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Introduction
Let’s face it, demand generation is a vital part of business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy. Unfortunately, several B2B companies spend a lot on marketing and see zero results because they don’t understand that demand generation strategies are essential to their success in business. Don’t be them!
Significantly, demand generation helps your potential prospects realize they need what you’re offering. That’s why it involves a series of actions focused on creating and sustaining brand awareness, engagement, and revenue. With this realization in mind, let’s turn our attention to what demand generation strategy is all about.
What is a Demand Generation Strategy?
A demand generation strategy is a marketing blueprint used by marketing teams to build demand for a brand’s products or services. In the B2B marketplace, the primary goal of the B2B demand generation strategy is to drive brand awareness and create demand for a product or service.
Demand generation strategy examples include:
- Free marketing resources created by HubSpot.
- Free webinars organized by Shopify.
- Referral program launched by Dropbox.
Here, the marketing teams introduce the target audience to their products or services to build a healthy pipeline of qualified leads for their sales teams.
5 Essential Tips for Success
Have you ever started developing a demand generation strategy, only to realize some elements are missing? You may do it wrong without considering these elements and not get expected results. The absence of some of these elements has caused many demand generation strategies to fail before launch.
Here are 5 vital elements to creating a successful demand generation strategy that will help connect to customers’ pain points while creating revenue, nurturing qualified leads, and increasing ROI.
Enhance Awareness
It’s no news that awareness lies at the top of the marketing funnel. So the first thing to do before generating demand is to enhance brand awareness. The truth is brand awareness is essential to the survival of any business. Without it, the target audience will be unaware of the brand’s products or services.
In the B2B marketplace, substantial brand awareness activities help potential prospects understand the problems your products or services are solving. In addition, awareness enhancement activities help your brand achieve several marketing goals like audience expansion, traffic boost, lead cultivation, and many others.
Enhancing your brand’s awareness can come in various ways. You can start with creating educational content about your prospects’ pain points and your solution. Also, you can create referral programs that will make buyers gladly spread the word of your offering to others when they know you’ll reward them. Importantly, publicizing authentic customer reviews as social proof can help build trust from your prospects and boost your conversion rate.
Develop a Content Strategy
Content strategy plays a vital role in creating a demand generation framework. It focuses on planning, creating, distributing, and managing the content used to enhance brand awareness. It draws the attention of your potential prospects at every stage of the marketing funnel and keeps them around even after conversion. A successful content strategy can turn your target audience into loyal customers.
Your content needs to make your prospects recognize the need to choose you over your competitors. Developing a B2B content strategy will put you in front of your target audience and address their pain points, so they want more information about your products or services before buying.
You can develop a content strategy by setting goals, sharing your brand story, identifying gaps, and creating content that fills those gaps for your audience while they move down the marketing funnel.
Developing a content strategy will boost consumer confidence and brand credibility remarkably while improving your ROI.
Maintain High-quality Leads
When it comes to demand strategy marketing, most marketers focus on only the top of the sales funnel and forget about the bottom. Don’t blame them — they don’t realize that maintaining high-quality leads is an essential component of the B2B demand generation strategy.
To generate demand successfully, you need to first generate enough high-quality leads for the sales team by building a healthy sales pipeline that converts. After creating a sales pipeline that consistently converts skeptical target audiences to paying customers, the next thing you’ll do is manage your potential customers. This prevents your sales team from wasting time on unqualified leads.
The goal of leads maintenance is to make qualified leads convert. We recommend having a better understanding of the unique needs of your target audience and leveraging targeted content. Send your high-quality leads personalized emails and follow up promptly. Align your sales and marketing strategies accordingly to get better results.
Implement Account-Based Marketing
With the need for personalized content in lead generating and management, marketers need to understand the unique needs of their audience, and implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a great way to do this.
Account-Based Marketing makes it possible to market and sell to your highest-value accounts without wasting time or resources on unqualified leads.
In the B2B space, ABM encourages brands to create a more cohesive and personalized customer experience. Brand marketers focus on generating leads and fast-tracking leads down the sales funnel through highly targeted campaigns that efficiently drive revenue. Hence, all activities in ABM strategy rely on a significant understanding of the accounts you’re targeting.
There are several ways to get started with Account-Based Marketing:
- You need to identify your high-value accounts.
- Get an extensive insight about them.
- Use your extensive insight to create a strategy to address their unique problems.
- Personalize campaigns to resolve leads challenges.
You’ll see a boost in customer loyalty and improvement in your ROI by doing these.
Engage in Partner Marketing
Imagine having the ability to enhance your brand perception and broaden the reach of your target audience. This is where partner marketing comes in.
As a strategic demand generation framework, partner marketing helps to boost growth and market exposure through a collaboration between brands sharing similar commercial goals.
B2B companies need to reach a larger audience, but this can be expensive. Building partnerships can help provide a cost-effective way of getting a more significant share of the target market.
For established businesses, partner marketing means more qualified leads or sales performance. And for new or smaller businesses, partner marketing implies having an opportunity to increase brand visibility and enhance awareness.
A good example of partner marketing is the partnership between Uber and Spotify that allows customers to start listening to music before getting inside their Uber. This keeps customers engaged more personally and boosts Uber’s competitive advantage.
When done successfully, partner marketing can be an effective approach to power your demand strategy marketing.
Conclusion
With demand generation being all about creating demand for your products or services, you might want to assume that demand generation is simple — this isn’t the case. Instead, several vital elements need to be considered to connect with your customer’s pain point and build a successful B2B demand generation strategy.
If your company is currently working on creating a demand generation strategy and any of these elements are missing, consider including them to make your strategy a success. With these, you’ll be able to enhance awareness of your brand, get more qualified traffic to your website, and ultimately grow your business.
Accelerate your leads and sales today Digitalzone puts your B2B leads and sales on steroids.
Using a global B2B database of 71 million companies, we have created and managed 46,872 successful campaigns for companies based in the USA.
We help B2B companies, just like yours, with Account Based Marketing, Content Syndication, Intent Based Marketing, Lead Generation and List Building.
Get in touch with us today, to accelerate your sales.
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