Demand Generation is considered one of the most important goals of marketing by 85% of companies. No matter how good your product or service is, it will not always sell itself. With so much competition in different industries, it is becoming ever more difficult for brands to drive demand for their products and services.
Companies are investing in demand generation strategies and programs to attract a qualified audience to notice them. To fuel the demand, you need to reach out and show your audience why your product is worth investing in. Demand generation is the need of the hour and can help brands boost their business.
This blog guide will discuss demand generation, its importance, how it differs from lead generation, and effective strategies to build demand for your product. With these tools, you can reach the right audience, increasing your chances of making sales. Let’s get started right away.
Table of Contents
- Demand Generation – What Is It?
- Lead Generation and Demand Generation
- The Difference between Lead Generation & Demand Generation
- Why Is Demand Generation Important
- Three Pillars of Demand Generation
- Proven Demand Generation Strategies
- FAQs
- Final Thoughts
- Related Reads
Demand Generation – What Is It?
Demand generation is a comprehensive marketing technique focusing on generating interest in your product or service. It is a focused approach that includes multiple touchpoints and campaigns to identify potential buyers, increase their awareness of the challenges, and present your brand as a trusted solution.
Both the marketing and sales teams work in sync to effectively execute this process. Demand generation marketing is a holistic approach from building awareness and generating interest to strategizing the customer’s journey.
As the process requires profound research to understand the customer, it helps marketers to place the product in all the stages of the buyer’s journey. This is more of a proactive technique and helps in better communication with prospects.
Moving on, there is often doubt that lead generation and demand generation are the same. Well, let’s answer that first before getting to the importance of demand generation.
Lead Generation and Demand Generation
Let’s define lead generation first. It is a process of collecting or capturing contact information, like the name, email address, and mobile number of people who have shown interest in your brand by requesting a quote, downloading resources, or taking a survey. That’s lead generation.
On the other hand, demand generation is a process that involves building awareness, branding, lead generation, and prospect nurturing. So, lead generation is a piece of the huge jigsaw puzzle (which is demand generation).
The Difference between Lead Generation & Demand Generation
Lead generation and demand generation might sound similar, but they are quite different.
Demand generation focuses more on creating demand for the brand. The ultimate goal of this process is to grab the audience’s attention and create awareness. This process involves building awareness, branding, lead generation, and prospect nurturing.
In contrast, the lead generation is slightly different. Yes, lead generation is the process of identifying, nurturing, and converting leads into customers. It is a process of collecting or capturing contact information, like the name, email address, and mobile number of people who have shown interest in your brand, by requesting a quote, downloading resources, or taking a survey.
Demand Generation |
Lead Generation |
| Demand generation sparks interest in the users. |
Lead generation converts potential prospects to customers. |
| This is the initial step of the sales cycle. | This process includes consecutive approaches to closing deals. |
|
This technique is used at the top of the sales funnel. |
This strategy simplifies the process of getting your audience through this sales funnel. |
| It creates awareness and builds trust. | It collects audience data and demonstrates the brand value proposition. |
Why Is Demand Generation Important?
The primary reason behind the popularity of demand generation is that it works. This is why businesses find it a worthy investment. It helps to position your brand uniquely and more engagingly to potential customers.
In the initial stages, you explain to the prospects that they have a need and what the challenges are related to that. This way, they are more likely to be receptive to the sales tone and messaging that comes in the later stages. Not only does it improve the lead quality, but it also makes the job of a salesperson easier.
Instead of directly selling your product or service, you’ll be building a robust sales pipeline for potential customers. First, create awareness and interest in your brand and products before selling. As you better understand the target audiences, you can optimize each communication to bring quality leads to the sales funnel.
Demand generation helps to boost awareness and interest. With this, your brand authority increases, and you become a trusted source of information in the industry. It helps create better marketing outreach to deliver a delightful experience to people interacting with your brand.
Three Pillars of Demand Generation
1. Demand Capture
This involves looking for the existing marketing demand using available data. Then, you can align the demands with your products and services through low-funnel content like blogs, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertisement, and social media marketing.
2. Lead Generation
This is about gaining the interest of potential customers. For this, you need to create strategies to capture the contact information of interested prospects so your sales team can nurture these leads and push them down the sales funnel.
3. Sales Funnel Acceleration
Once you have generated the demand and captured the leads, it is time to push these leads through the sales conversion process. Sales acceleration tactics include sending emails, scheduling appointments, and cold calling.
Proven Demand Generation Strategies
Let’s now look at the best ways and strategies to build demand for your products and services.
1. Set SMART Goals
You must have concrete goals before executing the demand generation process. You can develop a more efficient and focused strategy by setting and aligning the marketing and sales goals with your buyer’s needs.
For setting goals, you should follow the SMART approach, which means that your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. If you have vague or general goals, they may be challenging to track and reach. Hence, you should effectively set your goals by discussing them with the concerned teams.
2. Create Buyer Personas
You need to pinpoint the target audiences for your demand generation campaigns. You must create buyer personas representing your brand’s ideal target customer. You can analyze your current customer base to look for common factors. Using this behavioral and demographic data, you can create the personas based on the audience’s age, gender, income, location, end goals, family status, and requirements.
If you don’t have enough data, you can set up some interviews or calls with your customers to learn more about them. You can then understand the driving factor for your products and services and how they found your brand. Knowing these answers allows you to see the common interests, practices, challenges, and needs to create the ideal buyer persona.
3. Identify & Align the Buyer’s Journey with Personas
Once you have developed the personas, you must understand the buyer’s journey. In this, you have to identify how the customer moves from being interested in your product to the idea of buying something to complete the purchase then.
This will be different for different industries and audiences. You need to monitor the activities of your target audience to understand the buyer’s decision-making process. Based on this, you should be able to create better content and optimize your lead-generation strategies.
4. Use Content Marketing & SEO
Content marketing or inbound marketing is the most efficient way to nurture your audience through the conversion funnel. With the help of blog posts, how-to guides, videos, infographics, ads, and emails, you can engage with your audience to pique their interest. When combined with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can rank your quality content higher in the search engines.
In general, your content should begin with awareness and challenges, then should focus on building interest and desire for the product by presenting solutions, and should end with an action to call the customers to purchase it. You should create content for every stage of your sales funnel. For example, online ads are perfect for building awareness, how-to guides and tutorials to boost interest, or webinars and product videos to increase desire.
5. Offer Downloadable Resources
This efficient lead generation strategy can help you with your demand generation ventures. By giving more value to your potential customers for free, they see your credibility, which increases the likelihood of purchase of your products/services.
Also, you can capture the contact information of your website visitors using this technique. Later, you can filter the leads to qualify them, and your marketing plus sales team can work together to nurture the qualified leads.
6. Use Public Relations (PR)
Public relations is one of the most cost-efficient ways to boost your brand’s reach and awareness. This is about getting your story or an announcement about your brand to the target audience through social media, press releases, webinars, or other events.
By utilizing public relations, you can create a positive image of your business and reach a wider audience while building credibility. This can be done by approaching print or online publications for interviews, contributing to white papers and popular podcasts, getting cited by journalists and other credible sources, and building a strong social media presence.
7. Use Display Retargeting
Not everyone purchases at the first point of contact. Retargeting is another cost-effective way to be in front of the prospects throughout the buying cycle. By positioning yourself using paid ads to be in front of qualified leads, your chances of conversions increase.
Not only does it increase brand awareness, it also helps increase the number of repeat visitors and boosts the time on-site rate. Also, it provides you with another opportunity to capture the prospects’ attention.
8. Collect and Display Customer Testimonials & Case Studies
72% of customers say positive testimonials increase their trust in a business. Testimonials and case studies act as social proof and are great for building your credibility. Especially in the B2B market, businesses look to deal with trusted vendors. So, creating a dedicated testimonial-cum-case studies page on your website is essential.
You can ask your existing customers to record and send video testimonials or leave reviews on the website about your brand, product, or service.
9. Social Media is the Key
Social media marketing is crucial in demand generation campaigns as it is too considerable a marketing channel to ignore. By advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, you can market directly to specific users based on their interest groups.
The targeting options and a massive audience on social platforms give you an excellent opportunity to reach out to the right audience while boosting the demand.
FAQs
1. What does a demand generation marketer do?
Demand generation marketers are experts in overseeing the necessary marketing strategies to develop long-term customer relationships. They have a deep understanding of the desired market and utilize their skills and marketing knowledge to help businesses in brand awareness, improving their sales, advertisement, and prospecting, thereby increasing overall revenue.
2. Is demand generation and inbound marketing the same?
The answer is No. Many often have a misconception that demand generation and inbound marketing are the same. Demand generation is a program or a function you incorporate to create demand for your products or services, but inbound marketing is how you facilitate the process.
3. What is a demand generation strategy?
The demand generation strategy aims to build brand awareness and bring in highly qualified leads. The strategy involves various processes, like identifying the desired metrics, building brand awareness, converting prospects to leads, and measuring the strategy’s success.
4. What is the benefit of using demand generation for businesses?
Utilizing demand generation marketing can make your marketing messages more authoritative, carry more weight with prospective clients, and help increase revenue by farming qualified leads.
Final Thoughts
Well, it is pretty straightforward and evident that an effective demand-generation strategy can amplify brand awareness and increase your authority and credibility as a brand. By presenting your products and services as the solution to the challenges of different target personas, these tactics can help you boost revenue.
However, you need dedicated resources to devise and execute demand-generation strategies. This is often challenging for businesses with limited resources or brands in the initial stages. If that’s the case and you need efficient results, you can reach out to our team of experts with your demand generation needs, and we will be happy to take your growth to the next level.
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Related Posts:
- Top 10 Demand Generation Best Practices to Maximize ROI
- Demand Generation Funnel – 3 Stages You Need to Know
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