According to a 2021 LinkedIn report, at least 95% of new products fail to achieve their sales targets, highlighting the importance of a well-crafted demand generation strategy. Therefore, faced with an explosive abundance of products all around, it is only natural for customers to feel overwhelmed and lose focus of their needs—leading to unsatisfied and misinformed buys. Connecting with consumers at different touchpoints of the buyer’s journey is a driving force behind long-term brand success and engagement. Let’s, therefore, find out how to bridge consumer information for smooth product sales with the best demand generation strategies.
What is Demand Generation?
demand generation strategyDemand generation refers to the entire set of data-driven activities concerned with piquing customer interest in a company’s products or services. The aim here is to convert this interest into a buy and formulate a strategy that leads to recurring successful conversions.
Given below are three curated examples of demand generation strategies:
1. Giving Freebies
Freebies foster the trust of the consumer base on your services or products, as you develop a behavior of positive expectancy in their minds.
2. Email Marketing
When it comes to intimate demand generation, emails have the highest ROI (Return on Investment) due to their traditional formal impression.
3. Interactive Content
From website design to written content style, interactivity extensively increases engagement.
The Importance of Demand Generation
Products address consumers’ pain points and solve problems. However, there’s a catch! People only solve those problems of which they are aware. So, you might design a world-class product but still not hit the bull’s eye as your target audience isn’t aware of the problem in the first place. This is where a demand generation strategy proves its importance by doing the following:
Generating brand awareness
Systematically raising brand curiosity and credibility
Identifying the most probable consumer bases
Generating sure-shot high-quality leads
The Best Way to Create a Demand Generation Strategy
1. Implement Omnichannel Strategies to Expand Reach
Online shoppers constantly switch between a minimum of two channels. Additionally, more than 25% of buyers have made an online purchase in a physical store. With the proliferation of digital connectivity and the online migration boom of businesses, one cannot deny the positive impact of omnichannel seamlessness in enhancing the buyer’s journey.
2. Encourage Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing teams regularly deal with leads and strategize appropriate magnets to build a strong brand voice. Combining sales and marketing is an ingenious demand generation strategy as their synergy helps build a linear customer experience alongside intelligent resource sharing. This lowers promotional costs and enables businesses to gauge consumer behavior across different touchpoints.
3. Focus on LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s wide-ranging user base, encompassing both producers and consumers, coupled with its distinctive ad formats and specific goals, positions it as an unparalleled platform for effective lead nurturing and generation, particularly for hyper-targeted B2B and B2C advertisements.
4. Focus on User Experience (UX)
UX is how a user interacts with a product or service, and the central driving factor of brand success. Improving UX is synonymous with making your website seamless with easy-to-navigate landing pages, creating mobile-optimized websites, providing engaging, appealing informative content, etc.
5. Generate Content for Different Stages of the Sales Funnel
A well-crafted document that aligns with the needs and apprehensions of a business’s consumer base will systematically touch on all the stages of the sales funnel—awareness, consideration, and decision. A consistent demand generation strategy requires tracking the buyer’s journey across the funnel. This is why a majority of marketers have made content strategy a crucial aspect of their digital marketing paradigms.
6. Use Chatbots and Marketing Automation
Marketing automation gives marketers the much-needed creative headspace to explore new solutions for demand generation strategies and challenges. Customer relationship building is a full-funnel management endeavor, which will only be enhanced by the different marketing automation tools. ChatGPT is a case in point that automates content generation as well as responsive marketing with chatbots.
7. Implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Concentrating resources on a set of target accounts in a market is called account-based marketing. In 2021, at least 70% of marketers used ABM and personalized marketing, thus making it the most important demand generation strategy in the age of abundant consumer data.
8. Leverage Consumer Intent Data
Consumer intent data offers businesses the Midas’ touch for marketing strategies. Keep track of product searches to understand how prospective customers are expressing their needs through clicks, product comparisons, etc. This gives marketers micro-moments of data insights to make a consumer feel valued and drive them into action. Delivering the right personalized messages at the right time also means securing a prospective buy.
How to Develop a B2B Demand Generation Strategy?
Here's how you develop a top-notch B2B demand generation strategy:
1. Decide on a Type of Demand Generation Strategy
In the previous section, we talked about the efficiency of omnichannel marketing strategies. We can apply the same while formulating a demand generation strategy for a B2B industry. There are seven prevalent types of demand generation strategies with their unique marketing collateral that boost brand visibility and traction:
Blogging
Email marketing
Videos and visual storytelling
PR campaigns
Influencer marketing
Social media campaigns
Webinars and other kinds of one-on-one engagement
2. Top-of-the-Funnel (ToFu) Tactics
The B2B marketing funnel demands a lot more refinement than its traditional counterpart, the B2C marketing funnel, as they solve major organizational problems such as operations, productivity, and profits. ToFu tactics include finding creative ways to generate leads by establishing the brand voice, offering solutions, and piquing consumer interest. According to Semrush, this crucial first step in the funnel is used by at least 95% of content marketers.
3. Persona Building
A Marketing Insider report claims that 93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals segment their database by buyer persona. B2B demand generation strategies need to categorize the consumer base. This is because finding the right businesses to cater to is often more challenging than hitting the right customer segments. Strong and highly informed user personas help boost ToFu tactics.
4. Start With the Goals and Work Backward
Succinctly formulate the end goals and make sure everyone, especially the marketing and sales teams, are on board with the plans. Once the targets are chalked out, retrace all the strategies and perfectly streamline the details. For instance, take a look at your consumers’ choices of suppliers and their key attributes. Are they looking for better customer engagement or cheaper supplies? Strategies will differ for both demands accordingly.
5. Beyond the Funnel
It is also important to note that consumer behavior has undergone radical shifts in the past few years. Lesser consumer time per engagement means customer acquisition can be segmented into pre-click and post-click formats. The pre-click strategies will lure a person to the offered services while post-click strategies will incentivize urgency and value-building to finalize purchases.
6. Middle-of-the-Funnel (MoFu) Tactics
Content still remains the keystone of a comprehensive demand generation strategy. Content not just informs but also instills faith in the consumer base, pushing customers toward a high level of brand awareness. The aim here is to establish yourself as the dominant voice within the domain and link product performance to engaging thought leadership pieces that generate consistent value for consumers.
7. Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BoFu) Tactics
This step entails nurturing your consumers’ decision-making process in late-stage marketing tactics. Swaying potential customers to finish a buy comes with its own risks of UX disruption. However, a tactical, periodic push with targeted ads, promo codes, and personalized blog posts boosts sales, which is why marketers heavily focus on BoFu tactics to drive conversions.