Blog Post

Demand Generation

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

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.

 

Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

How To Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy

According to 3Q Digital's Growth Marketing Survey Report, less than 1 in 5 marketing leaders have the structure in place to execute an effective growth strategy.

Without a plan to facilitate the continued growth of your company, you will be left vulnerable to changing market dynamics and a volatile customer base.

Having a concrete strategy for growth is the secret to overcoming internal and external barriers and building an effective, scalable growth marketing model that will sustain your business in the long term.

This article will show you how to create a growth-oriented marketing strategy to drive customer acquisition and retention.

Step #1. Define Your Vision

It's not enough to say you want to grow your business. You need to figure out what growth means for your company at the moment.

If you don't have a clear vision for what you want to achieve with growth marketing, you will end up chasing the wrong things, getting distracted, wasting resources, and taking forever to hit milestones.

So you need to decide which target business goals your growth strategy will support within a set timeline. This way, it will be easier to stay on track and measure your progress. For example, your goal might be to:

  • Increase newsletter signups by 10% every month
  • Grow cart value and website conversions by 25% in four months
  • Break into x and z new markets by year's end
  • Generate 30% more revenue every quarter for two years

The more SMART your vision is, the better.

Source: Breeze. A graphic showing that SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Step #2. Establish Success Metrics

Your growth marketing efforts will likely involve both digital marketing and traditional marketing tactics, so there are going to be all kinds of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can track. But not all of them are going to be important to you. 

Your job is to identify the key growth metrics you will use to determine how well you are progressing toward the goals you set earlier. Some examples of metrics you can set for different goals include:

Goal

Metrics

Acquire new customers

Click-Through Rate (CTR) on paid media campaigns, email marketing open/CTR, landing page conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, etc.

Increase revenue

Customer lifetime value, monthly/annual recurring revenue, average revenue per user, customer lifecycle, revenue churn, etc.

Step #3. Research Customers and Competitors

Now that you know what areas of your business you want to grow, it's time to begin gathering data to help you get there. 

Start by understanding who your ideal and existing customers are. Dig into their pain points, behaviors, and entire customer journey. Figure out which customers use your services the most and which ones you generate the most revenue from. What characteristics set them apart?

Look at your competition or businesses in a similar niche that are experiencing tremendous growth and see what you can learn from their strategies. Pay attention to what differentiates your brand from theirs, then leverage that to blaze past the competition.

The information you glean from your research will help you shape your growth marketing plan, identify market gaps that you can fill, find ways you can better serve your customers, and position your brand to claim a bigger market share.

Step #4. Brainstorm Potential Strategies

Growth strategies aren't going to fall into your lap; you have to come up with ideas for how to connect with your customers, improve your speed to lead time, and make your brand a market leader.

Don't limit the strategy brainstorming process to your growth marketing team alone. Source for ideas from people across the organization. Additionally, use social listening to discover what your target audience is saying about your product and competitors, then harvest their suggestions or build on interesting ideas.

Step #5. Choose Tactics in Line With Your Goals

All the strategies you came up with in the last step won't be winners, and you probably won't have the time or resources to try them all out, even if you want to. 

Your energies should be focused on the tactics that align with the objectives you have set and are equipped to drive the business growth you want within the timeline you are working with.

Once you identify your top-performing strategies and channels, double down on your efforts and focus on optimizing them.

Step #6. Budget, Execute, and Evaluate 

When creating a budget for your growth marketing efforts, don't get too hung up on what it will cost. Instead, consider the value that it will generate for your brand and factor that into your calculations. Don't forget to factor in the cost of whatever growth marketing platform you will use — e.g., Hubspot.

Once you have allocated the amount of money you can afford and intend to spend to implement your growth plan, all that's left is to put it into action and start reaping the rewards.

As you execute your growth marketing strategy, diligently monitor the results you are getting so you can pinpoint new trends and know what's working for you, what needs to be adjusted, and the tactics to move away from.

Want to Jump Start Your Growth Marketing? Connect With Matter Made

Devising, executing, and tracking the performance of a sustainable growth strategy is key to building a successful business that is constantly growing and beating the competition.

Matter Made helped Productboard achieve deeper market penetration for their product and 99% month-on-month enterprise lead growth using a five-point omnichannel integrated campaign.

Want to turn your marketing initiatives into a similar relentless growth engine? Let's talk.

Ready to drive efficient demand?

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