What if you could raise brand recognition, get more qualified leads, and boost the proportion of leads you turn into paying clients?
Demand creation aims to increase brand recognition and authority by creating in-depth, exciting content that cultivates leads. By nurturing quality leads, a strong demand generation program increases sales.
But how exactly do lead generation and demand generation differ from one another? And how may a demand-generating plan be effectively implemented for your company?
Demand generation vs lead generation
Demand generation in marketing refers to raising awareness and demand for your goods or services. The objective is to increase your audience, establish your authority, and create interest in your brand to generate high-quality leads.
Demand gen includes a broad range of operations that begin before you’ve found a prospect. They continue even after the prospect converts and becomes a customer. It is also a collaborative effort between sales and marketing.
Be mindful not to mix up lead generating and demand generation. These two distinct methods handle various stages of the buying cycle, even though many terminologies in digital marketing can sound relatively similar.
Lead generation strategy aims to turn your target market into qualified leads. By bringing in new visitors to your website and presenting them with your solution, demand generation seeks to grow your audience.
Lead generation is all about:
- Gather as much customer data from your target market as you can
- Create a database of prospects at various points in the sales cycle
- Explain the benefits of your offer and how it stands out from the competition
- Turn leads into paying consumers
Best B2B demand generation strategies and activities
1) Content marketing
According to Statista, 46% of B2B companies plan to increase their content marketing efforts.
You may create demand for your company using a variety of content formats. Consider these formats for capturing the market:
- Blogs: Most of your competition is publishing more than thrice a week, so don’t think you can skirt with one blog a week.
- YouTube videos: 7 in 10 B2B customers consume marketing videos throughout their buyer journey (Google)
- eBooks
- Podcasts or webinars: 44% of senior-level decision makers, such as department heads, VPs, owners, and C-suite executives, listen to podcasts.
- Industry insights
2) Paid marketing
One of the quickest ways to reach your target audience is paid marketing. With paid marketing, it is a game of how well you can use the data you gather to increase your demand with each campaign.
PPC platforms like Google and Facebook quickly allow you to reach your audience’s feeds and search results so they can know more about your services.
3) Account-based marketing
Creating strong personas is a must for every B2B company. With the abundant data available on B2B platforms like LinkedIn, you can gather leads and use email campaigns and personalized messages to reach out to them.
Gather a great email list through sales navigator or LinkedIn ads, then use your content and educate this list and nurture them into prospects.
Demand generation metrics to track to be successful
Effective demand generation is based on measurement and testing.
Demand generation is a naturally data-informed strategy and requires you to understand some crucial DG metrics. These will help you get your efforts iteratively better.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is a critical number that can determine your company’s performance and is the essential DG metric. If your CAC is greater than your customer lifetime value (CLTV), your company can never be profitable, and you need to rethink your demand generation strategy.
Conversion rates for funnels
Too frequently, marketers aggressively concentrate on the initial quantity of leads that can be created during a marketing-qualified campaign. Although this is a crucial statistic, it misses the touch points and analytics that show how well your company is producing content, cultivating connections and sending quality leads to sales.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
A customer account’s entire profitability throughout their association with your company is known as customer lifetime value, or CLV or LTV. This demand creation indicator provides information on the efficiency with which your company closes agreements and the caliber of your account management and customer interaction activities.
There are more and more opportunities to engage customers in novel ways as companies explore more channels. The demand creation approach is one of these novel tactics. As businesses employ demand generation techniques, they soon learn to automate their actions to increase their reach and make their marketing profitable.
