Demand generation is like creating a wave of interest in your brand, based on what your customer’s challenges are. It’s about using marketing tools like blogs, SEO techniques, social media and Paid campaigns for instant results to create a demand for your offering mapped to your customer’s needs.
This approach isn’t just a quick trick – it involves consistently attracting your ideal customer profiles and building your brand awareness over time, in a way that resonates with your audience. It takes time, but results in much higher quality sales and far stronger brand recognition.
However, it can’t be achieved through implementing one or two marketing methods. Unlike lead generation, a single-channel approach is unlikely to work with demand generation. Demand generation adopts a more holistic way of looking at brand engagement, typically over a longer period than one campaign.
Demand generation involves a strategic multi-channel, integrated process using informative content, webinars, emails, and online communities to connect with potential customers throughout their buying journey. It’s about looking for your key target stakeholders and mapping your activity to their likes, dislikes, interests, buying motivators and key consumer channels. Everything from the events your prospects attend, to the type of content they engage with on LinkedIn, to the publications they look to for thought leadership.
It’s best considered as a conversation, not a one-way message. Effective demand generation goes beyond flashy ads and sales messages. It avoids overly pushy spam emails or intrusive DMs. With demand generation, you need a well-rounded marketing strategy that attracts highly targeted prospects and builds the foundation for long-lasting customer relationships.
Here are our top 5 demand generation strategies:
Become a thought leader
Create high-quality content that educates and engages your target audience. Position yourself as the go-to expert, using unique insights and data to craft informative opinions on key topics of interest to your audience. Aim for content that’s helpful, interesting, and Search engine optimisation friendly to attract readers and establish yourself as an expert. Regularly update your content to maintain a fresh and relevant perspective.
Distribute content in the right places
Great content alone won’t be enough to engage users. You need to carefully plan your content schedule and distribution channels wisely, to ensure the right audience sees it. An integrated approach is always best. Your website is your centre point, but you can grow the reach of your blogs and web content through social media (particularly LinkedIn, for all you B2B marketers out there!) PPC ads, online forums/groups, PR and email. Don’t forget to adjust the messaging to fit these channels accordingly.
It's all about personalisation
Tailor your approach to your highest-value accounts through account-based marketing, bridging the sales and marketing gap for a more successful and targeted strategy. Through ABM, you can personalise content specific to your key stakeholder needs and interests. You can also target decision-makers with focused ads on LinkedIn, mapping your messaging to specific buying motivations.
Strategic partnerships
Partner-led events are powerful tools for demand generation. From webinars to podcasts or in-person events, they offer a highly targeted and engaged audience right from the start. It’s a great way to add value to your audience and help build credibility as part of the demand capture stage. The key is to keep these events focused on the topics at hand, rather than making them into a sales pitch, as this can easily backfire.
Optimise and track through the process
For a successful demand generation approach, all activity needs to be tracked across the entire funnel from the brand awareness stage through to lead nurture and demand capture, and ultimately sales conversion. This entails a solid content plan mapped to audience needs, a channel distribution plan, a fully SEO-optimised website with conversion tracking integrated for lead capture, and an effective lead nurturing strategy in place.
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