Demand generation is one of the most important elements of executing an effective digital marketing strategy. Effective B2B demand generation ensures your marketing efforts work toward the overarching goal of building long-term profitable relationships with your target audience. These may include activities that make certain your audience is:
- Aware of your brand
- Connecting with your message
- Getting value from every interaction
Most commonly used as a tactical approach spanning the full life-cycle of your acquisition programs, getting your demand generation strategy right can make significant improvements to your ROI.
These 12 tried and tested demand generation best practices and marketing tactics are quick wins that will help you get the most out of your marketing efforts.
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1. Know your audience
Do you have an ideal customer profile (ICP)? Without knowing exactly who it is you want to sell your product or service to, your messaging, user experience and buyer’s journey will be hopelessly generic and ineffective at creating conversions.
Having information on your ideal buyers allows you to conduct research on the type of customers who will be most likely to purchase your product or service, instead of wasting time on money on those that are unlikely to convert.
You can use the information you gather from your research to create targeted messages and personalized experiences that are more likely to resonate and subsequently convert prospective customers.
2. Don’t neglect your content strategy
Content is the vehicle for communicating with potential customers and providing helpful information that will encourage them to take the desired action. By creating relevant content that’s tailored to the needs of your target audience, you can create a positive impression and establish trust.
The types of content you decide to create can take many forms, such as blog posts, ebooks, case studies, webinars and videos. Each piece of content can be used to engage your target audience in different ways. For example, blog posts can provide helpful information, while webinars can offer a more interactive experience. By creating content that is relevant and engaging, you can encourage potential clients and customers to move to the next stage of the buying journey.
Learn more: Your Multichannel Content Strategy Needs Editing…
Content can also be used to target different stages of the sales funnel. For example, you can create content that educates potential customers at the top of the funnel, and then create content that provides deeper insights and encourages them to take the desired action. By creating content for each stage of the buying journey, you can ensure that you’re creating a positive experience for potential customers and helping to move them through the funnel.
Interested in learning more about effective B2B content generation? Our content specialists can help craft outstanding copy that really strikes a chord with your target audiences in the formats that suit them best.
3. Co-brand your content
They say two heads are better than one – well, two brands are even better. If you can find another business that you can work with collaboratively on a project, it can be a great way to expand your reach. This strategic partnership will only work if their brand has similar goals to you and if you are able to negotiate a deal you’re both happy with.
You should also ensure that any businesses you are working alongside have an audience demographic that complements your own, rather than being too different or similar. However, if you get the balance right it can be a great way to amplify your content more organically through word of mouth (WoM) referrals such as follower recommendations, email newsletter subscribers, or their existing customer base.
4. Re-purpose content
Most brands have a handful of content that outperforms anything else delivered throughout the year. Instead of just re-posting this archived content on your social media channels, give it a new lease of life.
This can be getting a collection of cohesive articles together and publishing an ebook, or writing fresh supporting content for an evergreen infographic you’ve produced in the past. This is an effective demand generation tactic and a great way to generate high performing lead generation assets. It’s a simple, easy tactic that allows you to make the most out of your best content, while also delivering something of genuine value to your target audience.
5. Gate premium content
While making all your content easily accessible may be a good long-term strategy in theory, it doesn’t give you any insight into when your prospects are ready to go to the next stage in their buyer cycle.
Requesting contact information before providing access to some of your most high-value content can help you gather valuable insight about visitors at critical touchpoints in their user journey.
Learn more: How to Map and Optimize Your Conversion Journey
This data can help you provide much more personalized and relevant user experiences further down the line that can greatly enhance your nurture programs and ultimately accelerate your pipeline.
6. Make sure you’re actually providing value
Conversely, while creating high-quality content is important and requesting information from users before they can access certain pieces of content is sensible, you need to make sure what you’re making is actually offering value.
One of the simplest and most effective ways to grow your audience and generate demand is to provide value. All the content you create should have a purpose and something to offer your target audience. Giving them useful information without immediately expecting something in return is a great way to build trust and move potential clients further down the marketing funnel
7. Optimize your content for search
All your efforts creating amazing B2B content will go to waste if your target audience can’t find and discover your brand and product/service in the first place.
Optimizing your content and site for search will ensure your website is visible to prospective clients by increasing your ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). Effective search engine optimization (SEO) drives more organic search traffic to their website outside of traditional paid channels, which leads to an increase in demand for your products and services. It will also help your business build trust and credibility, as customers are more likely to trust a website that appears higher in search engine rankings.
What’s more, SEO allows businesses to gain a better understanding of their customers by providing them with detailed insights into their search behaviors. This data can be used to create targeted campaigns, allowing businesses to craft content that resonates with their target audience. SEO also helps businesses to create stronger relationships with their customers, as they can serve relevant content that meets their customers’ needs.
8. A/B test and experiment
If you want to understand more about your online visitors, A/B testing can be a great way to determine how your audience wants to connect with you. The idea is that you have two different ways to achieve the same goal.
For example, you may have an infographic that you want to be at the center of your demand generation campaign, but you might be unsure about how best to showcase it. By using A/B testing, you can have one page that uses parallax scroll and another that encourages users to interact with the content. You can then see which route has the highest success rate and use this to inform future strategic decisions, as well as where to sit your infographic.
The beauty of testing is it gives you invaluable real-time feedback that can be used to refine, improve and enhance your efforts, making your campaigns more powerful and ultimately more successful.
9. Make your CTAs really, really relevant
Why should your audiences care enough to click?
It’s one of the very basics of marketing to ensure that your high-performing content has a strong call-to-action at the bottom, but are yours really relevant? You need to make sure you’re not just using the same one-size-fits-all approach and that your CTA is based on real motivations expressed by visitors on your site.
Looking at your user journey and personas will give you the information you need to construct a solid CTA for each article or landing page on your website that will address genuine questions your visitors are asking.
10. Personalize your email marketing campaigns
Going back through your old client base can be a good way to generate new leads. Create email marketing campaigns that are personalized to each individual recipient. This is relatively easy if you’re using marketing automation software and can help to take people onward from the awareness stage.
One of the most effective ways of doing this is to segment your old contacts based on their buying patterns. This is one of the most important things that define B2B customers and so should be the foundation of any email marketing campaign. You should also ensure you’re giving them an incentive to rekindle their relationship with you.
This can be something as simple as giving them free access to your latest whitepaper, high-value industry content or a discount off your normal rates.
11. Give sales your most qualified leads
While marketing and sales department work with customers at different stages of the sales funnel, their end goal is the same – to convert prospective clients and potential buyers into satisfied customers. With this in mind, it makes sense to be giving sales qualified leads.
High-quality leads are those that have been thoroughly researched and qualified by marketing teams, which ensures that sales teams aren’t wasting their time on leads that are unlikely to convert. Qualified leads also allow sales teams to be more focused and efficient in their outreach and follow up activities, which will lead to higher conversion rates.
Collaborate with your sales teams to produce a lead scoring model, which will allow sales reps to focus on the strongest leads with the highest likelihood of converting and increase alignment between sales and marketing.
12. Nurture your leads
To increase the quality of leads you pass onto sales and produce better results against your lead scoring model, run lead nurturing campaigns to ‘warm up’ prospects before sales contact them. You can do this by sending them follow-up emails and access to content. Nurturing your leads will make the sales process more efficient and produce far better conversion rates, as prospects will be more familiar with your brand and more likely to trust your organization when you do eventually make contact.
Learn more: B2B Lead Nurturing: How to Transform Your Leads into Revenue
These demand generation best practices will still need continuous optimization
Ultimately, a strong demand generation strategy will be critical in enabling marketers to meet KPIs, deliver a better ROI and drive the business forward.
By implementing the demand generation best practices outlined in this article, B2B marketers can generate and nurture leads, which will eventually convert into loyal customers. However, it is essential to continuously adapt and optimize demand generation strategies to stay ahead of the competition and meet the changing needs of consumers.
With a robust optimization strategy in place, businesses can use demand generation to achieve sustainable growth and drive revenue for years to come.
