person. A demand generation manager will still be charged with establishing the strategy, allocating budgets and designing the marketing plans, but their team of experts is equipped to provide these deliverables:

• Professional content: This team is in charge of developing custom buyer personas, content frameworks and message maps for your business and brand goals. They create high-value content backed by SEO data. They build social campaigns to promote your content across all your channels. They work with PR and media relations to make sure your content is properly syndicated and branded. They build playbooks and presentations for sales enablement. The list goes on because much like the demand generation manager, content marketers require a long list of expert skills.
  
  
• Professional design: Much like it sounds, this team creates the visual design for all your marketing deliverables. These experts are hired to build entire websites, videos, landing pages, infographics, eBooks, you name it. If it needs a design element, they can do it. These teams are often skilled in more than just graphic design. They can also provide creative direction for campaign flow and message maps.
  
  
• Marketing tech: Not all agencies are staffed to cover every aspect of marketing technology. Some agencies are prepared to help you with data analysis, lead management, marketing automation and CRM, content publishing and more. Just make sure you know what you need before you hire.
  
  
• Account management: Agencies often have account managers to make sure projects are on task, on budget and approved to your standards. They facilitate meetings between the agency and your teams, and they communicate any and all feedback to the right people. This can save you a lot of time on email exchanges, meetings and the churn that all marketing programs ensue.

When you hire an agency, you get an all-in-one group of marketing experts, not just a demand generation manager. At an agency, the content team can focus on their area of expertise, as can the designers and marketing technology crew. The account manager will make sure things run smoothly. And the demand generation manager will get to do what they’re best at without having to single-handily create a marketing program.