Demand Generation Marketing: What It Is, Examples & Strategy

Often, the most sophisticated SEO strategies are unable to pull in the needed traffic. Your marketing professionals realize that even well-thought campaigns lack the ability to convert curious visitors into potential customers. The ultimate solution to combat such a scenario is demand generation marketing.

This modern marketing approach can successfully help you create brand awareness, increase website traffic by 2X, and generate new leads in the long run. What makes it more important is that it eliminates silos and encourages collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

Our today’s blog will give you detailed insights into the most important steps to building a demand generation strategy. But first, let’s understand the key differences between lead and demand generation.

Demand Generation vs Lead Generation: The Main Difference

Demand generation intends to expand your user base by attracting new visitors and introducing them to your website, application, and other digital products and solutions. Lead generation, on the other hand, is an approach to converting your audience into leads. You may think of this distinction as a fine line, but there are some other differentiation factors to consider while making a pick.

1. Objectives: Demand generation is all about creating brand awareness and educating your audience about the problems your company aims to solve. Even if they are not interested in opting for your solutions at the moment, it is still imperative to make them understand that your company can offer the needed solution when the problem arises.
   On the flip side, lead generation helps your company to convert this demand into potential leads. As your buyers move forward within the marketing funnel, they learn about your products. Later, you can offer the prospect of solving all possible problems with your products.
2. Engagement: Demand generation helps you build trust and brand authority across your target audience. The more authoritative and reliable your company will be, the more engagement your business will experience.
   Lead generation helps you stand out and create a difference. It separates your brand and solutions from those of your competitors. It gives you the privilege to showcase all the benefits that your users will get by using your products.
3. Impact: Demand generation creates a bigger impact. It assists your company in educating your target users. Basically, it incorporates ungated resources to address and solve the queries your prospects are regularly dealing with. On the contrary, lead generation focuses on brand positioning and nurturing your leads with more explicit content. To be precise, it outlines contact information by producing gated resources.

Demand Generation: How It Helps Your B2B Company?

Demand generation is the process, and it helps businesses to create awareness and interest. Businesses are doing marketing for their brand to bring people into the sales funnel, with an emphasis on personalization.

The more demand you generate for your business, the more you’ll learn and grow— as long as you have the supply to back it up. And in the complete cycle, the Demand Generation process helps a lot.

An effective demand generation agency/company can help you build consumer interest, tap into new markets, and re-engage existing customers. On top of that, demand generation marketing, especially for B2B Marketing, is a great tool for revenue growth since it reduces customer acquisition costs and maximizes ROI.

5 Essential Steps to Build a Demand Generation Strategy

Understanding the basics is not the only thing. You need to have a robust process in place to make the most out of your demand generation strategy. Here are the 5 important steps to keep an eye for.

Step 1. Build Brand Awareness

The first and foremost step to take into account is building brand awareness as it plays a vital role in generating quality leads. Creating awareness is not just attracting potential buyers. It is about leaving a lasting impression and a positive experience. Hence, you need to take the necessary measures to build trust so that your customers find your solutions relevant to their needs or challenges. One way to achieve this and improve credibility is through authentic reviews. These reviews offer detailed insights and help buyers filter out their requirements quickly and easily.

Step 2. Develop a Content Strategy

The next step to build a value-driven demand generation strategy is focusing on the content. This content should be backed by industry expertise and help your brand stay authoritative in its niche. It should represent trust for the very first interaction with the buyers. As such, you need to develop a solid content marketing strategy that offers the needed insights at each step of the purchase journey. You need to prioritize content that successfully resolves queries of your customers and guides them to make a purchase. Some effective ways to do this are user-centric messages and segment-specific call-to-actions (CTAs).

Step 3. Nurture High-quality Leads

After building an effective content strategy, it is time to nurture your quality leads. You need to make sure that your marketing team stimulates these high-value leads from their first contact to decision and purchase. They should identify the content your customers prefer and share it through appropriate channels. The ultimate goal is to engage customers with the right information at the right time. And for that, you need to closely monitor lead feedback and regularly evaluate lead nurture performance data.

Step 4. Deploy Account-based Marketing

When high-quality leads start to choose your products, you can move on to adopting an account-based marketing strategy. This strategy helps your company to capitalize on potential opportunities with tailored sales and marketing practices. You just need to push your sales and marketing professionals to target the right accounts and nurture them accordingly. Make sure they create personas concerning the customers (their objectives and values) that display the highest probability of conversion.

Step 5. Invest in Partner Marketing

Last but not least, you need to have a highly visible online presence. Indeed, you can run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns but managing them is not an easy task. That’s when outsourcing your requirements to a digital marketing company can prove beneficial. It will help you convey the right message to a pre-vetted audience faster and better. Altogether, it eliminates the need to handle the complexities of engaging potential buyers on various social media platforms from the scratch.

The 5 Most Important Metrics for Your Demand Generation Funnel

Demand gen is thoughtful and engaging.

The main purpose of the demand gen strategy is to create interest in and buzz around your product and services and the brand. An effective demand generation campaign will not allow your efforts to be wasted on hard-selling a casual browser or have someone who was looking to make a purchase slip through the cracks.

The primary aim of demand generation for the B2B industry is to generate awareness and interest in the product and services so you can easily build a relationship, turn them into customers, and retain them for the long term.

Out of all of the metrics available that you can track for your marketing funnel, here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that often provide the most insight and usefulness when optimizing your demand generation funnel.

1. Marketing Qualified Lead
2. Customer Lifetime Value
3. Cost Per Acquisition
4. Content Performance
5. Customer lifetime value (CLTV