I love working in demand generation because it is this beautiful intersection of the qualitative and quantitative. We can do something that should tug heart strings, and then measure if it actually did!

Last week my quantitative side got the better of me and I presented the equation below in a management meeting:

(message) x (content)^(reuse) x (distribution) = results

Let me break down what each of these terms means to me:

• Message: you have to have something to say. A direction. This is your corporate brand identity, and then the story arc as you develop proof points with each new product release.
• Content: these are all the different ways you formulate and present your message. This includes primary, internally generated, assets such as white papers, contributed articles, speeches, webinars, and press releases. It also includes secondary assets like videos, blogs, infographics, social media posts, and email. Finally, this content includes your outreach to third parties such as press and analysts.
• Reuse: this is taking your content and distributing it across multiple platforms, whether it is publishing the same white paper in multiple languages or using the same webinar content across multiple vendors. Reuse an exponent because it allows you to get multiple hits from the same content.
• Distribution: these are all of your megaphones, all of the platforms your content uses to reach your target audiences. Examples include web, email, social media, advertising, publications, conferences, trade shows, events, and meet-ups.
• Results: are what you harvest from all of your hard work. There are obvious things that you get at the top of the funnel like coverage and sentiment. But as demand gen practitioners we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of the fact that we must produce tangible outputs for the company. So, for me, I include things like traffic, conversions, and MQLs – which are all quantifiable metrics.

Each of these variables, message, content, and distribution must be present in your equation. If any one of them is zero you will not see results. If any one of them is low or weak, you will see correspondingly low results. But… If you have all of the elements and over time work to make them progressively stronger, you will see correspondingly better results!

PR math, it’s the secret to demand generation success…