Digital Strategy and Enablement 

90% of buyers say that when they are ready to buy, they will find you. (Source) Implied: “Until then, leave me alone and stop interrupting.”

64% of buyers say content had a significant impact on their buying decision. (Source)

46% of buyers list ‘web search’ as their first place to go to find information. (Source)

Demand generation is creating awareness and interest in a company’s product and/or service through targeted marketing activities. It may include multiple inbound and outbound touch points like social media, web, mobile, email, telemarketing and video. These tactics drive the customer along the buying journey, provide sales with leads and increasingly, culminate with B2B ecommerce transactions.

At Cisco demand generation provides real-time content to our customers based on previous digital engagements, personalizes content and offers for the customer through segmentation/ targeting, gathers invaluable information on the customer to share with our partners, automates the passing of qualified leads to sales, and enriches outbound calls by using inbound data.

Activities implemented on Cisco.com to improve demand generation results include:

• Offer landing pages are now in a mobile-friendly responsive web design and are globally ready to improve awareness and engagement in capturing prospect reveals (registrations)
• Upsell messaging is demand generation specific, like product upgrades,  trade-in offers, and product comparisons on series level pages, datasheets and top performing end-of-live pages
• Let Us Help (LUH) module is added to top trafficked datasheets which generate approximately 15% MQL
• Geo targeted banners have been implemented on the U.S. Cisco.com homepage to target 58% of the global (non-US) visitors who visit the page, providing banners in their local language, which makes it easier for global visitors to read and respond
• New, responsive ‘we can help’ form which includes demand generation specific contact information expanded globally
• Geo-targeted contact us/ let us help modules in local language on select U.S. pages for global visitors is connected to their local contact center rather than a U.S contact center
• New proactive chat design to provide help to the visitor when they want it
• Integrated contextual demand generation offers are written seamlessly into the content of the page so that the visitor isn’t aware it’s an offer, implemented on the DX series pages

Demand generation highlights:

• $3.254B is the total SQL goal for FY15
• $3,828,346,896 in SQL has been generated so far through the end of Q3 FY15 – yes, we are ahead of pace ($1.678M from AMER, $1.322M from EMEAR, $509M from APJC, and $321M from GC)
• 88% of SQL is from outbound demand generation activities like email blasts or telemarketing campaigns
• 12% of SQL is captured from inbound demand generation activities like owned organic (Cisco.com) traffic, paid drive to’s (banner ads) and earned organic natural search
• Our FY15 joint inbound goal for the digital and GDC* teams is 1 million reveals (registrations) and $750 million in SQLs (sales qualified leads), with a stretch goal of $1B SQLs
  • So far YTD thru end of Q3: 595,000 reveals have been generated from demand generation activities to meet our goal (62% of goal met) ??? and
  • $450M in SQLs have been generated through the end of Q3 FY15 to meet our goal (60% of goal met)
• The conversion rate for inbound response (reveals) to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is 11% (moving the customer through the early stages of the buying journey)
• Then, as a next significant step, the conversation rate for MQL to SQL is 45% (moving the customer further along the buying journey towards bookings and revenue)