7 Steps to Create a Winning B2B Demand Generation Strategy

Demand generation is a crucial part of any B2B marketing strategy. It helps you build brand awareness, authority, and trust among your target audience, and generate qualified leads that are ready to buy your products or services. But how do you create a successful demand generation strategy that delivers results? Here are seven steps to follow:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Demand generation is a crucial part of any B2B marketing strategy

Demand generation helps you build brand awareness, authority, trust among your target audience

Demand generation requires a joint effort from multiple business teams

Demand generation involves creating valuable content for different formats and channels

Demand generation requires constant testing and optimization

1. Define your target audience

Before you start creating any content or campaigns, you need to know who you are trying to reach and what their pain points, goals, and challenges are. You can use buyer personas, market research, and customer feedback to segment your audience and tailor your messages accordingly.

2. Create valuable content

Content is the fuel of demand generation. You need to create content that educates, informs, and entertains your audience, and guides them through the buyer’s journey. You can use different formats and channels, such as blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, webinars, social media, and email marketing. The key is to provide value and relevance at every stage of the funnel.

3. Optimize your website

Your website is your online storefront and the hub of your demand generation efforts. You need to optimize it for search engines, user experience, and conversions. Make sure your website is fast, mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and has clear calls to action. You also need to track and measure your website performance using analytics tools.

4. Nurture your leads

Not all leads are ready to buy right away. You need to nurture them with personalized and timely communication until they are sales-ready. You can use email marketing, lead scoring, lead magnets, and marketing automation to segment your leads and send them relevant content and offers based on their behavior and interests.

5. Collaborate with influencers

Influencer marketing is a powerful way to amplify your demand generation efforts and reach new audiences. You can partner with influencers who have authority and credibility in your industry and can endorse your brand or products to their followers. You can also leverage user-generated content, testimonials, reviews, and case studies to showcase social proof and build trust.

6. Test and optimize your campaigns

Demand generation is not a one-time thing. You need to constantly monitor, analyze, and improve your campaigns to maximize their effectiveness and ROI. You can use A/B testing, surveys, feedback forms, and analytics tools to measure your key performance indicators (KPIs) and identify what works and what doesn’t.

7. Align your marketing and sales teams

Demand generation is a team effort that requires alignment and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams. You need to have a clear definition of what constitutes a qualified lead, a smooth handoff process, and a feedback loop to ensure that both teams are working towards the same goals.

TIP

To create a winning B2B demand generation strategy, you need to understand your audience’s needs and preferences, provide them with valuable content and solutions at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

B2B Demand Generation Strategy: A Statistical Report

B2B demand generation is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and nurturing awareness and interest in your products or services within a targeted audience. It involves a range of tactics, such as content marketing, email campaigns, webinars, and personalized engagement. Demand generation is essential for B2B businesses, especially in the SaaS and tech sectors, where there is high competition and long sales cycles. In this report, we will present some statistics that show the current state and trends of B2B demand generation, as well as some best practices and tips to improve your strategy.

Current State and Trends of B2B Demand Generation

According to a survey by Gartner, 79% of B2B marketers say that email is the most effective tactic for demand generation, followed by content marketing (76%), social media marketing (74%), and webinars (66%). However, these tactics also face some challenges, such as low open rates, content saturation, algorithm changes, and webinar fatigue. Therefore, B2B marketers need to constantly optimize their campaigns and test new approaches to stand out from the crowd.

Some of the emerging trends that are shaping the future of B2B demand generation are:

Account-based marketing (ABM)

This is a strategy that focuses on targeting and engaging specific accounts that are most likely to buy your products or services. According to a report by Thomson Data, 87% of B2B marketers say that ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing activities.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

This is a technology that enables B2B marketers to automate and personalize their campaigns, as well as gain insights from data. According to a report by Vib.Tech, 61% of B2B marketers say that AI is the most important aspect of their demand generation strategy.

Video marketing

This is a tactic that uses video content to educate, entertain, and persuade your audience. According to a report by Digital Marketers World, 72% of B2B buyers say that video influences their purchase decisions.

Best Practices and Tips for B2B Demand Generation

Based on the statistics and trends mentioned above, here are some best practices and tips to improve your B2B demand generation strategy:

Build awareness and authority

The first step of demand generation is to make your brand visible and credible to your potential buyers. You can do this by creating and sharing high-quality content that showcases your expertise, value proposition, and customer success stories. You can also leverage customer reviews, influencer collaborations, and social proof to boost your reputation.

Develop a content strategy

The second step of demand generation is to provide relevant and helpful content that addresses your audience’s pain points and needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You can do this by conducting keyword research, creating buyer personas, mapping out the content journey, and measuring the performance of your content.

Use email marketing

The third step of demand generation is to use email marketing to nurture your leads and move them closer to the sale. You can do this by segmenting your email list, crafting engaging subject lines, personalizing your messages, adding clear calls to action, and testing different variables.

Implement ABM

The fourth step of demand generation is to implement ABM to target and engage your ideal accounts. You can do this by identifying your high-value accounts, creating tailored content and offers for them, coordinating your marketing and sales efforts, and tracking your account-level metrics.

Leverage AI

The fifth step of demand generation is to leverage AI to automate and optimize your campaigns. You can do this by using AI tools such as chatbots, predictive analytics, lead scoring, content generation, and personalization.

B2B demand generation is a vital strategy for B2B businesses that want to generate more leads and revenue. By following the current state and trends of B2B demand generation, as well as the best practices and tips mentioned in this report, you can improve your strategy and achieve better results.

FREQUENTLY QUESTIONS:

Q1: What is B2B demand generation?
A: B2B demand generation is a marketing strategy that focuses on building awareness and interest in your products or services among your target audience.

Q2: What are the benefits of B2B demand generation?
A: B2B demand generation can help you increase brand visibility, authority, trust, lead quality, conversion rates, customer lifetime value, revenue growth.

Q3: What are the best practices for B2B demand generation?
A: Some of the best practices for B2B demand generation are defining your target audience, creating valuable content, optimizing your website, nurturing your leads, collaborating with influencers, testing and optimizing your campaigns, aligning your marketing and sales teams.

Q4: What are the challenges of B2B demand generation?
A: Some of the challenges of B2B demand generation are generating enough leads, generating quality leads, measuring ROI, standing out from the competition.

Q5: How do you measure B2B demand generation success?
A: You can measure B2B demand generation success by tracking metrics such as website traffic, organic ranking, social media engagement, email open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates (CVRs), cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), return on investment (ROI).

References:

https://www.coxblue.com/whats-the-difference-between-lead-generation-and-demand-generation/

http://www.ontargetpartners.com/lead-generation-services/demand-generation-and-discovery/

https://marketinginsidergroup.com/demand-generation/responsible-demand-generation-marketing-sales/

https://www.apnnews.com/demand-generation-marketing-pave-the-way-for-increased-business/

https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/6-basic-nurture-campaigns-use/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-demand-generation-faqs-ht

https://infusemedia.com/insight/demand-generation-vs-lead-generation/

http://www.leadformix.com/blog/2013/05/demand-generation-vs-lead-generation-tell-them-apart/

https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/demand-generation

https://zenmedia.com/blog/b2b-demand-generation-strategy/