If you’re looking for ways to boost sales, then a demand generation strategy may just be your key to success. By educating customers about your business and products, you’ll create more demand for your product. Plus, this is an excellent way to strengthen relationships with clients and separate your business from your competitors.
Keep reading to discover 10 effective ways to generate B2B demand for your product. We’ll describe how you can shift your sales and marketing practices to expand your reach and close more sales.
What is B2B Demand Generation? And How it Works
B2B demand generation is a marketing and advertising strategy designed to drive business growth by generating demand for your product/service.
B2B demand generation requires a strategic, multi-step process. Your marketing and sales team will collaborate on building relationships with prospective customers. Basically, it’s all about guiding customers through the pipeline with content and sales tactics.
Here are the steps involved:
Identify Your Target Market Profile: Conduct research and determine the key businesses and stakeholders that would most benefit from your product/service.
Creating Awareness: Use marketing tactics to expand your reach to diverse audiences. The goal is to strengthen your brand identity and exposure.
Driving Interest and Engagement: Offer product education to your prospective customers. Be informative and explain why they should purchase your product.
Lead Generation and Qualification: Collect data about interested parties and assess their potential of becoming a customer. Think of ways that you can guide them into making a final purchase.
Nurturing and Conversion: Offer your ongoing support, educate them, be present—answer their questions and reassure them. All of these behaviours will elicit their trust and drive your chances of converting them.
Benefits of B2B Demand Generation
Enhanced Brand Awareness: Demand generation will elevate your business’s reputation and visibility in the eyes of your target market.
Improved Lead Quality: Narrows down leads who have a genuine interest in your offerings, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Increased Sales Pipeline: Develops a strong pipeline of prospects and opportunities, easing the sales process and increasing conversion rates.
Better Customer Insights: By gathering more customer data you’ll better understand your customers’ needs and behaviours.
Higher ROI: Enacting these marketing strategies will help you reach high-quality leads, which leads to a better return on investment.
Measuring Demand Generation
After adopting any new strategy you must use measurement tools to determine how successful it is. These demand generation metrics and KPI’s should give you an idea of what to look out for:
Cost per acquisition (CPA): The cost of gaining a new customer. It’s calculated by dividing the total marketing and sales expenses by the number of new customer acquired.
Cost Per Lead (CPL): The average expense incurred to generate a single lead. It’s determined by dividing the total marketing expenditure by the number of leads acquired.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Prospects categorized by marketing as having a high potential to become customers. Mostly based on their engagement and interest levels.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Leads that the sales team labels as ready for direct sales engagement, indicating a higher probability of conversion.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The forecasted revenue a business can expect from an individual customer throughout the course of their engagement.
Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the profitability of marketing efforts. It’s calculated by subtracting the cost of the campaign from the revenue generated, then dividing by the campaign cost.
Demand Generation Cycle Length: Calculating the average time from the point of identifying a lead and turning them into a customer.
10 Demand Generation Strategies:
1. Improve Your Demand Funnel Framework
To implement this strategy, your main goal should be to generate demand at each step of the sales funnel. Create marketing and advertising campaigns that capture people at various points in the pipeline, from initial discovery to conversion.
Here’s an overview of the different stages and examples of how you can reach your target audience:
Top of the Funnel: Tactics that will build brand awareness and attract new audiences.
Educate your audiences with various types of content
Create campaigns that generate awareness of your product/service
Mid-Funnel: Focuses on prospects who are interested but not yet ready to convert
Leverage your CRM data
Retargeting ads
Free trials or demos
Bottom of the Funnel: Efforts to retain customer loyalty and re-engagement
Send personalized emails or a regular newsletter
Respond to feedback
2. Optimize Your Lead Nurturing
Your marketing team should always be in action. Basically, they should work in harmony with your sales team. So, as your sales team is moving individual leads through the buying process, your marketing team should be offering support along the way.
Their job is to create and distribute content that addresses an individual customer’s needs, hesitations, and questions. For example, people who're in the exploratory or browsing phase should not receive identical content. After all, marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach, different groups of people resonate with different messages.
Keep in mind, your marketing content may be the final push that converts a lead into a customer.
3. Develop a Content Strategy
Content marketing can help your B2B in so many ways. Of course, it often generates leads and drives higher rates of traffic and engagement, but it can also:
Build trust and establish authority in the industry
Give you a chance to educate your target audience and address their pain points
Improve search engine optimization (SEO)
Establish brand identity
With content marketing there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, instead, you can use it as an opportunity to be creative and post a variety of content. You’ll just want to make sure that regardless of the form or outlet, you should address FAQ’s and aim to create a need for your product/service.
Here’s some examples of types of content you may want to try:
Blogs: Articles you post on your website to educate your audience and improve your SEO.
Short videos: Content that can be uploaded on your website or social media.
Audiobooks/eBooks: Become an industry leader by publishing your own book. Offering it online will improve your SEO and expand your reach. To launch an audiobook, consider hiring an audiobook production company to take care of everything for you.
Podcasts: Podcasts are one of the most efficient ways to create high-impact content consistently. One recorded conversation can turn into a blog post, video clips, a newsletter email, social content, and more, all while building trust with your audience. Partnering with a B2B podcast agency means you get a done-for-you system that turns expert conversations into a steady stream of marketing assets, without adding to your team’s workload.
4. Account-Based Marketing
Account based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. Rather than placing a focus on increasing the overall sales volume, the goal with ABM is to concentrate on engaging specific groups of clients that have high purchasing power.
By tailoring marketing campaigns to certain audience members, you will address how you can solve their unique needs and challenges. This will strengthen client relationships and build trust, leading you to increased rates of conversion and ROI.
When you’re creating an ABM campaign, ask yourself these questions:
Have we spoken with the client before? If yes, why did we not close on any deals?
Are there trends with their online activity? What kinds of ads or posts do they engage with most?
Your answers will identify how you should introduce or reintroduce yourself, the client’s pain points, and their current needs. From that point, you’ll have enough information to create a personal sales pitch that targets their unique situation.
There are many ways that you can enact this strategy. An excellent example (that we’ll delve into in the next section) is email lists.
5. Marketing Through Newsletters and Emails
Newsletters and emails are an excellent way to communicate with your audience. You can automate opt-in emails (where you send a weekly/monthly newsletter) and send follow-up emails (to convert browsers into customers).
Here’s some things you’ll want to cover in your memos:
Campaigns or product launches
New content (e.g. podcasts, blogs, videos, social media)
Product knowledge and FAQ’s
Upcoming promotions
Shifts in the company (e.g. new team members, supporting causes)To create deeper and more trusting connections with your target audience, you can also send personalized messages to prospective customers. Use this as an opportunity to educate them on your product and its value.
6. Event Marketing
To create loyal customers you need a combination of things, though most importantly, friendly sales people who foster positive experiences. And unfortunately, it can be tricky to connect with people through a screen. So, to take your audience connections a step further, you’ll want to meet people face-to-face.
Attending industry-related events and networking will not go unnoticed. In fact, it will create more buzz around your brand. Basically, once people can put a face to the name, they’re more likely to remember you.
So, look out for upcoming conferences, sales conventions, trade shows, or even remote events (like webinars). You can also consider hosting your own event where your target audience can learn more about you. When you’re speaking at these events, make sure you clearly emphasize how your product can solve your client’s problems.
7. Leverage Social Media
Don’t overlook the power of social media and its ability to generate leads. If you’ve already developed a social media marketing strategy, you may want to revise it to improve your demand generation tactics.
Start by reviewing your engagement data. Look through your popular posts and identify the underlying themes. For example, are there specific topics that generate interest? Or whether the type of content impacts engagement.
Once you’ve distinguished what’s working best, you’ll want to respond with appropriate content. Also, when you notice people engaging with your content, you should reply with personalized content (e.g. product education, reassurance).
As a general rule, make sure each post will create interest towards your product/service.
8. Paid Advertising
Paying for ad space can be costly, though it’s an effective way of reaching your target audience. Be smart with it, learn how your ideal customers spend their time online and what kinds of platforms and content they frequently engage with.
By investing in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you will appear at the top of Google when someone searches for your chosen keywords. This will help you boost your brand visibility and generate leads.
Another way to achieve this is by promoting your content on your target audience’s social media feeds. Popular platforms you can use are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These sites offer you comprehensive analytics so that you know exactly what works and what doesn’t.
9. CRM and Marketing Automation
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to how a company collects and organizes information about its customers, ranging from leads to previous customers.
By tracking customer interactions, your sales team can optimize their sales pitches and follow-up meetings based on this data. For example, if a prospective client frequently views one of your products, you can assume that they’re showing interest in it. Although, it's your job to figure out what their pain points are and how you can educate them into making the purchase.
Marketing automation involves sending targeted messages to your prospective clients. The message will be tailored towards their previous engagement with your brand. In other words, knowing what stage of the sales funnel they are in and how you can guide them into making their final purchase.
For example, you can offer additional information to viewers who are still in the exploratory phase of the funnel, or send a reminder email to those who have yet to make their purchase.
10. Refine Your Lead Scoring
There are many ways to find leads, website interactions and analytics, social media activity, or email engagement.
Once you find out where your leads primarily come from (basically how your customers found you and why they chose you), you’ll have a better understanding of how you can better qualify future leads. You can talk to your sales team or directly to your existing customer base.
You should reflect on things like your marketing, campaigns, website quality, sales techniques, customer service, and your brand identity as a whole.
Tips for Better Demand Generation Campaigns
Create a target market profile: identify what makes your customer base unique. Determine underlying trends in demographics, engagement, and online activity.
Track everything: measure and reflect on your results. Any time you launch a new practice, campaign, product, or piece of content, make note of what the responses were.
Optimize your website quality: your website is the first place that customers will turn to after consuming your content. Ensure that it's functional and aligns with your brand identity.
As a final note, when you adopt a new demand generation strategy, make sure your whole team is on board. Communication is key, especially when big changes are being made! So, you’ll want to schedule regular check-ins with your sales and marketing teams.
Written by Emily Nyikos
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Jony Studios is a content marketing agency specializing in B2B podcasting and audiobook services. They have worked with many clients, from startups to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio, and many others.
