B2B demand generation is a valuable group of marketing strategies that can drive interest in your company’s offerings. You may be thinking to yourself, isn’t that the goal of all marketing strategies? And the answer is: sort of. While similar to lead generation and other popular B2B marketing strategies, demand generation stands out in a few key ways.
Firstly, while demand gen stimulates activity lower in the sales funnel, the primary goal is to spur top-of-the-funnel growth by supplying high-quality leads. Second, B2B demand generation can be considered a “slow burn”. A long-term strategy that builds awareness and authority over time, demand generation may take some time to ramp up, but the payoff will be worth it.
Unlike many traditional marketing techniques, demand generation isn’t owned exclusively by the marketing team. For this B2B marketing strategy to work its magic, you’ll also need to involve the sales team to ensure alignment between both departments, and better outcomes. Now, onto the good stuff—let’s talk B2B demand generation strategies.
When it comes to demand generation, it’s okay to pander to your audience. In fact, it’s preferred. B2B is often complicated, and your customers want to know you understand what they do and what they need to succeed. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t fly in B2B marketing.
So, it’s important your team truly understands your target audiences. The best way to do this is to create in-depth ideal customer profiles that combine data, experience, and intelligent inference. For example, you’re likely acquainted with your clients’ pain points, but you may need to use inference to translate these into succinct messaging that helps guide your marketing activities. Both the sales and marketing teams should collaborate on this task, as both have valuable insights into your ideal customer.
Once you’ve solidified target personas, ensure that your team members not only have access to this information, but understand it. Everyone at your company should be able to answer a pop quiz about your ideal customer at any time.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where a prospect is at in the sales cycle? Well, with intent data, you can. Intent data provides detailed insights into the buyer’s journey through aggregated behavior signals. This may consist of behavior like visiting your website multiple times, downloading a piece of gated content, or interacting with a sales email. Understanding how leads engage with your company at each stage of the buying process will help your team develop content that speaks to every part of this journey.
Content marketing is an essential part of an effective B2B marketing strategy and paramount in demand generation. An important goal of B2B demand generation is to build authority as an expert in your industry and win your target audience’s trust. Content marketing can help you do just that.
Developing top-of-the-funnel content for your target audiences enables you to provide potential customers with real value as you spread brand awareness, earn trust, and develop lasting relationships with leads–all at a cost-effective price.
Some of the most popular types of content for B2B audiences include:
Another perk of content marketing is that you can reformat the same information. For example, you may use talking points from an hour-long webinar in a quick minute video that can be posted to your social channels. Or, you may repurpose a blog post into a skimmable infographic. This also keeps your costs low while giving your audience more ways to learn.
As you begin to incorporate content marketing into your B2B demand generation strategy, here are a few tidbits to keep in mind.
Your sales team may be filled with rockstars, but they still need support to do their jobs effectively. A robust sales enablement strategy provides sales teams with the resources, tools, content, and information they need to win over prospects.
Both your marketing and sales team should contribute to your sales enablement process. Sales is close to the prospect and can provide insights to the marketing team, who can then produce content and resources, such as case studies, sales decks, and lead nurture emails.
There are plenty of ways to use events to engage with prospects and drive brand awareness. While simply attending the right conference or running a booth can go a long way, we suggest using events as an opportunity to build authority. Your team may achieve this through a speaking engagement, running a workshop, or hosting a roundtable discussion. This gives your business a chance to get your name out there and demonstrate your industry expertise.
The purpose of demand generation is to earn high-quality leads with a likelihood of converting. This is why a highly targeted approach works best. B2B involves specialized services and products, so you only want to market to relevant audiences, or risk wasting valuable resources.
Another important intention of demand generation is to earn quantifiable results. Tracking related data like funnel conversion rates and cost per acquisition will help you determine if your team is putting their energy into the right strategies. Remember, marketing is a living entity, and no process is set in stone. If it doesn’t work, don’t automatically scrap the idea, just get a little creative.