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

Demand Generation

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.

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