Demand Generation:
A marketing strategy that drives brand awareness and thereby demand for your product. The key to this is forming a full brand image, and nurturing those that interact with your business. Spend time on your leads, and be the first choice when your leads are ready to buy.
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The marketing funnel is a popular methodology for B2B marketers. Generally, there are four widely accepted stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. By targeting these four stages with your marketing, you can drive your prospective buyers through the funnel.
Sometimes known as the content marketing funnel or the sales funnel, the methodology aims to segment buyers and allow marketers to build strategies that target each individual stage. The approach is primarily inbound-focused.
Demand generation is a key component of the awareness stage and inbound marketing. Your buyers may or may not be looking for solutions to their problems. Demand generation makes sure that your buyers are aware of your business when they are ready to solve those problems.
So, how do you build demand for your solution? Build trust with your leads and provide them with the autonomy to make purchase decisions with your demand generation strategy.
Importance of Demand Generation
In today’s digital-first world, buyers are becoming savvier than ever. Leads know when they are being sold to, and can identify advertising and pitches in an instant. The online world is overrun by advertisers. Avoid simply adding your voice to the noise and turning leads off.
Today’s buyers often make a decision on a sale before they even get in touch with a sales rep. In B2B, with such large sale totals on the line, it’s important to make sure that your brand is front-and-center.
This is why demand generation is so important. Educating leads on your solution or your brand, without directly pitching, ensures maximum engagement in the early stages.
Demand generation can also help you to reach new markets and new buyers. Needless to say, you cannot launch a new product or open into a new market and expect sales to come rolling in. You need to excite audiences before you start pitching your solution.
Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation
These two strategies often go hand in hand, so what’s the difference? Essentially, they operate at slightly different steps of the marketing funnel.
Demand generation aims to build a brand image or brand awareness. Create demand and excitement for your solution with your marketing campaigns. This doesn’t necessarily involve your audience engaging directly with your marketing or your company. Your demand generation will impact people within your industry, regardless of their readiness for a purchase.
Lead generation is slightly further developed than demand generation. Once you have created a demand generation strategy, you will move on to lead generation. The primary aim here is to use your marketing to gather information about your users, and then turn them into leads.
For instance, users might come to your website for a valuable blog article you’ve written about a subject they’re interested in. This does not mean that those users are now classified as leads. They could just as easily click away and never return to your site.
However, you could generate a downloadable that provides further information and attach it to that blog behind a form. This allows you to gather information about that user and can work to convert them into a lead. This is lead generation.
Demand Generation Strategies
There are many ways that B2B businesses can generate brand identity and brand authority. The right approach for you will depend on your business and your market. However, here are a few popular demand generation strategies in the B2B marketing industry:
Content
Producing quality content is a great way to get on your potential buyer’s radar, without an aggressive pitch. SEO-optimized blogs, infographics, and video content are just some examples of popular types of content used for demand generation.
The primary goal is this: educate your buyers and provide value. The more you can offer your buyers, the more they will trust your authority in the market.
Social Media
Depending on your business and where your buyers spend their time, social media can be a great way to build demand. Get involved in conversations in your market. Show your buyers that you are engaged with their problems.
The more your buyers see your brand name and image, the more familiar they become. Even if they’re not ready to seek solutions just yet, your company will be top of mind when they are.
Find Your Niche
Casting a wide net is far less likely to see results. It’s challenging to resonate with your buyers when you’re not addressing their specific problems.
The key is to find your niche. Specifically, find the exact buyers that you believe would be interested in your solution. Target them with your content and marketing campaigns. While you may reach a smaller number of potential customers, they are far more likely to be engaged.
At Nituno, we work with B2B SaaS companies to audit marketing strategies, and evolve them to drive demand and lead generation. We have worked to build holistic marketing strategies from the ground up. Get in touch with us today to discuss your demand generation.
