What is Demand Generation Marketing?

Demand generation is one of the most popular forms of marketing that is quickly rising for many companies. It’s a strategy that creates high-quality leads that interact with your brand – eventually converting them into customers.

Because demand generation marketing is highly-effective at closing sales, many marketing teams face surmounting pressure to tie their marketing efforts to revenue. With that in mind, a strong demand generation strategy needs to come into play. 

What Is Demand Generation Marketing?

Demand generation marketing refers to thorough sales and marketing tactics. It aims to generate interest for your product or service by nurturing high-quality prospects and retaining long-term customer relationships.

You can create and discover several new opportunities when executing an effective demand generation strategy. Demand generation allows marketers to make innovative decisions, especially if your business is data-driven.

Unlike traditional marketing, you would measure the number of leads, whereas demand generation measures the total contribution to revenue.

To further explain, a demand generation marketer who passes leads to the sales department must be a good fit for the company and likely to become a customer.

How Do You Increase Demand and Revenue Simultaneously?

Demand generation involves a potential customer completing each stage of the marketing funnel. Generating demand is part of the customer journey — from bringing an unknown visitor to your site to converting those leads into paying customers. 

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: What’s the Difference?

What is the primary difference between demand generation and lead generation? Here are the industry’s definitions:

• Demand generation is the process of rendering awareness and interest in a company’s products or services.
• Lead generation initiates consumer interest through inquiries with contact information such as email or phone numbers in exchange for valuable content.

In other words, demand generation changes perception, whereas lead generation focuses on gathering leads and stops as soon as the prospects pass over to sales.

3 Challenges Associated With Today’s Marketing

Generating high-quality leads is one challenge alone. Yet, here is an overview of the obstacles that today’s marketers face:

1. Buyer Empowerment

Consumers are now in charge of their buyer journey. In fact, 40% of customers wait longer than last year before initiating contact with a B2B vendor. Because of this, marketers have to position their companies as trusted advisors before the potential buyer moves forward in their journey.

Consumers spend more time researching options before making a decision. So you must engage with buyers to build relationships and maintain trust. If you avoid this process entirely, you’ll be sure to lose those customers to your competitors. 

2. High Expectations

With more accessibility to informational resources, consumers expect more from companies. Buyers today live in a world where personalized apps, messages, products and services are readily available.

Although that’s quite impressive, this challenges marketers to anticipate the needs of consumers and deliver thoughtful, relevant content. The standard content marketing strategies and a one-size-fits-all approach to communication no longer work in this environment.

3. Increased Performance Pressures

With the technological advances you have at your fingertips, you can tie most of your marketing efforts to revenue. It’s now more common than ever for marketers to create revenue goals similarly to sales. A well-planned demand generation marketing process addresses these challenges. By doing so, it offers a reliant strategy that identifies and engages with empowered consumers and turns quality leads into revenue.

What Are the Successful Strategies for Demand Generation Marketing?

Demand generation marketing involves many components as part of the process. However, once you learn how to task all of them effectively, you can drive substantial results for your business. Here are some essential tactics for attracting, engaging and moving leads through a sales funnel.

SMART Goals

Generating demand through a steady, data-driven and predictable approach requires a strategy with concrete goals. When setting sales and marketing goals, they must align with your buyer’s needs. So, you must develop an actionable plan. 

The goals you plan to reach should always be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely, known as SMART goals. They help marketers develop a proper strategy for achieving the results they desire. When your objectives are too general, it isn’t easy to track and measure your return on investment.

Buyer Persona and Journey Development

Successful lead generation starts with creating a buyer persona. Knowing your customers allows you to generate traction — especially when you understand their goals, challenges, how you provide solutions and which messages resonate with them the most.

Once you establish your buyer personas, you can use your research and current customer data to understand the buyers’ journeys. Specifically, you’ll want to consider which content will be most relevant to each stage of their journey. When you create valuable content enough to make a difference in their lives, they’re more likely to share their personal information to receive it.

Content Strategy

Content is the most significant component of demand generation marketing. From videos to blogs, emails and checklists, it’s essential to get these right to gain attraction.

To create the most relevant content, revisit your buyer personas and ask yourself:

• What information do they need to know?
• What forms of content do they find helpful?
• Which methods do they prefer when consuming content?

Consider creating and repurposing helpful content to ensure you’re educating your prospects. Then give them the tools needed to make more informed decisions.

Optimized Website for Conversions

While you have abundant knowledge about your ideal customer and content to build brand awareness – you can allure quality visitors to your site. The next step in developing a demand generation marketing strategy is optimizing your website for conversions.

Using a data-driven approach, you can determine the most effective methods for driving conversions through each buyer persona.

These methods are like a pathway. They start with relevant, insightful content, leading to premium content offers via a call to action — and end with a landing page and delivery of the offer.

When you optimize your website for conversions, your prospects weave through the buyer’s journey without any additional input from you.

Supporting Sales

In a traditional aspect, a market’s job stops as soon as they gather leads and pass them on to the sales team. However, demand generation marketing involves working closely with sales to:

• Align lifecycle stages
• Offer support
• Develop a wholesome strategy
• Close more sales
• Retain more customers successfully

Time To Develop Strategic Demand Generation Marketing

Developing a demand generation marketing strategy may not be simple. However, the time and effort you put into it are worth the outcome. Now that you understand what demand generation involves, utilize these steps to see what results you can attain today.