As marketing teams improve, they understand that even the best SEO strategies can only take them so far. At some point, you have to turn interested people into paying customers. How to fix it? Turn to demand generation.
Demand generation marketing is a powerhouse that helps people know about your brand, brings more people to your website, and gets you new leads. It breaks down the walls that keep the sales and marketing teams from working together. So, read this article carefully if you want a healthy pipeline of potential customers.
What Kind of Marketing Creates Demand?
Demand generation marketing ensures that your sales team has a steady supply of leads to work with. In the beginning, it covers the campaigns that get your target audience to sign up for your mailing list so that you can keep them informed. In addition, it encourages your audience to engage with your material, attend events, and more. With demand gen marketing, you can keep your brand in the minds of potential customers by nurturing and engaging them.
The ultimate goal is to turn them into qualified leads by guiding them through the buyer’s journey. With the right sales pitch, you can turn them into a new customer.
How It Differs From Lead Generation
By attracting new users to your website and introducing them to your products, demand generation seeks to expand your customer base. When it comes to lead generation, your goal is to turn your viewers into qualified prospects. Because the differences between demand generation and lead generation are so subtle, we devoted an entire piece to explaining them.
Lead generation is fueled by demand generation. Because not everyone is ready to sign up or convert immediately, you must first generate awareness and interest. As a result, buyers at large corporations often cannot shop around for new suppliers until specific points in the process.
Customers who aren’t ready to chat with your sales team may nevertheless want to check out your videos or blog pieces. Consuming valuable, engaging, and actionable material helps to create trust and brand awareness. Consequently, you’ll have a leg up on the competition when that audience member is ready to buy!
Lead generation is mainly concerned with converting prospects into “qualified” status to begin sales dialogues with the brand.
Sometimes, demand generation and lead generation overlap. Driving registrations, for example, might be considered both if you offer product-focused seminars. Demand and lead generation can both be used to foster a relationship with your database as you progress them through the conversion funnel.
Comparing B2C & B2B Marketing Techniques
B2C businesses often only have to win over one stakeholder: the customer (and maybe their spouse or family). When it comes to B2B marketing, however, it is necessary to gain the support of entire departments, important decision-makers, and even the company’s CEO.
B2B enterprises will see a longer sales cycle due to all of this.
Decisions on B2B purchases can take six months or even more than a year in certain situations. A decision is considered final only when several people have approved from various levels of the organization. When developing a sales funnel, your B2B demand generation initiatives are merely the first step.
Why Even Think About Demand Generation
This promotion method is related to attraction marketing in that it works to pique the interest of consumers in your product or service. However, rather than relying exclusively on feelings, it has a broader range of applications and benefits.
Boost Brand Recognition
An enterprise demand generation program is not just a traffic generator but also an awareness machine. Inbound marketing efforts that are well-executed make your business stand out to consumers who may not yet require your products. Digital demand generation tactics that expose customers to your brand through thought leadership postings, on stage at industry conferences, or through social media mentions establish your brand’s reputation over time.
Your website’s traffic will begin to swell due to this demand creation technique immediately. The release of a new white paper or study can do this. This is merely the beginning of raising awareness, as with all campaigns. If businesses need your product or service in the future, you’ll have a long-term influence.
Bring In New Leads
A well-executed strategy for demand generation generates a significant increase in leads, despite its focus being broader than that of lead generation.
As long as demand gen is done correctly, the top of the funnel is filled with new leads. One or two percent may turn out to be high-quality prospects. However, lead nurturing can take months, or even years, depending on your sector and product.
Please check out our post on generating leads more consistently if your sales cycle is seasonal or erratic.
Improve Profits
An increase in revenue can be attributed to a rise in highly qualified leads.
A long-term income strategy, online demand generation allows you to see benefits within a few months and overtime as you create your pipeline, nurture it, and develop a comfortable relationship with your audience.
15 Effective Techniques for Generating Demand
We list the top 15 ideas for generating demand that will help you fill your sales funnel. They are great examples of content marketing, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise since you’ve probably encountered them before.
Account-Based Marketing
In an ABM campaign, you target a specific audience and coordinate your marketing efforts across various channels and strategies. Account-Based Marketing. Even though you’re still aiming to build demand with ABM, you’re precision-targeted with your approach, specifying the particular industry and firms (and sometimes the individuals) you want to target before reaching out.
Outbound operations like email marketing, LinkedIn ads, InMail, and direct mail can all be part of an ABM strategy. For example, you could direct your viewers to a bespoke landing page with tailored content or case studies.
B2B SEO
All boats rise with the tide. The best way to increase the volume of traffic to your website is by utilizing B2B SEO to optimize your numerous web properties.
SEO may help you understand your audience’s mindset by allowing you to research the relevant keywords and evaluate their search intent. Increased brand awareness and a broader audience are benefits of increasing your brand’s visibility.
You write, conduct keyword research, optimize the page, and include relevant internal links for each piece of content. Is it possible to crawl the data? Is there a logical structure to your website? Was the URL optimized in any way? What do you think of your headline? Is the speed of your website good? What do you think of it?
You’ll get the most out of your content marketing efforts if you approach it from the perspective of SEO lead creation.
Blogs
The foundation of long-term awareness and affinity building is a blog full of intelligent, helpful information that addresses audience pain points and feeds their interests.
Suppose you’re looking to get noticed online, attract relevant traffic, engage with your audience, and encourage them to download relevant content or sign up for webinars or other educational opportunities. In that case, blogging is one of the most popular forms of content marketing.
You may reach your customers at each stage of the purchasing process with a well-written blog. These tools, on the other hand, are best used at the beginning of the content funnel.
Contests & Sweepstakes
Freebies are always a hit. Throw online contests that provide your audience a chance to win a free product, service, or prize in exchange for their email addresses and other information. Offering a year of your subscription-based software for free can also lead to long-term customers.
Make your content stand out from the crowd by posing open-ended questions. The information they provide can be used for market research, establishing customer personas, or building an extensive repository of user-generated material.
Direct Mails
B2B organizations can still benefit from direct mail marketing, as it’s a straightforward approach to get their brand in front of the relevant individuals. To ensure that your mailers aren’t instantly thrown away, target individual customers at each business and customize your offers or promotions to them. As a result, ABM and direct mail are a demand generation marriage made in heaven.
The power of a tangible box can’t be underestimated, though. Have you ever received a FedEx or UPS shipment and not opened it? What do you think I’m getting at?
Free Useful Tools
Offering a free online tool is an excellent way to generate demand.
Create a product that people enjoy, use it over and over again, and spread the word about it to other people, allowing you to extend your audience.
In addition, the use of tools often results in a large number of backlinks being generated. For instance, at the time of this writing, Pingdom’s free page load speed test had produced over 2.2 million connections from third-party sites.
Interacting with a tool rather than lecturing to a passive audience is a distinct advantage of using calculators and other interactive technologies.
With this method, your audience interacts with your brand while using the product. As a result, your audience will have a positive and long-lasting impression of your presentation.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers with enthusiastic followings should be partnered with. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a more personal interaction with their followers, leading to more extraordinary campaign results. In other words, rather than focusing solely on the number of followers, consider the frequency and quality of interactions.
As a last note, be sure your efforts can be scaled up to have an enormous impact. As an example, Terakeet’s Chorus technology enables us to continually search the web and precisely target hundreds or even thousands of relevant influencers for specific niche markets.
Lead Magnets
With blogging and SEO, lead magnets can be powerful demand generation marketing tools. They’ll gobble up your content marketing strategy’s high-value downloadable information if it’s in line with what your target audience wants!
One approach to get media attention, broaden your reach, encourage online sharing, and boost traffic to your site is to conduct original research.
However, numerous marketing strategies can be used to get site users to provide their email addresses. Producing manuals and infographics are just a few examples of the many types of content you can create using these tools. To keep the customer engaged, you can use marketing automation sequences to keep them returning for more.
Live or Virtual Events
In-person events are an excellent way for industry insiders to connect, learn about the latest trends, and hear from thought leaders in their fields. Participating in industry events or even hosting your own branded events can help your organization forge significant ties and establish a strong brand.
It is possible to make your brand stand out by offering truly unique experiences during conferences. Among the ideas, you may bring to your booth are enormous gumball machines, oversized sofas, happy hours, homemade chocolate chip cookies, lotteries, interactive iPad games, stunning films, and human-sized Connect 4.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, virtual events can also take unique methods. Use multimedia, digital tools, and templates to your advantage.
Podcasts
Using podcasting to keep an audience’s attention for 30+ minutes at a time is another successful way to keep them engaged. Yet better, the world of podcasting hasn’t even reached the threshold of saturation in content. There isn’t much competition when it comes to building your brand’s thought leadership and cultivating a relationship with your listeners through podcasting.
Press Releases
It’s like a Swiss Army knife of demand generation marketing since it provides more options for you to engage with your audience than we can fit into this article alone!
Use the media, for example. Be aware of current events and consider how your organization might participate in them. You can then begin contacting the media with your story. Are you a leader with charisma? Make yourself available to be interviewed on blogs, podcasts, television, and radio.
Alternatively, you can use your videos, tools, and unique research as link-building resources. Finally, give them to industry experts to use as their material inspiration. Your brand’s credibility and authority will rise due to more people talking about it. Find out more about the connection between public relations and search engine optimization.
Social Campaigns
Social media campaigns that promote your content and encourage interaction with your audience are a great way to connect with your target audience. The more you know about the problems your customers are having, the more quickly you’ll be able to offer solutions. If you want to keep your social approach consistent and scalable, use tools like Brandwatch or Keyhole.
Strategic Partnerships
Drive demand for your product by forming strategic alliances. This entails creating partnerships with your businesses with the same (or comparable) target demographics. It’s thus possible to co-host or generate a large piece of content jointly by mixing complete data from each partner. Access to the other company’s network and a rise in information will assist both companies.
Videos
Incorporating videos into your marketing strategy is a powerful approach to engaging and motivating your target audience. Branding and demand development are both excellent benefits of using social media. Because visual content is more easily remembered than text-based content, videos are a great way to keep your brand in the minds of your customers.
Salesforce is a well-known B2B video producer. CEO Marc Benioff interviews Accenture CEO Julie Sweet to discuss how the management consulting firm is coping with the COVID-19 environment. At the same time, Alicia Keys performs live from her house in the background.
Webinars
Create thought-leadership in your field and increase the number of people that sign up for your webinars. You can utilize webinars as a good substitute for live events if your target market is still afraid of social gatherings after quarantine. In addition, how else can you get your audience to spend 30 minutes or more with your marketing?
If you’re hosting a webinar, you have the opportunity to teach your audience something new or alleviate some of the frequent problems they have in your sector. Talk to industry leaders and complementary solutions suppliers if you want to get the most out of your interview. With little to no more effort, everyone can reach a larger audience.
As the content’s lifespan progresses, create an online dashboard to monitor these SEO performance metrics over time. Demand creation activities can be linked directly to positive outcomes, allowing your company to expand on successful ones in the future. As a result, you’ll be able to stop the campaigns or goods that aren’t bringing in significant ROI.
