If you’ve landed here, it’s safe to assume that you’ve heard about demand generation. The topic and strategies themselves can be a bit confusing so let’s break it down into simpler terms.
“Demand generation marketing is the process of creating awareness and demand for your products or services. It expands your audience, generates buzz, and drives traffic to transform interest into action.” -Terakeet
The key element here is the long-term. Demand generation is not a quick process and it needs to be done gradually if it’s ever going to be successful. If done successfully, it can create awareness around the most relevant issues to your business, provide the qualified leads it needs to close deals, and position marketing as a revenue generator instead of a cost center.
So, what exactly is demand generation?
Let’s break it down.
The three pieces of demand
There are three main parts that encompass demand generation:
Lead generation
Before we jump in, there is a small distinction that needs to be cleared up. Lead generation is part of demand generation but there is a subtle difference between them. Demand generation aims to grow your audience by leading new visitors to your website while lead generation aims to convert those visitors into qualified leads. So to clarify, Demand generation is technically the first step, and lead generation is the beginning of the strategic process.
Lead generation is all about creating interest from potential customers and adding them to your marketable portfolio. Then once they are captured, they can be passed on to sales to initiate the sales conversions with the brand.
Demand capture
You need to ensure that there is an existing demand for your product or service. Once you find it, capture it, and guide your potential customers towards your products and services. Some content that can establish your brand proposition includes SEO optimizations, Pay-Per-Click advertisements, and third-party intent data.
Pipeline acceleration
After achieving a captured demand, your sales process can then be sped up using pipeline acceleration techniques. These can be anything from creating highly targeted content that assimilates your lead’s positioning in the sales funnels to engaging in conversations.
5 recommended demand generation strategies
Now that we have a basic understanding of demand generation marketing, here is a breakdown of five of our most recommended strategies to get started.
Blogging
Here at BrandClick, we are no strangers to blogging. Blogging is one of the most popular forms of content marketing as it helps to gain online visibility, attract relevant traffic, engage with your audience, tend to your audience’s needs and wants, and initiate a step in learning more. When finding topics, make sure to gather the information that interests long-term awareness and addresses audience pain points that are relevant to their position in the sales funnel.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are valuable downloadable or incentive-centered content that is aligned with your audience’s needs. Original research is a great example of this, as it can be shared with other industry insiders to expand reach, drive online shares, increase authority and credibility, and increase traffic to your site. A few more examples of this include ebooks, presentations, guides, toolkits, infographics, and templates.
ABM
“Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns focus on a narrowly-defined audience segment and coordinating your marketing efforts across multiple channels and tactics.” When running an ABM campaign, you may perform outbound activities like email marketing, Linkedin ads, InMail, or direct mail. Another suggestion is to guide your audience to case studies or specially personalized landing pages with unique content.
PR Campaigns
PR is the secret weapon of demand generation marketing, as it has infinite opportunities to connect and expand your audience. There isn’t enough time in the day to go over all of them, but here are a few examples of some things you can do.
- Stay on top of the news and popular media. Always think about how your company can enter relevant, topical, and most importantly appropriate conversations.
- Get an interview with a podcast, written journalist, radio, etc.
- Share your own research, tools, and videos with other industry insiders to turn them into link-building assets.
The main goal here is to get people talking. The more people talk about your brand, the better your credibility and authority will be.
B2B SEO
If you effectively apply SEO into your marketing, it enables you to be in sync with your audience’s thinking. Researching the right keywords and considering search intent allows you to get into the minds of your potential consumers, while also improving your brand’s visibility which extends your reach and increases awareness.
When creating any piece of content, optimizing your assets will maximize the return on your efforts and drive loads of traffic to your site. When optimizing, always remember to perform keyword search (long-tail is the best), conduct on-page optimization, and add relevant internal or external links if appropriate. The easier it is for a search engine to find your content, the easier it is for the consumer.
