Did you know that only about 5% of your potential audience is actually in the market to buy your product or service at any one time? At least that’s according to a survey by CMO Alliance. That means 95% of your potential market isn’t actively looking to buy from you. Demand generation is about targeting
Did you know that only about 5% of your potential audience is actually in the market to buy your product or service at any one time?
At least that’s according to a survey by CMO Alliance.
That means 95% of your potential market isn’t actively looking to buy from you.
Demand generation is about targeting this 95% to create more interest in your product or service and move more of your audience into the buying phase (or at least into the browsing phase).
In this article, you’ll learn what demand generation is, what the best tactics are and how to measure the success of your campaigns.
Demand generation is a marketing strategy to increase awareness and demand for your product and services, expanding your audience and, ultimately, generating more leads.
Content for demand generation tends to focus more on informative, thought-leadership style topics that aim to educate your audience about problems and challenges they may face, before positioning your products and services as the answer.
The main difference between demand generation and lead generation is the stage at which you target your audience and the type of content you use.
For demand generation, your aim is to attract a new audience to your brand, raising awareness of your products and services.
Typically, demand generation audiences may not even be aware of what their challenges are (which is why they’re not in the market for a solution).
So the content you create is about sharing information or insights that highlight those challenges, and position your brand as a trusted, authoritative company in your industry.
It’s not about going for the hard sell or being overly promotional.
Instead, it’s about adding value with educational content about the challenges your product solves.
Lead generation, on the other hand, is about converting the part of your audience who is aware of you, whether this is making a sale or getting their contact details so you can nurture them through your content and sales funnel.
Effective demand generation involves understanding your ideal customer profile, creating high-quality content that speaks to specific challenges or problems they need to solve, and targeting your audience in the places they visit to generate awareness.
There are lots of ways to create demand generation campaigns, but some tactics are proven to work more often than not.
Content marketing is a tried and tested strategy for demand generation, because the content you create lends itself to the educational, informative topics you need.
These could be articles and blogs on your website that educate your audience about challenges, and target keywords or phrases your audience uses when researching.
It could be creating videos for YouTube that tackle problems and challenges faced by your audience, or talking about the challenges your products help to solve.
You could create research reports, whitepapers or eBooks that take on a particular challenge faced in your industry, using your experts to provide insights and guide readers through solving problems.
For example, if you’re a project management software company, you could create a downloadable guide on frameworks to reduce wasted hours in projects, and use blogs, social media and paid ads to push the content at your ideal audience.
One of the quickest ways to create demand for a brand, product or service is to pay to appear in the places your ideal audience already is.
Online, this could be investing in Google and Bing Ads, along with paid social media advertising on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
An effective demand generation tactic for paid ads is to do remarketing campaigns aimed at people who’ve already been on your website or shown interest in your product or service.
Using the project management software example again, you could create a retargeting campaign on Facebook and LinkedIn that targets people who have previously visited your website or downloaded your free guide.
These ads would target a specific challenge and encourage your audience to get in touch for more information.
By retargeting this part of your audience, you remain front of mind as they browse online or scroll through social media.
This ongoing awareness can work to generate demand and enquiries.
You could also use thought leadership advertising on LinkedIn, promoting your whitepapers or research reports to generate traffic or content downloads, and retargeting ads at those people.
It doesn’t even have to be limited to online advertising, because demand generation is about generating awareness. You could even target your audience with offline advertising and media.
Industry events, webinars, podcasts and conferences (online and in-person) are all useful for generating demand for your products and services.
By offering attendees useful information rather than pushing them towards a sale, you can position yourself as an industry leader (rather than just a tool they can use) and earn trust and loyalty, which can be useful when it comes time for your audience to make a purchase.
If you’re going to use this tactic, it’s important to make sure you identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) so you can create the content, ads and retargeting strategy that gets attention and targets them where they are online.
Account based marketing works by targeting hyper-specific messages at the decision makers, or influencers, at companies you’d like to work with.
Like remarketing with paid ads, this requires you to understand your specific audience and the exact challenges they have.
However, because you’re targeting specific people in specific roles, if you get this tactic right, it can be highly effective at positioning your brand as an expert in your industry and raising demand for your services.
You can run demand generation campaigns for ABM with tools like email or paid ads (especially on LinkedIn) to get in front of your ideal customer.
Case studies are ideal content for demand generation campaigns because they demonstrate how other companies that match your ICP have used your product to solve challenges, without being salesy.
You can use case studies across multiple channels and even use them as content for paid ads on LinkedIn.
There’s no one right way to do demand generation campaigns, and the content or targeting you use will depend on the audience you’re trying to attract.
To give yourself the best chance of success from demand generation campaigns, there are a few things you’ll need to consider.
Demand generation is all about targeting your ideal customer, so it’s important you do the research to understand who they are.
Buyer personas are key to demand generation and content marketing.
One of the most effective ways to create buyer personas (if you don’t already have them) is to think about the customers you already have and which accounts fit into your “ideal” account bracket.
This could be based on their size, industry, use case, revenue or challenges they have that you solve.
Use these accounts as a basis for your ICP, then talk to your sales team and ask what questions they’re being asked by the people who are becoming customers, even questions from those who don’t become customers can help.
Understand what makes your customers choose you, and what makes others go with a competitor.
All this information starts to build a picture of who your ideal customer is and can help inform your demand generation personas and targeting for content and channels.
Demand generation is about widening the net of where you target your audience to raise more awareness and demand.
This could mean investing in more content types, advertising on more platforms or using new tactics like retargeting.
With this increase in activity, it’s important to test new channels, but track all the results you get, so you can focus more on what’s working and reduce activity in less effective areas.
Whether this is improving your website copy to focus more on specific buyer persona challenges, creating eBooks, guides and whitepapers, or investing in paid social ads, the content you create for demand generation should focus on very specific challenges or problems your ICP has.
If you’re looking to get started with demand generation campaigns, get in touch.
Our content marketing agency has years of experience running demand generation strategies for a range of B2B businesses and can provide advice and guidance to get your campaigns off the ground and delivering a return.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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