The plight of sales development representatives dealing with low-intent leads is deplorable. A sales pipeline that is flooded with numerous low-intent leads will have a domino effect on a business. These low-intent leads eat away at the SDR’s bandwidth as they have a lesser probability of conversion. With 79% of marketing leads not converting to sales, the presence of low-intent leads will have devastating consequences on a business. Leads with no purchase intent drastically impact the marketing ROI and also affect an enterprise’s revenue margin. At first glance, overcoming this challenge seems like a Gordian knot that businesses cannot untie. However, with B2B demand generation, you can slice this knot, acquire leads with purchase intent, and ensure profitability. If you are a business vying to transition from unqualified leads to qualified leads, this blog is a must-read,
B2B Demand Generation: a Knock-On Effect on Sales
What is B2B demand generation?
B2B demand generation is a marketing strategy to drive awareness and interest in an enterprise’s offering. With a B2B demand generation strategy, businesses can ensure that their potential buyers discover them easily and develop an affinity towards their brand. To put it simply, demand generation involves initiating marketing campaigns to foster awareness and interest in your products. Covering every interaction that a potential buyer has with a business, demand generation provides ample scope for businesses to educate their prospects and eventually nudge them to the sales process as qualified leads. Demand generation can be put to use while foraying into new markets, increase awareness about your products, and penetrate deeper into the TAM.
B2B demand generation prevents businesses from chasing immediate, potentially unqualified leads. Gone is the era where businesses could sway potential buyers by resorting to marketing gimmicks. Today’s potential buyers are better informed and empowered to conduct extensive product research before making a purchase decision. Hence, such an informed buyer market necessitates a need for demand generation strategies to maximize lead generation and increase the customers use of their product.
The Inevitable Shift: From Lead Generation to Demand Generation
- More informed buyers and customers who know what they need
- Acquiring high-quality leads with greater potential to convert into users
- Creating stronger brand perception to position the business as an expert
- Reach a wide audience and increase awareness about products
Types of Demand Generation
Before you go ahead and get started with demand generation, let us dive deep into the different approaches you can employ to achieve your business objectives through this method.
Inbound Demand Generation:
Combining bets parts of inbound marketing with effective buying experience, Inbound demand generation allows you to take your potential buyers on a journey, from discovery to decision, whilst they remain anonymous.
Tactics include:
- Blogs
- Social media content
- Live events
- Podcasts
- Paid Ads
Outbound Demand Generation:
Outbound demand generation uses interruption-based techniques that focus on creating a pipeline to push communication to the audience without any explicit permission to do so.
Tactics include:
- Mass email
- Cold calling
- Direct mail
- Purchasing data
- Intent data
- ABM
Lead Generation vs Demand Generation
The Moving Parts of a B2B Demand Generation Strategy
While trying to gain users by marketing your product, it all boils down to your ability to solve their problem. You have won half a battle if your product is a good fit and precisely addresses the audience’s needs. It is not so easy coz there are scores of other products that are proving the same to an audience and trying to grab their attention. So, the panacea is a solid demand-generation strategy that enables you to stand out from the rest. As a proactive marketing approach, demand generation allows you to stay on your audience’s mind throughout their purchase journey by effectively educating and engaging them.
1. Attract Customers That Align With Your Business With a Buyer Persona
Too broad an appeal leads to no appeal! This statement is true to the core when it comes to marketing. When you try to sell your product to everyone, you end up selling to none and lose out on profit margins. Hence, a core part of a demand generation strategy must be to develop buyer personas to target the right audience.
You can utilize various industry contact databases and build a buyer persona through market research for your business. As an archetype, buyer personas allow you to capture buying patterns and gain significant insights into individuals who are part of a purchase decision, as well as their personality traits, including demographics and more. The buyer persona paints a clear picture of the audience’s pain point, the solutions they are already weighing on, and their stage in the buying journey. These significant takeaways from buyer personas help you choose the prospect who will be the best fit for your offerings or services and avoid initiating mass targeting endeavors.
2. Encourage Your Customers to Act Through a Compelling Value Proposition
A compelling value proposition plays a vital role in demand generation, helping you foster a sense of trust with your audience. As a good value proposition helps you understand who needs your products, and position your business and offerings accordingly. With a compelling value proposition, you can get your desired results, i.e., from a mere form fill to a final purchase. An effective position of your products in the market lets you identify genuine leads interested in your products and attract them as users by providing precise solutions to their problems.
3. Know Your Audience for on-the-nose Strategies
Comprehending your target audience allows you to think like a buyer and market like a champion. Leveraging informational databases, you can initiate thorough market research and gain a granular understanding of whom you are selling to. Understanding your audience’s preferences, vims and fancies helps you coin the right content and marketing strategy to communicate only the things that matter the most to them and gain their trust and attention.
4. Emphasize Things That Matter to Your Audience via a Content Strategy
Investing significant efforts into creating buyer personas and comprehending your audience works wonders for you as a business. It allows you to understand what matters the most to your audience and accordingly tailor a content strategy to establish communication with them. A content strategy plays a crucial role in b2b demand generation as it paves the way for self-discovery and self-education.
Crafting content that resonates with the audience, i.e., specifically entails how it will mitigate a problem they are facing, takes you a step closer to your audience, and even turbocharges your conversion efforts. A clear perception of the audience allows you to comprehend which websites, industry publications, and other resources they turn to while or before making a buying decision. From these insights, you can come up with the right content that can be leveraged to create the buzz and drive demand generation.
5. Show Up Where Your Audience is Present, Utilizing Multi-channels
A multi-channel strategy covers platforms like email, social media, and other content distribution avenues, allowing you to be present where your target audience hangs out. With a multi-channel approach incorporated as a strategy in your b2b demand generation, you can effectively cover a wide audience base and create more awareness about your offerings. Additionally, consistently interacting with the audience across channels brings better brand visibility, helping you stay on your potential customer’s mind.
6. Choose an Appropriate Channel for Receptive Communication
A channel strategy for demand generation marketing allows you to specifically determine how to reach your target audience and effectively connect with them. Additionally, choosing a specific channel for demand generation allows you to tailor the content accordingly and come up with appropriate distribution methods to gain ample traction for your products or services. With bespoke messages that drive interest, you can gain better responses from your audience and nudge them to purchase your offerings easily.
Example:
- LinkedIn to distribute in-feed content.
- PPC to bid on buyer-intent keywords.
- Blogs to target informational keywords.
- YouTube to distribute live events.
7. Make Your Website a Platform That Drives Conversion Optimization
Once you have piqued the audience’s attention with your offerings, the next logical step is to convert this interest into a purchase, i.e., conversion optimization. To achieve conversion optimization, you must create an ambiance where buyers can evaluate your products, understand how they will address and resolve their problems, and compare them against competitors. All these can become a reality with a website. As an opening vista to your business, a website gives you visibility and makes sure buyers find you and explore the various solutions you are offering them. A clear user experience, product information that is easily accessible on your website, a smooth sales or checkout process, and actionable CTAs allow you to encourage high-intent conversions via your website.
8. Take Up Lead Scoring to Focus on Prospects That Will Convert
Lead scoring as a demand generation strategy allows you to identify and prioritize high-quality leads. Owing to this, your sales and marketing teams can completely focus on prospects that will eventually convert and increase their operational efficiency. Via lead scoring, you can ensure that the right leads are contacted at an optimal time in their purchase journey and cement the deal. By digging deeper into sales and marketing data, you can perceive the top factors that had a significant impact on sales and develop a point or grading system for qualifying leads. Based on the scores, your sales and marketing teams can work in unison to comprehend when a prospect will be the most receptive to a direct outreach. Lead scoring allows you to segregate the prospects into qualified leads, hot prospects, or a bad fit and accordingly invest time and efforts in persuading them to make a purchase.
Looking to Set Up a Grading System for Lead Qualification? Know More About Lead Scoring
Components of B2B Demand Generation Strategy
The core components of a B2B demand generation strategy include demand creation, which generates awareness of a problem and solution, and demand capture, which converts buyers in your market actively seeking a solution.
| Demand creation | Demand capture |
|---|---|
| Organic SM | SEO optimization |
| Paid SM | PPC |
| Live events | Review sites |
| Podcasting | Your website |
| ABM |
Demand Creation:
As part of generating awareness of a problem, demand creation includes distributing content to the audience on their preferred channels. The main objective of the demand creation is to target users who are not looking for an offering. Take a look at the top 5 demand creation strategies
Be in front of the right people with the right message
Achieve this through organic social media.
Create a strategy aligning social media posts with the content your buyers prefer and want. It allows you to reach potential prospects or buyers before they have a preference for a brand or identify a specific problem. Organic social media lets you bring awareness at the initial stages of customer understanding, cementing a bond and further paving the way for strong buyer and seller/vendor relationships. It can be achieved by encouraging in-feed content consumption, i.e., offering content that the buyers or prospects can consume within the platform without having to step out to view content on other platforms.
Appease your most preferred audience with the best in-feed content
Utilize paid social media.
Distribute content to a specific audience segment by leveraging paid social media, so as to get your message to the right audience without them following you. Utilize paid social media for retargeting so that you can constantly stay in the mind of a user about your offering via advertisements. This strategy includes serving ads to a buyer, a vendor, or a user who has completed an action or visited your site.
Engage with customers on a deeper level for strong brand awareness
Make use of podcasts.
Podcasts provide a platform to establish thought leadership by connecting with the audience at a deeper level. Via podcasts, you can engage with your audience through valuable content and foster trust that arises through constant listening and interaction. Such engagement ultimately culminates in driving and generating user interest, which further contributes to a successful sale. With a steady spike in podcast listeners over the years, aligning your demand generation strategy by distributing content in formats or channels your buyer wants to consume helps you drive demand creation.
Increase brand affinity and awareness about your product
Make use of event marketing.
A powerful way to generate demand is by bringing people together in an event and creating a community. Events allow you to garner the audience’s attention and prioritize building brand affinity. As events provide a platform for direct, and personal interaction with prospects, it allows you to foster relationships and high-quality leads. Via events, you can offer your prospects a tangible experience, which seldom any digital marketing efforts can offer, and make a significant impact on their purchase decisions.
Focus your efforts on high-value target accounts
Take up ABM.
The majority of businesses cast a wider net to target a broad audience base or a large market. However, if you wish to latch onto high-value accounts, you need to sharpen your focus and take up ABM. You can market to a niche audience, tailor your demand generation strategy, target specific buyer accounts, and generate high-quality leads.
Demand Capture:
Demand capture involves grabbing the buyer’s attention when they are ready to buy in channels they are present or are using. Demand-capturing strategies align closely with several inbound marketing tactics. Take a look at the top 4 demand capturing strategies.
Grab the attention of potential prospects
Initiate SEO optimization.
Imagine the impact when your website appears on the first page when the audience initiates a Google search for products or services like yours. It allows you to capture the attention of potential customers who have a buying intent. Visibility in SERP helps you make the most of the demand that rises through organic search queries. Optimizing your website content for relevant keywords, targeting specific audience segments based on their search behavior, optimizing website elements through link building , effective content marketing, and ensuring your website has a fast loading speed are some of the tactics to be adopted to bring your products to the limelight in a google search.
Reach out to people with high purchase intent
Capitalize on PPC.
How about bringing your products to the attention of an audience with high purchase intent? You can do this through PPC, using selective keywords that indicate strong purchase intent, strategically placing ads in search results, and creating opportunities for immediate sales. Utilizing purchase intent keywords, you can make sure that the PPC ads appear to users who are likely to convert to customers, capture demand, and enhance sales efficiency. Additionally, via PPC, you can retarget previous users and increase the scope and certainty of lead conversions.
Effectively convert existing demand into sales
Boost credibility through positive reviews.
Increasing confidence in your offerings among the audience empowers you to influence their decision to purchase and convert the existing demand into sales. Good customer reviews on your products and testimonials on reputable platforms enable you to come to the forefront of a large audience base who are looking for solutions. Besides giving you ample exposure and brand visibility, positive customer reviews on large platforms help you easily nudge leads in the consideration phase to buy from you. Positive customer reviews enable you to position your brand as a go-to–solution provider in the market, whereas the extra mile you go by responding to negative feedback or reviews allows you to establish yourself as a business that prioritizes its users. Reviews and testimonials act as social proof, helping you to be perceived as a more authentic and trustworthy entity and fostering long-term bonds with your users.
Create a central hub to attract potential customers
Harness the potential of your website.
Your website is a central hub that you can leverage to showcase your products and how they address the problems of your audience and capture their attention through appropriate keywords or SEO strategy. Websites allow you to collect lead information through forms and nudge users to purchase various tactics, including clear call-to-actions, attractive UX designs, dedicated landing pages, and more. Through relevant and valuable content on your website, you can show your expertise, effectively draw an audience genuinely interested in your enterprise’s offerings, and convert them to users. Besides these, live chat features that answer customer queries also play a crucial role in converting the prospects who visit the website into leads and further into users.
Demand Generation Funnel: to Ensure More of Your Leads Become Customers
What is a demand generation funnel?
A pictorial representation that entails various stages a potential customer goes through when interacting with a brand.
It takes an average of seven interactions with a brand before a B2B buyer purchases from a business. This marketing rule of 7 provides businesses with a myriad of opportunities to initiate and drive buyer-led engagement, move more buyers down the funnel, and convert them to loyal users instead of merely harvesting their contact information.
Dark Funnel: Capitalize on the Untrackable Interactions
Potential channels of the dark funnel
Businesses must not ignore the potential of the dark funnel, i.e., tracking the untrackable interactions, to optimize demand generation. Despite not being visible through analytics, the dark funnel plays a crucial role in influencing a buyer’s purchase decision. Some of the potential channels that constitute the dark funnel include messages, comments, group threads that are part of dark social, review sites, Reddit groups where conversations around a brand happen, events, and organic mentions on a podcast.
Impact of Demand Generation: A Reckoning Force Benefiting a Business Up and Down the Funnel
Demand generation offers immense vantage points to businesses vying to amplify their profit margins. As a powerful force at the top of the funnel, good demand generation allows you, as an enterprise, to reach a wider audience. Breeding familiarity with a brand in a wider audience segment quickly transcends to securing greater market share. Additionally, demand generation helps fill up the middle of the funnel with good leads with purchase intent, and further, lead nurturing strategies ensure they move down to the bottom of the funnel. All these add up to more leads, more conversions, more users, more sales, and further replicable growth.
A Brief Overview of Benefits Associated With Demand Generation:
Better leads and higher ROI
With demand generation strategies in place, you are attracting prospects genuinely interested in what your business is offering. Marketing to qualified leads increases the likelihood of conversion rates, helping you avoid wasting time prospecting with leads without any purchase intent and focusing only on collaborating with prospects that will fetch you profits.
Stronger brand recognition
Demand generation provides you ample scope to educate the market, create awareness about your product, and position your brand as a solution provider. Besides helping you establish thought leadership, demand generation enables you to build stronger brand recognition and foster a bond of trust with your audience.
Shorter sales cycle
Marketing and sales become easier when you are selling your products or services to consumers who are already informed about your offerings! Demand generation strategies make this a dream come true for every business. As demand generation helps you generate ample qualified leads, you can easily persuade them to commit to buying your product, accelerate the sales cycle, and swiftly close the deal. Overall, via a shorter sale cycle, you can ensure bang for your buck, i.e., a higher ROI.
Deeper connection with the audience
B2B demand generation enables you, as a business, to provide valuable, ungated content that addresses the prospect’s pain points. Content that addresses the prospect’s pain points helps you strike the right chord with them, leading to more meaningful interactions and gaining users who stay loyal to your brand.
B2B Demand Generation Metrics: Measuring Your Efforts
Now that we have dealt with various strategies for demand generation, let’s understand how to measure the efforts. While measuring B2B demand generation efforts, it is always best to skip the vanity metrics and consider the lead quality and its impact on revenue margins. Here are a few of the metrics to consider:
- Number of visitors booking a sales meeting.
- Number of leads that turn into a business opportunity.
- Average deal size that helps you forecast revenue margin.
- Sales pipeline value i.e. combined revenue from every qualified lead in the pipeline.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC), i.e., cost spent to acquire a paying customer.
- Cost per lead (CPL), i.e., money spent to acquire a lead.
- The average length of a sales cycle.
InfoCleanse and Demand Generation:
A business must know the lay of the land to formulate demand-generation strategies. In this regard, having access to information that allows you to assess and understand the business stakeholders of the industry, companies, and job roles associated with every sector you wish to market for is a must. InfoCleanse’s contact databases provide this information in spades, which allows you to understand your target audience better and initiate appropriate and precise demand-generation endeavors. With InfoCleanse’s accurate, authenticated, and verified data in your marketing arsenal, you can undertake demand generation initiatives, including email campaigns and digital newsletters to generate awareness and product surveys to understand user needs, comprehend the latest market trends, and optimize lead generation.
Turbocharge Demand Generation Efforts With InfoCleanse Data Solutions
Wrapping Up
The B2B landscape is evolving as today’s buyers are not prone to make impulsive purchases without conducting extensive research online. As the modern user journey includes conducting ample research before buying, it becomes non-negotiable for businesses to cater informative, relevant content through the above-mentioned B2B demand generation strategies to ensure that they are in sync with modern buying behavior.