5 Essential Things You Need To Build A Demand Generation Strategy

When marketing your products or services, your number one goal should be to make your target audience care about what you’re offering them.

This is why your marketing strategy should be to shift their perspective so they understand what your products or services do and how you can solve specific problems. In other words, you want to help them recognize that they need whatever it is you’re offering them to create a demand for it.

This is what demand generation is all about.

Overview of what demand generation is

As mentioned above, demand generation’s main objective is to make people interested in your products or services, allowing you to build a strong pipeline of highly qualified leads for your sales team.

Demand generation’s scope covers all marketing and sales initiatives in every phase of the sales funnel. The key to developing awareness and igniting demand for what you are selling is to provide valuable information to the right people at the right time.

What makes demand generation important is that you create awareness so that people realize their need for the products or services you offer. It also helps position your brand differently with prospective customers. As a result, they become more receptive to your sales messaging.

To grow your business, you need to create a robust pipeline of potential customers. But to ensure that you’ll be able to sustain their needs and keep them interested in what you have to offer, you need to optimize every point of contact. By doing so, you’ll be able to improve the quality of the leads that go through your sale funnel. To do that, you need a powerful demand generation strategy that will help you create a thoughtful and cohesive outreach marketing plan that ensures an enhanced user experience.

Demand generation vs lead generation

Although demand generation and lead generation share a common goal – to increase your sales and grow your business – each strategy’s approach and immediate objective are entirely different.

Demand generation

Demand generation is all about awareness and interest. It’s about positioning your company in a way that your audience will view it as a valuable source of information. It lets you put your brand in front of your audience to make them more interested in what you have to offer. By doing so, they’ll become more receptive once you interact with them.

In other words, demand generation is like casting a broader net with various kinds of content to increase brand visibility and let people know about the solutions you can offer them.

Lead generation

The main goal of lead generation is to obtain your audience’s contact information to engage them for sales and marketing purposes. What makes lead generation different from demand gen is that this strategy has the presumption that your target audience already knows they have a problem and are looking for ways to solve it through the products and services on the market. They’re at the phase where they’re ready to take the step to continue through the sales funnel. All that’s left for you to do is to convince them that you have the best solution for them.

While the two may be different, both marketing processes work well together in generating leads. Through demand generation, you can generate leads to increase your sales conversions. The key here is creating content that will get the right message to the right people at the right time. This is because not all qualified leads will be converted to sales. This doesn’t mean that those leads are just a waste of your time and resources. Your sales team can engage those leads to bring them back into the funnel for future conversions.

Building a successful demand generation strategy

Demand gen can make your marketing messages sound more authoritative, more valuable to prospective customers. Ultimately, this can help you boost your sales conversions and increase your revenues.

Check out these essential steps to help you build a strong demand generation strategy.

1. Develop brand awareness

The first step to achieving success in any digital marketing technique is creating brand awareness. This isn’t just about grabbing the attention of your target audience. An effective brand awareness strategy ensures that your marketing messages leave a positive and lasting impression on your target market. Furthermore, you should be able to make them trust your company when you offer solutions to their needs or challenges.

One of the most reliable ways to build brand awareness and credibility is customer reviews. It would help if you had authentic reviews from previous customers to provide potential buyers with a glimpse of how you will be able to solve problems they haven’t even realized yet. What makes reviews more compelling is that they are candid, genuine, and free from marketing hype, giving prospects valuable insights that will help them filter through a myriad of options in the market.

2. Leverage multi-touch attribution

Nowadays, everything is changing so quickly. The sales funnel that everyone has gotten used to is no longer the same as before. It has evolved more in the last five years than in the previous decade. And customers do not take the same path to purchase. Because of this, your marketing strategy must focus on personalization and multi-touch attribution.

Multi-touch attribution is a way to measure the success of the different strategies you use, including PPC, email marketing, or video marketing through Google Analytics and Google Ads. By using such tools, you’ll be able to determine the entire customer journey and how they interact with your marketing messages and how they complete the goals you’ve set for them. This means that you need to get the right message at the right time using the right technology.

3. Create a content strategy

An excellent demand generation strategy should make search engine optimization (SEO) a starting point. With an SEO plan, you will need to organize an Editorial Calendar where you will list all content pages in order of their value for demand generation. From there, you will assign a target keyword for each content page in your website’s sitemap. This allows you to define different keyword categories that your target audience is likely to search.

By creating different types of content that answers buyers’ concerns or questions as they move through the customer journey, you’ll be able to build brand credibility. Ultimately, customers will think of your brand as a subject matter expert within the marketplace, encouraging them to look to your business when they need something that you offer in the future.

4. Create buyer personas when targeting audiences

To make your content stand out from a sea of other content from other brands, you need to make sure that they are well-curated and personalized to address the needs of your high-value leads – leads that are most likely to convert.

It will also help if you create buyer personas to be able to target your audiences with your marketing campaigns effectively. This is where you segment different users into different profiles of your ideal customers so you will know who to reach out to and how you can successfully convey your message.

Buyer personas must include details such as fictitious name, age, gender, job, typical concerns, etc. Through segmentation, you’ll be able to personalize your ads to the people who are most likely to read or consume them. Your marketing team will also be able to work cohesively by having clear targets for your content and ads.

5. Nurture high-quality leads

There will always be times when users don’t bite into your marketing tactics right away, no matter how good they are. This doesn’t mean, though, that you should scratch them off your list. Remember, your marketing team has already exerted effort in reaching out and convincing your prospects about your brand. So, why waste such leads when you can nurture them instead?

Your marketing and sales teams should continue to engage and interact with those people because, after all, they are still considered prospects. Your staff should continue making sure that your business is in tune with buyer behaviors, concerns, and challenges to ensure that they will remember your brand in the future. Aside from that, you should also focus on the types of content that potential customers want to read and the channels they are more likely to be on.

The goal of nurturing highly qualified leads is to continue reaching out to those people with the right content or information that will be most useful to them.

Bottom line

To ensure a sound demand generation strategy, you must increase brand awareness, develop a strong content strategy, prompt engagement, and nurture high-quality leads. Through a robust demand generation plan, you’ll be able to bring in more highly qualified leads and grow your business.