Whether you are a new firm that has only recently made its presence felt or an established business, your main goal is to increase the demand for your products and services. While most of the brands consider lead generation, demand generation is equally as important but mostly overlooked. 

Your marketing efforts and sales should focus on generating real demand for the services that you offer; otherwise, it is a waste of money and effort. If you are a company that has already tried the basic steps and tactics to improve demand and is now ready to implement new methods, you are at the right place. 

This article further explains what demand generation is and some effective strategies that can help you boost your company’s demand graph. 

What Exactly Is Demand Generation?

If you want to develop or improve your B2B brand’s awareness and interest among the target audience, demand generation is the best way to go. This methodology is mainly used by marketing and sales teams to further generate a sizeable demand for their products at every step. 

Apart from generating a liking for your products, the main objective here is for your sales and marketing teams to work in sync; every strategy you implement should be working towards achieving this goal. 

This way, you can reduce the money wasted on marketing, improve lead quality and be able to achieve your target consistently. That being said, most firms confuse demand generation with lead generation. This article further talks about that. 

How Is Demand Generation Different From Lead Generation?

Most of the companies use both strategies simultaneously since the difference between both is quite subtle. However, both lead and demand generation have individual roles to play in a particular business. To capitalize on a buyer’s journey, you must notice these nuances and use them in your favor.

Lead Generation 

Lead generation strategies are quite common in the industry and most use them to get more customers. It mainly deals with making a note of your potential clients and customers and converting them into qualified leads through lead scoring. In simpler words, it is all about reaching out to the customers who are interested in your products and influencing them to buy your products. 

Lead scoring helps you in understanding how many potential customers your firm has and their marketing habits. This strategy mainly takes from the pool developed by demand generation and checks to see how many of your leads want to become paying customers. Some of the common examples of lead magnets consist of:

Whitepapers

EBooks

Direct mail marketing

Live events; and

Retargeting campaigns 

Demand Generation

On the other hand, demand generation is all about maximizing demands for your products and services and bringing in new customers. It also allows the company to show that their products are the solution for any problem the customers are facing. 

While lead generation does not differentiate between any kind of leads, demand generation is more focused on bettering the lead quality. This is a marketing aspect formulated by your company’s sales and marketing teams. Some of the prominent examples of demand generation tools include:

Webinars

Blog posts

Downloadable content

Search engine optimization

Podcasts

Videos; and

Influencer marketing

Why Is Demand Generation Important?

Before you focus on selling your products, you have to make the potential customers realize that the services and products you offer can help them. Without knowing about the products you sell and the benefits they have, the customers are in no position to decide whether they want to invest in them. This is where demand generation comes in with as a helping hand. To put it simply, demand generation helps make your company visible to the general public and allows them to know and understand what your firm has to offer. 

Without good sales and marketing, your company will never be successful, irrespective of how good your products and services are. That being said, demand generation mainly helps a business prioritize three main things.

Increase Brand Awareness: It allows you to promote your brand and get more people interested in either the brand or the product or service you are showcasing. 

Improves Overall Profits & Revenue: It helps your company earn more money and provides a better ROI by converting an interested customer into paying customers through better conversion rates.

Generates Better Leads: It not only allows you to get more leads but also acquire quality leads that will potentially become paying customers. 

How To Boost Demand Generation?

There are quite a few tactics that can help you improve demand generation for your brand or a particular product. Out of the several strategies you can implement, here are some of the most effective and common ones used.

Utilize Intent Data

One of the best ways to find in-market buyers is through using buyer intent data. Firstly, you should develop a customer journey map. This will show how your customers find your brand and if you are in the right places at the right times. This can range from blog posts and advertisements to landing pages. 

That being said, using intent data is a step further. It provides detailed insight and allows you to understand if the buyer is showing interest in buying your product. This will help your team to not always have to create demand but instead focus on buyers that are already prepared to buy. 

It has become more crucial than ever to take advantage of this feature. Back in the day, buyers would get introduced at a regular industry trade show or any event they attended. 

However, now this process takes place online. With intent data, your team can pay attention to the leads in-market, ready to have conversations about the purchase decision. 

Provide High-Quality Content

Your content marketing strategy must involve quality content that helps potential customers in the future to learn more about your products. You should always try researching; engaging with the customers through content and helping them discuss their decision internally. 

Depending on the solutions and information the customers are looking for, they will have a demand for different types of content. Therefore, you should always create content with the main goal of building brand awareness. 

You can use videos and blog posts to target the top-of-funnel queries or use eBooks and whitepapers for middle-of-the-funnel buyers. To influence the bottom-of-funnel customers, you can use case studies, blog posts, and personalized webinars. 

Having an understanding of what you want to provide to your customers and which format works best for you is the first step to developing demand generation strategies. 

Improve Your Return On Advertisement Expense

One of the most efficient ways you can reach new customers is by utilizing targeted advertisements. However, if you have experimented with advertisements in the past and not seen apt results, you are not the only business. Google’s survey shows that any average ad publisher only gets about 50% of their advertises seen. 

However, this means that half of their investment is being wasted. For any small or medium-sized business wasting important resources is not an ideal situation. However, you can change this by creating highly targeted ad campaigns. You have to make smart platform choices and discover a tightly targeted area. 

The most used B2B ad spaces are Google and LinkedIn. While on Google, you can use Search or Display ads to promote relevant content. For example, you can run search ads that target relevant keywords pointing to a gated webinar or whitepaper. By asking for the email IDs of consumers to enter, you will quickly create a list of qualified customers. 

With that list, you can then retarget the leads that display ads with low CPMs/ with more targeted ads; you will see a higher ROI and you will be able to make the best use of the available resources. 

However, on LinkedIn, you can specify the companies you want to advertise with and target each filter from size to the region and actual company names. Adding an ad criterion makes your job a lot easier and helps you find potential leads. 

Conclusion

To sum up this article, demand generation is one of the most important tools to not only improve your company’s conversion rate but also make it known to your target audience. In simpler terms, if you cannot generate demand, there is no way you can close deals or grow your business further. 

The main objective of all the strategies mentioned here is to provide you with ample information about your audience. Once you understand what they want, you know how to serve. However, each brand has its own specific needs. You should only choose strategies that help your firm become better instead of what is popular. 

All in all, getting through to your customers with what you can offer can only be considered if you go with the right message. With a clear idea of your objectives and purpose, you can easily plan your demand generation strategy planning and achieve new milestones for your business. 

About Animesh Sharma:

Animesh Sharma is a digital marketing consultant, author, speaker and trainer who help companies grow their business. He has more than a decade of experience in Digital Marketing and mentors DigitalWala. Animesh Sharma did his B.Tech in Information Technology from Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Avadh University, Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh and later an MBA degree in E-Business from Lucknow University. Animesh Sharma is also pursuing Doctor of Philosophy in Digital Marketing from Lovely Professional University, Punjab. He regularly maintains his blog www.animeshsharma.com