Chicago—Brian Krause, VP-marketing and communications at Molex Inc., outlined his process for improving demand generation Thursday at a Business Marketing Association seminar here.

Demand generation, which Krause defined as the art and science of developing, nurturing and maintaining buying interest in a company's products and services, is often a problem area for marketers. Strong, integrated lead generation is the first and most important step in the process, he said.

“You must actually have email addresses in order to run an email marketing campaign,” he said. “You need to do your homework on that front-end piece.” Molex, a global manufacturer of connectors, works multiple channels, including SEO and social media, to drive potential customers to its website and convert them into leads.

Once a company has a strong database of emails that has been “developed, cleansed and segmented,” the next step is investing in marketing automation. When customers are on the company website, marketing automation helps to “read their digital body language” and react to their behavior, Krause said. This creates an environment for effective lead nurturing.

“[Lead nurturing] is understanding what the customer is looking for and what they want to talk about,” Krause said. “It's understanding who these people are.” For Molex, lead nurturing enables its marketing staff to see where in the production cycle an engineer viewing its products might be, then allows the company to align other, related products to that person.

Krause also emphasized the importance of constant evaluation of all parts of a demand-generation program. “You need to constantly be making tweaks and changes to improve,” he said. “We have had some great wins, but we are still evolving.”