B2B demand generation is proving to be one of the best marketing tools today for businesses looking to increase their sales. As is the case with any type of marketing, demand generation marketing needs to adapt as markets change from year to year. If your sales team is not utilizing demand generation, or not making changes to your demand generation marketing strategy from year to year, you could be leaving a lot of lost sales on the table. If your business is looking to maximize demand generation, this is the ultimate guide for doing so in the year 2022.
What is Demand Generation?
B2B stands for business to business. So, when you are talking about B2B demand generation, you are talking about demand generation between businesses. Now that you understand that term, it is time to learn more about what demand generation is. Demand generation is a marketing technique used by marketing teams that focuses on increasing brand awareness and demand for the product or service that your company is looking to provide. Demand generation helps your business to grow faster, and can be used in conjunction with other marketing techniques that provide slower or more organic results.
How Does Demand Generation B2B Work?
Creating demand with demand generation campaigns is not always easy. Marketing and sales teams need to work hand-in-hand to stimulate demand. This is done by delivering the right message about your company to the right people in another company. One of the biggest tips that you need to keep in mind when you are doing any type of B2B marketing is to keep in mind that your audience is not the average consumer. You are marketing to other businesses, which means you have to appeal to the head of companies or key decision makers in companies.
In order to appeal to those types of buyers, you need to communicate the business value that your company is offering. There are many ways this can be done, including advertising, hosting events or webinars, creating public relations campaigns, and using creative content creation marketing campaigns. Ensuring your sales and marketing teams deliver a consistent message across multiple channels is extremely important as you develop demand gen strategies.
Demand Generation Campaign Examples
Now that you have a firmer grasp as to what B2B demand generation is, you may be curious to see examples of demand generation marketing in action. Here are a few examples of successful demand generation strategies:
1. Content Creation
Content that is created should help to create a buzz about your product. You want to show what your product is and how it can benefit the businesses you are targeting. There are many ways to create engaging content, including webinars, podcasts, blog posts, videos, and in-person events. You can use content marketing strategies to help boost content creation.
2. Social Media Engagement
When you use social media properly, you can boost engagement and create a sense of demand for your product. Be sure to keep in mind that your target audience is the decision makers and owners of companies, so you target your social media content and engagement to attract decision-makers within businesses.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing has been used by marketing teams as a way to generate leads for over a decade. However, you need to focus on quality leads. As such, you need to find a way to ensure that your emails get read and get read by those who are in charge of making decisions. When your business is able to target accounts well, you can successfully use email marketing as one of your demand generation tools.
4. Live Chats
The final example of a successful demand generation strategy is to utilize live chats. Businesses and decision makers who land on your website can use a live chat button to talk directly to someone in your organization, preferably someone in your sales team or lead generation department. Your staff then has the ability to talk directly to that individual and provide them with the benefits that your product or service can offer them. This is a great way to turn potential buyers into customers.
Demand Generation Versus Lead Generation
One of the most common questions that people ask about demand generation is how demand gen differs from lead generation. Lead generation, also called lead gen, is one of the components used as part of demand generation. Lead generation is a marketing strategy designed to create new leads for a business. Once new leads are found, they are warmed up and probed to determine if they have any interest in the types of services that your business is offering, a process called lead nurturing. Your marketing team can implement demand generation campaigns to help create demand with these leads. If they are high quality leads, they go through the sales pipeline. If everything goes according to plan, these leads ultimately go through your sales funnel and hopefully become customers.
B2B Demand Generation Benefits
As a business owner, you want to learn about the benefits of any type of content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing, or demand marketing you are considering implementing. Learning the benefits can help ensure that you are utilizing marketing methods that help to create qualified leads and help your sales process, ultimately helping to increase revenue for your business. If you are thinking about putting together a B2B demand generation strategy for your business, you may be wondering what the benefits of this marketing strategy are. Here are a few of the benefits that you may experience if you utilize a successful demand generation strategy.
Helps to Increase Brand Awareness
One of the benefits of demand generation is that you can increase awareness of your brand. Anytime you utilize a successful marketing campaign, you want one of the goals to be brand awareness. Brand awareness can be beneficial for your business both now and down the road. When you successfully get people to recognize your brand and become aware of your brand, the more likely it is that they will do business with your company if and when they need the services that you provide. This takes some of the load off of your sales team, as customers are now coming to you.
Increases Lead Quality
Another benefit associated with utilizing demand generation marketing is that you can increase the quality of your lead generation. This essentially means that you are producing more high quality leads. The reason for this is that when you run a successful demand generation marketing campaign, you are letting other companies know exactly what you offer and how what you offer can benefit them. When they reach out to your company for more information or a price quote, they already know a lot about your company. As such, your team is more likely to close the deal with these leads.
Helps to Decrease Your Customer Acquisition Costs
The ultimate goal of any business is to be as profitable as possible. In order to help your business with that goal, you need to find out how much it costs you to acquire customers and ensure that you are spending less on acquiring customers compared to the amount that customers are spending with you. If you spend more on acquiring customers than customers spend with you, you are losing money. Utilizing demand generation metrics is vital to ensure you know how much your customer acquisition costs are versus the customer lifetime value. A successful demand gen strategy will help to decrease your customer acquisition costs. This is key to helping you keep your customer acquisition costs low.
Increases Revenue
A demand generation strategy is also beneficial to your company because it helps your business to increase revenue. The whole goal behind B2B demand generation is to increase lead generation and find more customers for the products or services that you are offering. Additionally, when you target other businesses, rather than individuals, you are likely to make larger sales. This is a smart business strategy for increasing revenue. And any business owner knows that increasing revenue is the key to helping your business stay in business.
Faster Business Growth
The final benefit of the demand generation process is faster business growth. There are many marketing efforts that can be used to generate marketing leads. However, many of these methods are slow and tedious. They take time to develop, implement and start seeing the results of these efforts. Unfortunately, businesses, especially new businesses, do not have time to sit back and wait for their business to slowly take off. They need money to come in quickly in order to survive and pay the bills. Generating demand is one of the best marketing tactics to generate more leads, and thus, bring in more paying customers.
How to Implement Demand Generation B2B
There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy for implementing business-to-business demand generation. There is some trial and error that goes into the process, and there are some changes that need to take place based on the type of business you own and the types of businesses you are looking to target. Paying close attention to the techniques you are utilizing and monitoring your conversion rates can help you to see how well your marketing tactics are working, and whether or not changes need to take place. However, here is a rough guide to the steps that your business should consider taking when trying to implement a demand generation strategy.
Step 1. Offer Helpful Content Across Multiple Channels
The first step to any successful lead gen program, including demand generation, is to offer helpful content across multiple channels. You want to attract prospects and create interest. You can do this by creating relevant content and releasing that content in many different ways. You can create marketing channels, release press releases, create a blog, host in-person events, create eBooks, utilize social media or have giveaways on your website. As you create content, think about your target audience and ensure you are tailoring content to your target audience and placing content on channels that your target audience is likely to look at.
Step 2. Showcase Your Brand's Personality and Unique Characteristics
The second step in creating a demand gen strategy is to take the time to showcase your brand's personality and unique characteristics. You want to generate awareness for your brand and company, and one of the best ways to do that is to detail what sets you apart from your competitors. Most businesses do not have a service or product that is truly unique. There are likely other companies that offer products or services similar to yours. As such, you need to find a way to stand out from these companies. Showcasing your owner's personality or creating a personality for your brand and showcasing that in your content is a great way to differentiate your company from your competitors and entice potential customers to do business with you.
Step 3. Learn to Differentiate Inquires From Qualified Leads
One of the hardest, yet most important steps to a demand generation strategy is learning how to differentiate inquiries from qualified leads. Qualified leads are potential customers who should be passed along to your sales team for steps four and five. Inquiries may look like potential customers, but these people do not have the budget to do business with your company, do not have the authority to make decisions on behalf of their company, or may not be looking to utilize your product or service anytime in the near future. As you are generating leads, your company needs to find a way to determine what is a qualified lead versus what is an inquiry from someone who is not in a position to purchase products or services from you at this time.
Step 4. Create Tailored Content for Qualified Leads
Once your demand gen strategy has produced qualified leads, you need to create tailored content for these leads. This is a type of marketing known as account-based marketing, as the marketing methods are tailored specifically to a specific account or business. As you go about creating tailored content, you need to research the company you are marketing to and find ways to emphasize the ways that your service or product can benefit them.
Step 5. Continue to Nurture Leads
Lastly, it is important to understand that not every lead is going to convert right away. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is dismissing leads that do not turn into customers immediately. You spent time and money obtaining that potential customer. Continuing to nurture potential leads can pay off, as those leads may slowly come around and decide to do business with you. You do not want to spend a lot of time nurturing leads, so things like social media marketing and email marketing are great ways to nurture potential leads.
5 Essential Keys to Building Demand Generation B2B
With so much content being thrown at individuals on the Internet, capturing the attention of potential customers and creating demand can be challenging. This is why B2B demand generation is so important. When it is properly implemented and utilized, demand gen can benefit your business and help your business with business-to-business marketing. Here are five essential keys that can help your business build demand generation.
1. Hone In On Your Niche Market
One of the most important elements of demand gen is to hone in on your niche market. This may involve doing market research to find out what types of companies are most likely to benefit from or want to use your product or service. Many businesses make the mistake of marketing their product to any and all businesses. However, this can be costly. By identifying your market, you are able to identify your target audience and market more effectively to them.
2. Learn How Your Products or Services Can Benefit Your Niche Market
Once you have honed in on your niche market, you want to learn how your products or services can benefit your niche market. This is key to properly marketing those services or products. Potential customers want to know what your product or service can do for them. Researching the problems they have and how your product provides a solution can be key to generating new customers.
3. Learn the Buying Process For Your Potential Buyers
One of the steps that many companies overlook is learning the buying process for your potential buyers. When you learn how your niche market handles the buying process, you have a better understanding of the hurdles you face when selling to these companies. Some companies have lengthy steps to purchasing products or services, including meeting with higher-ups or pitching products to multiple people within a company. Knowing how this process works can give you unique insight that you can use as you market and target potential leads.
4. Identify Key Content Pillars and Create Unique Content
One of the keys to demand generation is to create interest. Identifying key content pillars based on your niche market and creating unique and engaging content is key to creating high-quality leads for your business. Always track your conversion rate to determine what content methods or marketing strategies are providing the most leads and the most conversions.
5. Avoid the "Me" Problem
Lastly, avoid the "me" problem. Many businesses make the mistake of talking about their business. Potential customers or buyers do not want to hear a lot about you. If your content revolves around "me, me, me" it can turn buyers away. They want to know what you can do for them, including how you can help their business or how your product or service can be beneficial to them. As such, your content should use "you," rather than "me" or "us."
