Blog Post

Demand Generation

What is Demand Generation and How to Leverage it in Your Marketing Strategy

Demand generation is a powerful tool to use in your B2B marketing strategy. It’s a full-funnel approach that engages customers and prospects at every stage.

Demand gen works by creating targeted interest to develop value for your brand. By providing essential information at the moment of need, demand generation strengthens relationships. This approach works at each stage of a prospect or customer relationship.

How Does Demand Generation Work?

A properly developed demand generation strategy uses multiple approaches. It uses strategic content, strategic messaging, data, and buyer personas to align customer needs with valuable insights.

Demand gen positions your brand as a provider of valued information at each stage. It’s the glue that connects you to your customers.

There are several key stages to demand generation. Below we will delve into each and show how it can transform your marketing strategy. The stages are:

  • Raising Brand Awareness
  • Developing Content
  • Nurturing Relationships for Sales
  • Retaining Customers

One important note: Demand generation is not lead generation. Lead generation is a narrower, focused strategy designed to collect qualified leads for sales teams to pursue. One example is collecting names and contact information on an online form.

Demand generation is a more comprehensive approach that nurtures relationships at each stage. While it uses many of the same tactics as lead generation, it’s a broader strategy.

Raising Brand Awareness

One of the most essential tasks marketers need to complete today is to develop brand awareness. Today’s customers want to relate to brands they frequent. They expect brands to know them, their needs, and interactions with your business.

Brand awareness leaves buyers with a lasting impression of your company. It fosters trust, confidence that the solutions your company provides are reliable, accurate, and impactful.

Brand awareness has multiple components, including:

  • A clear brand identity helps you differentiate your company from competitors. Your identity should provide customers with easy recall of who you are and what you’re about
  • A go-to-market strategy based on research that articulates what you’re going to sell and how. Demand marketing can be seen as a way to prove whether your assumptions are correct. It can also help to adjust based on data and results
  • Buyer personas articulate who you’re trying to reach and what characteristics they share. Identifying and developing brand personas lets you understand who you’re approaching and how
  • Thought leadership helps position your brand as an expert and authority within your space. You want people to think of your brand when they think about industry leaders
  • Strong reviews management, which includes encouraging customers to leave reviews and responding appropriately to customer feedback
  • Social media presence on the right platforms. Leveraging social media lets you set the tone and messaging for your brands. It’s a powerful way to communicate broadly

Developing Content

Your content strategy is at the core of your demand marketing approach. You want to develop content that addresses customer pain points and answers critical questions.

Content development should occur for each phase of the sales funnel. By identifying key needs at each phase, you’re able to position your brand as authoritative and valuable.

Content should answer the questions that buyers will have throughout the customer journey. The information should also be displayed in multiple formats. Today, for example, video is an increasingly important medium for gaining information and answering questions.

Among the content options are:

  • Blogs that educate your website visitors and drive SEO, with keyword-optimized content. Your blogs should be about topics of keen interest to customers and prospects.
  • Email marketing gives leads multiple opportunities during a campaign to engage with your brand. Email marketing can answer questions and speak directly to their needs while acknowledging actions already taken. If resources permit, this content can be personalized to provide more resonance
  • Conversion optimization which uses your website to gain information about prospects. At strategic points, visitors should be encouraged to seek more information. Gated content such as white papers, product guides, or videos allows you to secure contact information. Investing in website user experience (UX) tools can help to ensure visitors navigate your website to maximize leads
  • Paid advertising increases your presence and can be highly targeted based on desired customer demographics. Paid ads on both search engines and social media attract visitors and facilitate a larger prospect pool
  • Conversational marketing using chatbots and other technology lets you connect with visitors. Automated and live engagement lets you answer questions and add value to the visitor experience

Nurturing Relationships for Sales

Leads are critical and sales teams are eager to connect with prospects, especially those of high value. However, with demand marketing, there’s much more than a marketing-to-sales handoff.

Throughout the sales process, marketing tactics can deepen the relationship and assist in closing deals. Sales enablement tools include:

  • Case studies, with narratives from actual customers about the work you’ve done and solutions you’ve provided. Compelling case studies build trust and provide real-world examples of your brand’s impact
  • Testimonials are narratives provided by your customers, ideally, those who are similar to your target audiences. They are quick statements that reinforce your value and worth to a customer’s peer
  • FAQs and fact sheets offer details in easy-to-digest formats. FAQs typically use a question-and-answer format for commonly asked questions. Fact sheets are often more detailed with specifics about products and services

Retaining Customers

Retaining customers is essential for repeating business, advancing your brand’s reputation, and extending the customer relationship.

There are many ways you can provide services that focus on retention, including:

  • A knowledge base where customers can share solutions and insights and learn from each other
  • Customer support that includes ticketing tools and transparency to track inquiries and provide timely service
  • Incentive programs for customer referrals can generate new business while providing discounts for existing customers
  • Customer-only content such as first-to-know emails, special discounts, and promotions tell customers how valued they are

Demand generation marketing connects you to customers at every step of their journey. It’s the right way to engage, provide value and build credibility for deeper long-term relationships and more opportunities for business.

Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

Blog Post

How To Leverage Growth Marketing

Traditional marketing is where brands broadcast a one-size-fits-all marketing message describing the product’s features. It is expensive, broad, and doesn’t consider the unique requirements of the customer.

This doesn’t work well for budding businesses that are targeting a particular niche and have a limited marketing budget.

Enter growth marketing

Growth marketing focuses on sending personalized customer-centric messages to the target audience explaining how the product will give them the value they are looking for.

In this article, you’ll learn what makes growth marketing unique, its strategy and characteristics, and how you can leverage it.

Growth Marketing Vs. Regular Marketing

Growth marketing attracts prospects, keeps them hooked, and turns them into loyal buyers. With techniques such as content marketing and lead nurturing, customers are nudged through the funnel until they make a purchase. 

Various marketing channels are auto-optimized through the latest tools and data-backed processes for sustainable growth. The primary advantage of growth marketing is that it nurtures customer relationships and increases your average customer lifetime value.

Traditional marketing approaches include ideation of marketing operations, publishing the ad copy and design, implementing Call-To-Actions (CTAs), outlining the ad spend for the campaign, and so on. 

All these efforts follow a traditional “set it and forget it” strategy. This strategy is great for increasing brand awareness by focusing on the top of the sales funnel.

The image below highlights the difference between traditional and growth marketing.

Source: Mondial Trends. A graphic showing the differences between traditional and growth marketing.

What a Growth Marketing Strategy Includes

Market Penetration

Growth marketers exclusively focus on the niche where you offer products/services or look for potential customers in your competitors' niche to penetrate the market better.

This growth hacking technique pushes brands to look for differentiators. Here, growth marketers answer two specific questions:

  1. What sets you apart from your competition?
  2. What are the specific areas you are better than your rivals?

Strategic Collaborations and Partnerships

Growth marketing teams facilitate rapid growth by finding and teaming up with other brands that offer products your target audience uses — for instance, telecom providers partnering with smartphone manufacturers.

Apart from keeping customer acquisition costs low, this strategy could get you lots of new customers and result in sustainable growth. Sometimes, you might have to create new products or services to form a partnership.

Market Development

This strategy involves running growth marketing campaigns where you advertise the products or services to new markets to facilitate demand generation. It is done in two ways:

  1. Targeting new niches and buyer personas.
  2. Moving to new geographic regions.

Product Development

Your product development growth strategy has to be tailored to your brand’s specific needs. To attain rapid growth, you should diversify your marketing efforts to find creative solutions in the following ways:

  • Product Updates. Build on what you have (this is also great for customer retention). 
  • New Products. A great way to enter new markets and target different user personas.

Characteristics of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Data-driven

Before growth marketers invest in a new marketing tactic aiming for rapid growth, the idea has to be backed by data. As growth marketing tactics involve taking risks, intuitions and “do this because competitors are too” have no place.

Read: “How to Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy.”

Product Focused

Your business needs to consistently improve its product to remain competitive in the market. Whether it is adding more features or functionalities, your product needs to evolve with the changing needs of your target audience. 

Growth marketing facilitates this by collecting data that can guide this product development and keep your target audience updated about the values you offer.

Limited fear of failure

Apart from being data-driven, the high success rate of growth marketing can be attributed to the diversification of efforts. With multiple marketing strategies at play at once, the best growth marketers keep a close eye on the numbers and scale up the efforts that have the highest marketing ROI.

Storytelling

Considering our endless appetites for stories, growth marketers use a story where a person with similar problems to the target audience gets their problem solved with their product. This makes the brand’s message more realistic and relatable, motivating more prospects to make a purchase.

Retargeting

Retargeting reminds your website visitors, prospects, leads, and customers about the value your product offers. This also keeps the customer acquisition costs low.

Should You Hire a Growth Hacker or Outsource Growth Marketing to an Agency?

Having an in-house growth marketer has the following pros:

  1. They will be familiar with your product and processes completely.
  2. 100% dedication towards your brand growth.
  3. You can gain a lot of insights into your industry.

However, it is challenging for the following reasons:

  1. It's expensive to hire new professionals, get new tools, and set up new growth marketing strategies.
  2. After some time, they could run out of ideas by falling into a "creative rut".
  3. You still have to pay your growth marketing team even if you pause your strategy. 

Growing brands with a limited budget risk a lot in this scenario.

In these instances, outsourcing growth marketing to an established agency such as Matter Made is ideal because:

  1. You get experienced, accountable professionals.
  2. It’s cost-efficient; pay until you are leveraging their services.
  3. You will be kept in the loop at every stage through timely reports.
  4. You can reinvest the saved resources elsewhere.
  5. You get expertise from successful growth marketers. 

Growth Hacking, Demand Generation, and Matter Made

Matter Made has helped product-led companies like Dropbox and Loom achieve hypergrowth through demand generation, product-led growth, and bespoke growth strategies

Our seasoned marketing team can help your brand achieve similar results.

Interested in knowing what a growth marketing strategy brings to the table for your brand? Let’s talk.

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