Growing your company always includes an overhaul of your marketing strategy. What works on a small scale is unlikely to translate as you seek to expand market share, and you could waste a lot of money and time trying—with little to show for it.
This is the perfect time to implement a Demand Gen strategy to drive growth. Do the research and plan the smart way forward.
In this post, we’ll show you how to create and implement a demand generation strategy to drive growth.
Benefits of a Demand Gen Strategy
- Increase brand interest
- Generate higher-quality leads
- Nurture relationships that create brand ambassadors
- Earn and hold market share
- Re-engage existing customers to increase retention/ CLV
- Turn existing customers into Demand Gen amplifiers
- Larger deals
- Key accounts
- Higher ROI
Challenges of Demand Generation
- Building an audience
- Consistently creating high-quality content
- Budget constraints
- Marketing-Sales alignment
- Capturing demand
- Turning leads to customers
As challenges, these represent opportunities you'll need to directly address and overcome through Demand Gen strategy.
How to Create and Implement a Demand Gen Strategy for Growth
Create Buyer Personas
You have to define an audience before you can build one. Your buyer persona is a fictionalized yet data-based representation of what your ideal customer looks like.
The clearer understanding you have, the more directly and effectively you'll be able to communicate with this target audience to grow it.
You can define and refine the audience for your B2B SaaS by factors like:
- Professional factors. Industry, job role, decision-making structure, goals, challenges
- Personal factors. Demographics, interests, hobbies, news and information sources they trust, what they do for entertainment, and shared life experiences.
- Intent factors. What's driving their decision-making processes right now? What are they looking for? And what do they need to know they've found it?
Mapping the Buyer's Journey
- Non-aware. They're unaware they have a problem or its impact on their ability to do their job, get business results, etc.
- Problem-aware. They become aware—or are made aware they have a problem and how much it's hurting them. They have begun seeking B2B SaaS to solve this problem and consider some options.
- Solution-aware. Now, they're aware of the kinds of solutions that exist. They're evaluating needs, benefits, pros & cons, cost, etc., to finalize their selection.
This is a journey. It can happen quickly. But most of the time, the person travels along this path looking at various sources of information.
Your demand generation strategy must ensure that you become a source of information, so they travel the path with you. This gives you the power to guide this person.
On your side of things, Generate demand > Capture Demand > Nurture/Engage > Close > Retain/Re-engage.
Fail to create a full-funnel, multi-channel experience, and you'll lose them if you can get their attention in the first place.
Determine Your Goals for Demand Gen
Goals should always be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound (SMART). They should take into account factors like:
- How much can I achieve with this budget? Budget constraints, along with immediate business revenue needs, can drive decision-making. You could go all out and think long-term for outstanding growth, but work with what you've got.
- Where's my target audience leading me? You've done your audience and competitor research to define the target audience. Your goals must reflect what you learned about where they are, how they make decisions, and the buyer's journey.
- What can I track and measure? Consider how you'll measure if, where, when, and how your demand generation strategy and/or implementation is working. Do you have the technology you need to do that? What do you need to set up to ensure you can consistently, reliably, and confidently track performance?
Develop a Content Strategy
An MIT study found that 66% of marketers at top companies say businesses must focus on end-to-end customer experience and journeys to succeed.
You must target the whole buyer's journey across important channels to earn the benefits of Demand Gen. First, ask yourself where you need to have content.
- Facebook ads and organic
- LinkedIn ads and organic
- Search ads and organic
- Retargeting ads (various locations)
- Website
- Downloadables
- Account Based Marketing
- Sales enablement
- Publisher Direct
- Mobile-first
A full-funnel Omni channel experience is critical for SaaS companies. If you're not currently full-funnel or omnichannel, this may seem like an overwhelming number of places to engage in demand generation.
So, I want to communicate that the right content strategy optimizes the content creation process to make this achievable.
Next, you must ensure you're creating content for the entire funnel. As a general rule, when people are non-aware, they need blog posts, videos, user-generated content, and ads that introduce them to the problem.
When they are solution-aware, they need demos and free trials to help them decide to buy your solution.
Nurture Leads
Your content strategy includes a clear path and method to not only generate demand but capture demand so you can turn MQL into SQL during mid-buyer's journey.
This is the time to build a stronger relationship with the prospect. Email is a great way to do this because you have greater control over the cadence and order of marketing messages.
- 77% of email marketers say email engagement is going up.
- A/B testing emails leads to higher ROI.
Here, your strategy should address how you'll align marketing, sales, and service. Misalignment among these three cost SaaS companies money through customer and employee churn as well as lost productivity.
They must be united through definitions, purpose, communication, and technology. For example, use lead scoring automation to Speed the Lead to Sales at precisely the right time.
Track, Measure, and Optimize
You must make sure you can see the full impact of your marketing, sales, and service alignment, automation, and demand generation strategy. You need to know how your audience experiences your full-funnel, omnichannel experience.
Clear and reliable revenue attribution and reporting are essential to achieve this.
This not only proves ROI. It helps you identify gaps in the whole funnel, omnichannel experience. You can then eliminate what's not working and double down on what is to grow.
Matter Made helps B2B SaaS businesses grow. We help you create and implement a Demand Gen strategy to attract and convert more ideal customers and grow your business. Let's talk about generating demand for your B2B SaaS.
