Demand generation is a marketing strategy enabling B2B marketers to get better by reducing the gaps with actual opportunities by virtue of leads generated. Previously what used to be called lead generation is now known as demand generation.
The present competitive market is getting tougher for a brand to generate demand for its products. Demand generation is a sophisticated marketing strategy used through various data analysis, converting potential customers into promising buyers.
Importance of Demand Generation
This process helps to create a path and finally expanding a business. The overall process involves mapping the consumer behavior, creating brand awareness, and finally increasing conversion rates of the potential clients.
Demand generation is not only acquiring customers but also nurturing relationships with existing customers. The strategies cover multiple levels, including different campaigns, with the use of multimedia to help to build brand awareness.
Process of Demand Generation
The process can be explained in the following steps:
- Building Brand Identity
- Properly identifying buyer personas
- Establishing thought leadership
- Practicing a strong social media presence
- Maintaining different public relation management programs
- Creating a go-to-market strategy
In order to generate demand, people have to know about your brand, and about your company. Awareness should be made to the level that contacts and customers are able to recollect and recognize your brand.
An important tool for demand generation marketing– Events
More than 80% of marketers invest a big amount in events. These are targeted towards a specific group and are organized from time to time. Some examples of events are:
- Conferences
- Classroom Seminars
- Road Shows
- Trade Shows
- Webinar
- Live streaming
- Personal events
Important factors of demand generation marketing
These include
- Lead Generation: A lead refers to a person who has shown interest in your services or products. Lead generation is the process of converting these leads to fruitful customers. The overall process includes attracting customers through publicity material, or through blogs and social media.
- Demand Capture: This is capturing the individuals that already have demand for your products. SEO with specific keywords is a big tool that helps in capturing demand.
- Acceleration: It is used to increase revenues with efficiency. The process is accelerating the sales process by converting leads into buyers, efficiently. It is important to turn leads into buyers quickly, as the more time you will take; the greater is the risk of losing a customer.
How to measure demand generation efforts
Following are the factors to measure your efforts effectively
- Total number of meetings generated
- Number of opportunities generated
- An average of the deal size
- Total number of every qualified opportunity
- Customer Acquisition Cost
- Cost Per Lead
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Average Sales Cycle Length
- Revenue generated
Challenges to Demand Generation
Identifying Competent Leads: Better successful conversion rates depend on identifying a good lead. Recognition of a competitive lead is based on the selection of those who hold the purchasing capacity to buy your product or services and are willing to go for them.
Remember that inadequate recognition may lead to the failure of your demand generation strategy.
Content and Placement: A successful demand generation is based on reaching out to the leads with the right content and in the right form. Content customization for different buyers and placing them in the right places is a basic requirement for demand generation strategy.
Using Data: Demand Generation is a data-driven process. Quality data with leads, preferences, and past experience of customers, can help in guiding the content placement strategy.
Data collection on your efficient strategies helps you to learn from the mistakes done in past, and improvise future plans for more demand generation techniques. It is important to know what works best, but even it is equally important to know what does not.
Conclusion
While acquiring new clients is important, retaining, and maintaining your existing clientele, is more important. For the sustained growth of a company, demand generation is quite crucial, which can be achieved with a proper customer retention strategy. Remember to maintain ‘3 Vs’, that is Volume, Velocity, and Value to achieve your goal of demand generation technique.
