Demand generation is quickly becoming one of the most effective marketing strategies today. B2B and SaaS have been drawn to this tactic due to its all-encompassing nature. It offers a highly efficient, consistent, and streamlined strategy when engaging with prospects. From the time they are entirely unaware of your company’s existence to the closing of the deal, this method will provide you a comprehensive approach.
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation marketing pertains to the systematic and all-inclusive program related to marketing and sales. It aims to generate public interest in your brand and offerings. It also nurtures leads into customers and finds ways on how you can retain them. As compared to lead generation, this is not just a method to discover business opportunities. It also pertains to creating opportunities. You will pay attention to data-driven growth, marketing, and sales alignment. This process will allow you to make wise decisions that will lead to the progress of your company. The conventional marketer will focus on the number of generated leads. The marketer specializing in demand gen will concentrate more on the total amount of revenue they contribute.
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation
While demand generation advertising and the traditional form of lead generation may appear similar, there are particular distinctions that will separate these two. Some marketers will be indiscriminate when capturing leads. They will not pay too much attention to the persona of the prospects that qualify as sales leads. For instance, someone who visited the site and left their contact information will immediately be considered by some as a lead. This situation is pretty common among companies that heavily rely on cold callings.
Your demand generation manager determines prospects according to their initiated actions. The marketer will then take this prospect into a lengthy lead nurturing process. It ensures that the sales team will have authentic and higher-quality leads, resulting in a better conversion rate. Demand gen is also more thorough than lead gen. However, it is also longer. It includes a seamless collaboration between the marketing and sales team and will consist of the element of email marketing, inbound, and direct marketing. In some areas, demand and lead generation may also overlap. For instance, if your offering requires increasing registrations, both of them are applicable.
What Are the Importance of Demand Generation?
Demand gen offers an enormous number of benefits to all businesses. Whether you are a startup company or a seasoned business in this industry, the advantages written below will convince you to integrate this into your marketing process.
Improving Your Brand Awareness
Demand generation marketing could be a powerful force that will drive your brand awareness campaign. It will not simply encourage people to visit your website. It will help you advance your marketing campaign, especially to people who may not know your product. A considerable part of the demand gen campaign involves bringing traffic that is interested and highly engaged. Nonetheless, brand awareness is just the initial benefit of this approach. Eventually, you will arouse the public’s interest and develop the needs for your service or product.
Targeted Leads
While demand generation advertising has a broader focus than lead generation, well-formulated demand gen could contribute to capturing high-quality and valuable leads. If you do the process appropriately, it will fill your sales funnel with potential leads. Moreover, a good percentage of this will be high quality. However, depending on the industry where you belong, nurturing this lead may take a very long time. In some cases, it can take years before you can successfully convert them.
Increase Your Revenue through Demand Generation
Since there will be more qualified leads, then you should expect that your revenue will also increase. Demand generation manager offers both short-term and long-term benefits, especially on your income. Therefore, you can expect it to reflect the changes in your revenue in a few months as you are building your pipeline and nurturing your leads. Remember that you will have to develop a consistent rapport and communication with your audience.
What Are the Best Demand Generation Strategy for My Business?
Now that you have a clear idea of demand generation marketing, you will need to know how to implement it or integrate it into your marketing plans. Here are some of the best methods that are being used by industry leaders today.
Free Stuff!
Everyone loves freebies; no one cares if it is just a part of your promotional or marketing campaign. Whether free downloadable content or a special offer, be sure that you are giving your best stuff to your audience. While some businesses may think that this process is counter-intuitive, offering freebies will have an array of benefits.
- Forging Trust- Handing out freebies to your audience will build a sense of reliability and trust between the business and the customers. Therefore, it is highly likely that they will return to your website and content.
- Improve Brand Awareness- People will see you in a more positive light. Your engaged prospects may decide to take the necessary steps and become your brand ambassadors. They will advocate for your brand and recommend your product to the people around them.
- Capture Lead- By offering the people something valuable, they will be more obliged to provide you with information that you need, such as their contact information.
Free Tools and Resource can also advance your demand generation advertising campaign. However, developing a free tool will not be a simple feat. There are various things that you may need to consider, such as the development budget.
Lookalike Audiences
This strategy is for those who are already advertising on Facebook. For those who are not yet on this social media platform, it is time for you to evaluate your marketing approach since you could be missing a lot of opportunities. Be sure to take advantage of one of its powerful tools-Lookalike Audiences. As the name suggests, this feature presents users that resemble the audience that has already show interest in your brand. The platform will consider the behavioral similarities and demographics when determining the users. Also, it allows you to create custom audiences based on the information you’ve collected from your visitors or audience.
- Double Your Reach- Perhaps the most significant benefit of Lookalike Audiences is that it allows you to spread the reach of your advertising campaign. It gives you the power to cast a wider net and capture more potential leads.
- Powerful- There has been a noticeable increase in the average time that people stay on Facebook. Therefore, you can use Lookalike Audiences as one of your most potent demand generation tools.
Consider Lead Scoring
Demand Generation marketing will not be simply about increasing the number of your leads; you also want to guarantee its quality. With lead scoring, you can quickly tell whether the lead is the kind of leads your sales team needs to ramp up the company’s revenue. With lead scoring, you may need to evaluate the behavior and action history of the prospects. You will need to know whether they developed sufficient interest in your product or whether they expressed an intent to purchase it. Nonetheless, there are instances when lead scoring may not be appropriate for your brand. For example, if you struggle to generate enough leads, there’s no sense in worrying about the lead score.
Email Marketing
It would be best if you also decided to implement email marketing as a part of your demand generation strategy. Unfortunately, not a lot of marketers will realize its potential. When using this method, A/B testing is vital. If you resort to an email bomb strategy, you are basically driving the customers away from you and intentionally harming your brand. Everything related to your email campaign must be analyzed and tested. You must test everything from offer placement, linking strategies, subject line, and the length of the headline, which will help you develop a more informed choice. It is more effective than basing your actions on your assumptions.
Avoid spamming and make sure that you will only offer your audience something valuable. Delivering messages with low value and little information will guarantee that your audience will unsubscribe to your mailing list.
Content Creation
You should invest more of your resources in creating high-quality content. A comprehensive content creation strategy tailored for your demand generation advertising will include elements such as providing the audience with valuable resources or some of your best stuff. Compared to other methods we mentioned above, content creation is a long-term investment. It requires patience, commitment, and consistency to produce regular content that will attract the interest of your audience.
Those who are blogging should find ways on how they can make this more valuable. Perhaps they should integrate research and real-time data, offer infographics, insight about the emerging trend. Before posting your content, ask yourself if the audiences will be willing to spend some of their time consuming the material you published.
Lead Magnets
Lead Magnets, especially when combined with SEO and content creation, could help you develop a solid demand generation strategy. If your content creation method involves downloading something valuable, which resonates with your audience’s needs, they will immediately consume it. Posting original research would be one way to do it. It will help you increase the organic traffic of your website, encourage social shares, widen your reach, and it is also possible to earn the attention of the media. However, this may be challenging, especially for a startup company. Luckily there are different ways to do this, such as producing checklists, guides, infographics, toolkits, presentations, templates, eBooks, and white papers.
Joining and Hosting Events
In-person and virtual events will allow you to build your network. Joining one could also help you connect with industry experts and learn some emerging trends and cutting-edge methodologies. It would be a great platform where you can build your relationship with your prospects. Conferences also offer you a chance to showcase your expertise and ability to provide a unique experience to the audience. For instance, you can add interactive games, lotteries, dazzling videos, and others to attract the participants’ attention and encourage conversation about your brand.
Webinars and Podcast
You can build your authority in your industry and collect prospects through podcasts and webinars. It helps you experience the same benefits of a live event. It would be an excellent alternative, especially in this time of pandemic when your audiences are still wary of social gatherings. Webinars would be a perfect chance to assist the audience in overcoming some pain points in your industry. It is also an excellent time to promote a new product. If you want to leave an impact, you can interview some of the influencers. Some audiences may be more attuned to listening to the podcast. Depending on your industry and the nature of your business, podcasting also has lower competition. It allows you to establish yourself as a credible company and start building a relationship with your audience.
PR Campaigns
The PR campaign will also serve as an integral part of your demand generation marketing campaign. It presents you with more opportunities to connect to your audiences. Start by staying on top of the latest news and finding out how to penetrate those newest conversations. You can then pitch your idea to the media. If you are known for your charismatic leadership, you can get invited on the radio, podcast, or tv for an interview. However, we understand that not all of us can be resource persons. You can then create a tool, video, or any material and use that for your link-building efforts. You can reach out to industry influencers and ask them whether they can use your materials as a part of their content. As more people talk about your business, your authority, credibility, and visibility will increase, gradually increasing the demand for your offerings.
Good demand generation strategies will be heavily based on data. You need to know which customer persona would convert, the offers that could be appealing to your audience, and the message that works. You may need to continuously assess the outcome of each campaign and consistently optimize them to produce the best possible result.