The Power of Demand Generation: How to Generate More Leads and Revenue
In the past 20 or 30 years, businesses have discovered the power of demand generation. As a business activity, it’s nothing new. But as a recognised and considered marketing strategy, it’s changing the corporate world – for the better.
In this blog, we’ll be taking a deep dive in to the idea of demand generation. We’ll look at some of the most common demand generation strategies, some success cases, and we’ll suggest the next steps for you to implement these great ideas in your organisation.
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation as a strategic choice, goes beyond transactional marketing. With demand generation you take a broader focus, building interest, awareness, and demand for your products or services through targeted strategies and campaigns. Companies try to become more than just a business selling products or services. They give people other reasons to interact with them and that helps to establish their brand in the forefront of the customers’ minds.
Think of demand generation as an extension to the sales funnel. With the sales funnel you start off with a pool of prospective customers and that number gets gradually reduced to qualified leads, and finally just your customers are left.
The problem is that the sales funnel is two-dimensional, it’s linear. Potential customers can get left behind. The vast majority of people who enter your sales funnel don’t complete the journey. Many are enticed away by competitors or substitute products. Others will simply change their minds and walk away. Unless you captured their data, they might leave forever and you’ll never know.
Lead generation adds another dimension to your sales funnel. Instead of potential customers progressing through a linear journey, your target market is in orbit around you like moons around a planet. Some are in closer orbits than others, but that’s perfectly natural. There’s no pressure, no sales techniques, they will seek you out when they are ready. It gives an organisation gravity.
A successful demand generation strategy will attract customers. They will seek you out because you offer more than products or services. Demand generation marketing means crafting compelling experiences and building lasting connections with customers.
Demand Generation Strategies
- Content Marketing
The first and most common demand generation strategy is content marketing. These two can work hand in hand to attract, nurture, and convert prospects into valuable leads for businesses.
Content marketing can be a powerful demand generation strategy. When you create regular, useful, or entertaining content, you get an SEO boost and you begin to create a community around your brand. It establishes trust and it shows people that you’re really there, working on the problems facing your customers. Great content marketing creates engaged audiences who’ll keep returning to you, time after time.
One of the most common techniques is to create an authoritative blog that focuses on the topics that interest your customers. It that blog offers how to guides and eBooks as supplementary material, the more the better. This type of content will attract potential customers into your orbit, and away from that of your competitors.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing can also be a very effective demand generation strategy. By creating interesting and informative emails, that offer recipients real value, companies can benefit in many ways. It gives them a platform to introduce their products or services and showcase their expertise.
If you’re sending out large numbers of emails, it’s worth investing in the proper tools for the job. Marketscan Edge is a powerful email marketing platform that offers all the functionality you need within a simple and intuitive user experience. With Edge, you don’t need any special knowledge to create automated email campaigns with visually appealing emails and optimised landing pages. It’s all handled with a drag and drop interface. All you have to do is create the content, set your preferences, input your best quality data and the software does the rest.
If you want to improve your email marketing campaigns, Edge will also provide you with a full suite of analytics and insights. Even without that, you can learn a lot from your own email inbox. Go to your junk folder and lines and, without opening any messages, read the subject. Here’s what I see on mine: page after page of exaggerated, unsupported claims and overly personal or familiar copy.
Remember, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. That phrase encapsulates where lots of companies go wrong with email marketing. You could send a blanket email to everyone on your CRM database. But going for quantity over quality is rarely a wise demand generation strategy. A far more effective technique is to use highly targeted, regularly cleaned, good quality business data.
- Account Based Marketing
Another popular strategy that often goes hand in hand with demand generation is account based marketing. You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule? 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Account based marketing seeks to maximise that by focusing on those high value accounts, nurturing them with tailored marketing activities.
With this type of demand generation strategy, you’ll normally focus on building a relationship with a specific person within an organisation. That might be a purchasing manager, a senior engineer or product designer, perhaps even the CEO. If that’s the case with your organisation, you could benefit from our company look up tool. It lets you search our massive master database for a specific company and identify the decision makers you need to reach.
Account based marketing requires close collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Both teams work together to identify key accounts, develop account-specific strategies, and coordinate outreach efforts. Regular communication and feedback loops are essential to keep teams aligned for optimised results.
Account Based Marketing at Adobe
Adobe, the software company, is open and transparent about their use of account based marketing. Their Marketo Engage software is fast becoming an industry standard for marketing automation and demand generation. Significantly, a good part of their success has been down to an account based marketing approach. There’s a fascinating Q&A on their website with a member of their demand generation team which offers a great deal of insight into the activities of their marketing department.
The team at Adobe realised that customers buy experiences as much as they buy products. If the customer experience is not right, the product fails regardless how good it is.
Adobe developed a personalised approach for each target account. They tailored their messaging, content, and engagement tactics to address the specific pain points and objectives of each organisation. In this way they created high quality customer experiences. They were able to build strong relationships with target accounts, increase engagement rates, and ultimately drive revenue growth in their new products and the rest of their portfolio.
Key Takeaway
In recent years, demand generation has emerged as a powerful marketing strategy that goes beyond transactional approaches. By focusing on building lasting connections, delivering compelling experiences, and tailoring strategies to target accounts, businesses can attract customers, nurture leads, and ultimately sell more products.
The three strategies we’ve mentioned here, content marketing, email marketing, and account-based marketing are just a few of the many options to create a gravitational pull for your target audiences. By adopting effective demand generation strategies, businesses can unlock the potential for increased leads, stronger customer relationships, and sustainable growth in today’s competitive landscape.
Remember that Marketscan can provide you with the tools you need to run a successful demand generation campaign.
