Blog Post

Demand Generation

How to Create and Implement a Demand Generation Strategy

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

  1. Increase brand interest
  2. Generate higher-quality leads
  3. Nurture relationships that create brand ambassadors
  4. Earn and hold market share
  5. Re-engage existing customers to increase retention/ CLV
  6. Turn existing customers into Demand Gen amplifiers
  7. Larger deals
  8. Key accounts
  9. Higher ROI

Challenges of Demand Generation

  1. Building an audience
  2. Consistently creating high-quality content
  3. Budget constraints
  4. Marketing-Sales alignment
  5. Capturing demand
  6. 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)
  • Email
  • 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.

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.

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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