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Blog Post

Demand Generation

Driving Growth 101: The Basics You Need to Know About Demand Generation

Written by
Matter Made

Driving growth is critical to business success. In B2B SaaS — and any industry — if you're not growing, you're losing ground. But what if you don’t know where to start?

Running an expensive ad campaign and hoping for the best is a common best attempt at demand gen. But you've been burned by the short-lived results and low ROI of this method before.

Alternatively, demand generation is a high ROI, long-term growth-driving vehicle you need to know about. Here's how to use demand gen to drive growth.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand Generation is a data-driven marketing strategy that creates demand for your SaaS solutions. To accomplish this, you must determine the why, where, and how of the target audience's relationship to your B2B SaaS.

Why do they want it? Analytics — mixed with some common sense — tells you the goals and pain points.

Where do they look for it? It tells you the channels they frequent and sources they trust.

How do they need to get it? Demand gen focuses not only on how you initially deliver your SaaS. It cares about "how they receive it". Do they love it and tell others?

Focus on the full funnel

Demand generation seeks to align your marketing, sales, and customer support. In doing so, you create a seamless customer experience that delights customers — top to bottom, start-to-finish, a full funnel experience.

But demand gen doesn't see a funnel that ends at the bottom. It sees a cycle where the bottom of the funnel feeds the top. To accomplish this you'll focus on four demand engines.

Use all four demand engines

What's an engine do? It powers something. To get the most out of demand gen, you need to get all four engines humming in unison. This drives growth.

Creating demand

This engine focuses on generating awareness about the problem your SaaS solves for businesses.

Capturing demand

This one involves engaging people who've shown interest. Start conversations and engage them in the solutions in a meaningful way.

It's critical to note that small actions lead to bigger actions. Leverage this interest to strengthen this bond. Get them to take action like following you or signing up for an email list.

After all, 79% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective distribution channel. It's important to capture demand here when possible.

Accelerating demand

What's it mean to accelerate? You want to not only fill the funnel with high-quality leads but speed the funnel up.

How? Invest in deepening and widening this connection.

Deepen the connection by providing helpful content that serves their needs and goals. Simultaneously, they're learning about your offerings and developing greater intent to buy.

Use data to know when an individual is ready to buy. Deploy automatic lead routing technology to Speed the Lead to sales and close the deal.

At the same time, widen a connection. Encourage interested people to engage with you on multiple channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, etc.). They may not even be a paying customer yet! But this both passively and directly engages other decision-makers in their company (and others).

This also widens the bond because now they're talking offline too! As a result, more people are becoming aware of the problems and entering Top of Funnel.

Growing demand

What do you do after you've made the sale to delight new customers? You should offer robust customer support (people and self-service) along with data-driven, automated onboarding procedures, and advocacy programs.

Marketing creates relevant content to support these efforts, thus aligning marketing and customer support.

Create content for the full funnel...for each demand engine

Each engine needs its own special type of fuel to work. Content is that fuel! But the type of content is different for each stage.

  • Creating demand
  • Educational problem-centered content, blog posts, infographics, long-form guides, videos.
  • Capturing demand
  • Content focused on solutions, eBooks, case studies, white papers, webinars, social media posts.
  • Accelerating demand
  • Sales enablement content, managing objections content, success stories, demos, free trials.
  • Growing demand
  • Onboarding emails, videos, and other guides, troubleshooting guides, self-service content, ChatBot content. Simultaneously, you're facilitating and promoting User-Generated Content (UGC), Loyalty and Advocacy programs.

Identify and Grow Key Accounts

This demand-gen customer success strategy focuses on strengthening the bond you have with high-value accounts. Your goal is to maximize customer lifetime value.

On the surface, this sounds like an account retention strategy. After all, you've heard that increasing retention by just 5% can double your revenue. Of course, retention matters.

But customer lifetime value is more than how much one business account spends in their lifetime. Keeping that company engaged in the solutions fuels all four demand generation engines.

This engagement translates to ROI. This happens in several ways, all of which you can amplify through this strategy

First, simply having a long-standing well-known and/or active customer demonstrates stability, authority, and relevance. Key accounts often have many employees who engage with you on social media.

Let them do the talking. What they say about your products will mean more than anything you ever say about it.

To employ this strategy, actively build a platform that encourages these key accounts to create user-generated content. Then, promote on social media and at various stages. At the same time, leverage their feedback to make your product, pricing strategy, features, and content better.

They'll feel heard—a very basic human need. When businesses fill this need, they strengthen the connection and turn key accounts into brand advocates. These voices drown out the competition as the advocates further drive growth.

Ready to Grow?

Real Growth drives itself — but you have to get the engines started and fueled up. As you focus on full funnel demand gen, you fuel the four engines that turn customers into advocates.

These advocates propel others faster through the funnel. They amplify results you get from your efforts, saving you time and money. Then just keep those engines running, and you have long-term, sustainable growth.

To learn more about demand generation, check out our guide to demand generation. Here, you'll learn more about how to generate the demand that drives growth.

 

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Coming up next:

Blog Post

Demand Generation

The Best Demand Gen Strategies and How to Implement Them

5
min read
min watch

There are many effective demand gen strategies. But knowing which works best for B2B SaaS or your individual business isn't always straightforward.

In this blog post, we will explore the best demand generation strategies for B2B SaaS. We'll look at how to use them to meet your goals and how they'll inform your current or future marketing strategy.

What Are 9 Key Strategies for Demand Generation?

Before I talk strategy, I want to get one concept out in the open. We're going to look at 9 effective demand gen strategies that are very effective for B2B SaaS looking to grow their companies.

But I'm not suggesting you use one of these and run with it. These strategies are interconnected. Implementing each of these together amplifies your demand generation to not only generate more revenues.

And you can do it time- and cost-effectively to generate the positive cash flow you'll need to grow.

1. Define Your Audience for Better Targeting

Create data-backed buyer personas that represent your ideal customer. Use this demand gen tool to connect more efficiently with targeted messaging within these other demand generation strategies.

2. Focus on Full Funnel

Buyers go through three distinct stages of a buyer's journey.

  • Non-aware. They don't know they have a problem or how much it's impacting their productivity, business goals, customer relationships, etc.
  • You have the answer to this problem, but they don't know they have a problem yet.
  • To generate demand, research, plan, create, and publish content to expand awareness of the problem.
  • Use it to guide them into the next stage and capture the lead (email list, etc.) to improve your ability to nurture.
  • Problem-aware. They now know they have a problem. They want to learn everything they can about possible solutions.
  • Engage them with content that helps them explore the solutions.
  • Focus on benefits, not specific SaaS features, which will seem overwhelming right now.
  • Solution-aware. They now need to define and refine the solutions that will work best for them.
  • Allow them to experience the solution with a demo or free trial.

Map out the buyer's journey within your company to enhance the timing and relevance of your messages.

3. Be Omnichannel

According to McKinsey, 94% of survey marketing leader respondents said the move toward a more omnichannel experience has been good for businesses and customers. B2B customers regularly interact with brands across at least 10 channels.

These include various channels:

  • Organic social media and search
  • Paid social media and search
  • Influencers
  • Display ads on Google and Facebook partner websites
  • Remarketing
  • Email
  • Website
  • Apps

To implement an effective omnichannel experience, you must be consistent, targeted, and resourceful. This allows you to work within time and money constraints.

For example, deploying effective analytics, A/B testing, a robust content management system, and automation allows you to streamline content creation and related processes. Eliminate duplicate efforts to maximize ROI.

4. Build a Relationship

Demand generation gets much easier when B2B SaaS companies focus on solving real-world problems. You build authority, industry relevance, and a following of loyal fans/customers.

This becomes a magnetic force that amplifies demand generation.

To build a relationship, listen to your customers and prospects. Build your content messages around their needs, goals, and preferences.

Showcase your willingness to solve B2B problems and how others use your SaaS to meet their goals.

5. Publish High-Quality Content

High-quality content is the substance that turns "strategy" into tangible business results. Use it to communicate thought leadership, authority, relevance, and your unique value proposition (UVP).

Guide and influence by presenting the right kind of content at the right stage of the buyer's journey.

For example,

  1. Someone is not aware they have a problem. Social media posts, blog posts, and videos can help them learn about their problem.
  2. Guide them to the solutions. Leverage valuable content to capture demand through email list sign-up. Checklist, Guide, etc.
  3. Send them solution-focused content via email to nurture that interest into making a decision. Case studies Vs. Content, etc.
  4. Offer them a demo or free trial so they can experience the solution.
  5. Assign the lead to a sales rep. Follow-up with a Sales email sequence (email automation) that includes sales enablement content.
  6. Support and re-engage them to increase retention and CLV through retargeting, social media, email, customer support

6. Streamline Workflows with Automation

Identify repetitive and time-sensitive tasks. Use automation to enhance workflow and improve results.

For example, lead scoring automation tracks a lead's behaviors. It identifies when the MQL becomes a SQL. It can then assign that person to a sales rep to begin email sequences and sales outreach.

This is known as Speed the Lead.

According to Oracle research, lead quality increases by 80% when companies employ automation. And this is just one pivotal moment you can use it to enhance results.

7. Unify Marketing, Sales & Service

A unified marketing, sales & service team communicates one message and accomplishes perfectly timed hand-offs. Achieve consistently delightful customer experiences. People want to share these experiences online.

This sharing feeds the top of funnel. It generates more demand.

8. Target Key Accounts

Key accounts:

  • Are high ROI and CLV
  • Help you generate buzz and demand
  • Show that your SaaS works
  • Give you valuable feedback that helps you improve your product

They've also been working with you for a while, and it may be a name people know. Even better!

Identify key accounts to acquire and retain. While you never want to be too reliant on one account, these are critical for Demand Gen and growth.

9. Optimize with A/B Testing, Tracking, and Analytics

Track, test, and analyze to improve how you apply these strategies continually. Invest in tools to correctly attribute revenues across the buyer's journey—not just the last touch.

Track ROI of your various strategies, channels, and companies to determine which ones you should increase to grow.

This not only improves their effectiveness. It cuts costs to increase ROI.

How to Build a Successful Demand Gen Campaign?

Leverage these strategies to provide real value to customers. This builds credibility that attracts the right people and guides them through the buyer's journey.

Want to know more about how to implement demand gen for your B2B SaaS company? See how Dropbox increased targeted engagement by 6.5X.

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