The Art of Demand Generation: An Ultimate Guide for Marketers
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In today’s fast-paced and hyper-competitive business landscape, more than merely developing superior products may be required to succeed. And that’s where demand generation steps in!
The true challenge lies in generating demand for those products, capturing the attention of your target audience, and compelling them to take action.
Even if you create the best product in the world, without an effective marketing strategy, it’s as good as a hidden treasure in the depths of an uncharted ocean.
Can you imagine Apple being where they are today if it hadn’t built great marketing campaigns over the years?
A well-executed demand generation strategy focuses on recognizing and guiding potential customers through your marketing funnel, ultimately converting them into loyal paying customers.
Initially, this process may appear challenging, but by breaking it down into manageable steps, it becomes remarkably straightforward. And that’s precisely where our expertise comes into play – we’re here to support you every step of the way.
What Is Demand Generation?
Demand generation refers to the set of marketing activities and strategies that aim to create awareness, generate interest, and nurture potential customers. The goal of this process is to ultimately drive demand for a product or service.
There was a time when demand creation used to mean tricking people into buying things they might or might not need. But today, demand generation marketing has a different meaning altogether. It’s all about adding value to your users now. To gain their interest and trust, you need to give the correct information at the right time and solve a problem.
How to Build a Demand Generation Campaign?
Just like how people think differently, they also have their own unique ways of behaving. Hence, building a demand generation campaign is a unique process for every organization. While we can’t tell you how to make decisions for your brand, we surely can give you a blueprint that you can follow.
Remember that your strategies must align with your goals and your position in the marketing funnel. Every action you take should target moving further in the buyer’s journey. Here’s a quick guide for how you can create a campaign that brings maximum output:
Define and Know Your Target Audience
Start by clearly identifying and understanding your target audience. Determine their demographics, needs, pain points, and motivations. This will help you tailor your campaign to resonate with their specific interests.
You need to know what your audience actually wants and whether or not your content aligns with their needs. Analyze who interacts with your content, how they interact with it, and if that interaction eventually leads to conversions.
Set Clear Goals
Define measurable goals for your campaign. These could include metrics like:
- No. of lead generated
- Conversion rates
- Sales revenue
- Brand awareness and engagement
Setting clear goals will help you stay focused and evaluate the success of your campaign.
Offer Free Services
Offering free services will give your prospects insights into what they’ll be getting into once they actually make a purchase. For example, Outgrow offers a 7-day free trial for users to try every feature of the product.
When you let people try your product without asking for their credit card details and provide support wherever required, they’ll leave behind any hesitation and go ahead with your brand
Use Lead Magnets
Use lead magnets to learn more about your audience. Platforms like Outgrow let you ask questions from the audience in an engaging way. Try their free forms and surveys that will help you understand your users better. When they answer your questions, you’ll know what to offer them. This will then help you identify your target product market easily.
For example, a health service provider can use a health assessment like this to attract leads and offer the right solution to the right customer.
Develop Compelling and Educational Content
Create high-quality content that aligns with your audience’s interests and addresses their pain points. Your immediate purpose in creating content should be to educate your audience. Educational content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy. Make sure your content is answering your audience’s questions before they even ask them.
This can include:
- Blog posts
- E-books
- Videos
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Case studies
Focus on providing valuable information and solutions that establish your expertise and build trust with your audience.
How can you do this? It’s not that hard. Just be real.
Use Interactive Content
Making your audience feel involved is a crucial step toward generating demand and leads. This can be done by making them a part of the conversation.
How? Interactive content!
It lets the audience engage directly with your brand and make choices for themselves so that you can ultimately help them with personalized solutions.
Interactive content gets 52.6% higher engagement than static content. It makes sure that it’s not one-sided talk. It gives the customers a chance to express themselves, and that makes solving their issues easy.
Look at this e-commerce recommendation for example. It asks the users about their needs and gives the right recommendations. The user feels valued!
Optimize for Search Engines
To enhance the visibility of your brand in search engine results, it is crucial to employ search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in your content. This involves conducting keyword research, optimizing your website, and crafting targeted content that aligns with relevant search queries. By doing so, you can attract organic traffic and improve demand among potential customers.
Some crucial SEO tips are:
On-page SEO
- Do thorough keyword research and use relevant keywords across your content.
- Optimize your tags and descriptions for search engines.
- Utilize internal linking wherever possible and make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Off-page SEO
- Try to get high-quality and ranking backlinks for your content.
- Guest posts on other websites to promote and create awareness.
Leverage Social Media
Utilize social media platforms to actively connect with your audience and generate demand for your brand. Identify the social channels where your target audience is most engaged. Devise a social media strategy that involves sharing valuable content, engaging with users, and fostering a community around your brand.
Some additional tips are:
- Run social media contests and giveaways to generate awareness.
- Try to indulge in social media advertising to reach a wider audience and generate more leads.
- Track your results so that you know what’s working for you. You can then optimize your approach accordingly.
Did You Know: There are almost 4.8 billion social media users active currently which makes up about 60% of the global population.
Implement Email Marketing
Utilize email marketing to nurture leads and guide them through the buyer’s journey. Segment your email list based on different customer personas or stages in the sales funnel and deliver personalized, relevant content to each segment. Use email automation to streamline and optimize your communication.
An intelligent way to engage your audience here is to use interactive emails. Interactivity in emails is known for attracting people and increasing open rates significantly. Stats say that interactive email content increases the chances of selling as 50% of customers are buying at least once a month of marketing emails!
For example, you can add a festive contest like this in your emails to generate users’ interest in engaging with your brand. This would ultimately generate demand among relevant leads.
Utilize Paid Advertising
Consider running paid advertising campaigns to expand your reach and target specific audience segments. Platforms like Google Ads, social media advertising, and display networks can help you reach a larger audience and drive traffic to your content and landing pages.
But running ads is not as straightforward as it seems. Often, people run out through their budgets without seeing much return.
Here are a few things to consider while running ads.
- Set clear goals for your ads campaign. Are you looking to generate more leads, drive more traffic, or increase sales? Once you know your goal, you can then tailor your campaigns accordingly.
- Choosing the right platforms to run your campaigns is of utmost importance. Google Ads is a good option for businesses that want to reach people who are searching for their products or services. Social media advertising is a good way to reach people who are already interested in your brand. Display advertising can be used to reach people who are browsing websites that are relevant to your business.
- Identifying your target audience is essential to make sure you don’t burn your budget by showing ads to the wrong audience. You can use demographic information, interests, and even past purchase behavior to target your ads. The more specific you can be with your targeting, the more likely you are to see results.
Monitor, Analyze, and Optimize
Regularly monitor the performance of your demand generation campaign. Track key metrics, such as website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. Use this data to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven optimizations to enhance the effectiveness of your campaign.
Using tools like Outgrow for creating engaging and interactive content can help you immensely as it comes with an inbuilt analytics dashboard. You can also fetch custom reports showing you both the bigger picture and granular details of your campaign.
Continuously Test and Iterate
Experiments with different strategies, messages, and channels. A/B tests your campaigns to identify what resonates best with your audience and optimize your approach. Demand generation is ongoing, so continuously refining and iterating based on insights and feedback. Tools like Outgrow also let you A/B test your campaign on the go so that you can refine your content accordingly.
By following these steps, you can build a strong demand generation campaign. Adapt your approach based on the unique characteristics of your business and target audience to drive interest, engagement, and conversions.
What Are Some Demand Generation Strategies and Tactics That Always Work?
The best part about a demand generation strategy is that there are no fixed rules or guidelines. You can choose the tactics that are most suitable for your brand, and you can learn from the strategies that others have used. Here are some of the best examples and tactics that you can employ.!
Website UX and UI
Your website is one of the most important tools you have for generating demand. If your website is not user-friendly and visually appealing, visitors are likely to quickly leave. Moreover, a clear website structure guides visitors through the sales funnel and toward conversion points.
Here are a few tips for improving your website’s UX and UI:
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate.
- Use high-quality graphics to ensure audience engagement.
- Place call-to-action buttons strategically throughout your website
Example? Have a look at Netflix’s website. It has everything a user would want to know before signing up. The FAQ section is just enough to answer all the questions a prospect would have. Moreover, the clean and bold CTA is sure shot to grab attention. Perfect!
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring refers to the act of allotting different points for different actions that prospects take on your website. This is a great strategy to measure a prospect’s interest and engagement with your brand. And this will give you a fair idea as to how qualified a particular lead is and how you can nurture them to generate demand for your product.
For example, a lead gets 5 points for reading a blog and 10 for downloading a whitepaper. Your scoring should depend on the offerings you have. Once a lead gets enough points based on your scoring system, they can be passed to sales and nurtured effectively.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
Every activity in a business is a team sport. Make sure that your sales team is aware of all the marketing strategies. Also, ensure that your marketing team knows how a prospect is progressing in the buyer’s journey.
An integrated team is the key to successful conversions. An informed marketing team won’t pursue someone who’s already a customer or the sales team won’t make efforts to convert an unqualified lead. Maintaining internal awareness is as important as creating brand awareness.
Webinars and Podcasts
Show your value to your prospects by communicating with them. Explain to them how your products or services can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. Webinars and podcasts are great ways to engage prospects in real-time and demonstrate your expertise.
For example, check out our monthly podcast, “Marketer of the Month,” wherein we invite keynote speakers to share their opinions and stories about rising digital marketing trends. It’s an informative way to tell the users about us and how they can use interactive content for marketing. Moreover, this is a great opportunity to showcase your brand as an industry leader and boost demand thereafter.
How Do You Measure the Success of a Demand Generation Campaign?
Measuring the success of a demand generation campaign isn’t hard. You just need to know the right metrics. And we are here to help you with that. You can measure your performance correctly in two steps.
Define KPIs
The key to making informed decisions lies in adopting a structured method for measuring performance. When you have a clear understanding of your desired outcomes from the demand generation plan, the process of measuring success becomes more streamlined. Therefore, it is crucial to define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before starting your demand generation process.
A few metrics that you can use to define your KPIs are:
- Number of meetings generated
- Number of opportunities generated
- Average deal size
- Sales pipeline value
- Customer acquisition cost
- Cost per lead
- Customer lifetime value
- Average sales cycle length
- Revenue generated against budget investment
Track Data Over Time
Demand generation can be a long hectic process for some organizations. And measuring performance can get harder when there’s no benchmark to compare to. Comparing metrics to industry standards might not always be fruitful, especially for startups. Thus, it’s better to track data over time.
Spend time measuring success against yourself. Ensure that your demand campaigns are yielding the results that you want by tracking channels and sources on a regular and individual basis.
The demand generation funnel expects time and patience from you. So, don’t hurry for results. Give the measuring process some time and thought. Well-thought tracking will lead to better results. Examine your metrics and see how they relate to your strategies.
Challenges to Demand Generation
Every process has its own pitfalls. One just needs to learn how to overcome them. The process of demand creation involves a few challenges on the way, and we’ll tell you what they are.
Identifying Competent Leads
It’s important that we spend time on what’s worth the effort. Finding and recognizing good leads can be challenging. Failure to do so can act like a big obstacle in fulfilling your demand goals. Remember, working in the right direction to fetch 10 relevant leads is always better than spending more to get 100 irrelevant leads. Quality over quantity!
Creating Correct Content
One of the most important aspects of demand generation is creating content that is relevant to your target audience. This means finding the right search terms that your users are looking for and then creating content that addresses those terms.
Placing Content Properly
Creating good content will only be successful if it reaches the right audience. Make your content accessible to your target audience. If they don’t find your content, the lead-generation process will never take place.
Collecting and Tracking Data
One needs to know how to process the data collected throughout the funnel. Having tons of data with no use can lead to strategy failure and an inability to create better plans. It’s important to know what works and what doesn’t.
Demand Generation Examples
Here are a few best demand generation examples for you.
ROI Calculator – Outgrow
Telling your customers the benefits of using your product by giving value is the goal. That’s what we do. We created this ROI calculator for our prospective customers to estimate the return from using Outgrow. You can try it too!
Idea Generator
We created an idea generator for our audience to help them generate creative and unique content ideas for their industry. You can try it here!
Marketing Plan Generator – HubSpot
As we said earlier, offering free resources is always a good idea. HubSpot gives you a chance to use their tool for free. You can upgrade whenever you like.
They, hence, created demand by making the customer try their product. This also generates relevant leads and efficiently converts them into paying customers. Simple!
What Are Some Demand Generation Tools That You Should Try?
While one needs to constantly apply new strategies to the process, some demand generation tools can help make the process smoother. Here are some of our favorites that you should try!
Conclusion
Demand generation is an ongoing process that requires continuous effort, analysis, and adaptation. By implementing effective strategies, measuring performance, and addressing challenges, businesses can successfully generate demand, attract and retain customers, and achieve their growth objectives.
With our expertise and support, you can navigate the demand generation landscape and thrive in today’s competitive market. So, start your free trial now.