When you sell a product or service, your customers know what you deal with. Therefore, they raise demand for your service or product. Experts call it a built-in demand. A demand for which you need not put extensive efforts to convert the inquiries into actual sales.
But, at times, customers do not know about a problem that they have, and you have a solution for it. In such a situation, you need to put effort into developing demand-generation tactics as part of your marketing strategy.
By generating demand, you help your audience understand the pain points. You tell them why they matter and ultimately why the solution being offered by you is the best fit.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation is a multi-step process that brings in two major elements: brand storytelling and elements of education. It shows your audience a potential challenge they might be facing in their work, life, or otherwise. Do you need to tell the customers about how your brand can become the answer.
Sometimes, people use the word demand generation and lead generation interchangeably. However, they are different and need different strategies with different focuses.
Demand generation requires much more education and tends to work in the inverse of lead generation. When you want to create demand, you need to educate your prospects by introducing them to a challenge that exists for them. And then you need to explain why it’s significant enough to invest in a solution.
You need to do a thorough job of convincing your audience that a problem exists. Then you need to convince them about why your solution is best. Therefore, demand generation takes a more proactive approach to get in front of your customers. Not just that, it is a long process, which means you will need a longer time to start the campaign.
What is a Demand Generation Campaign?
A Demand Generation Campaign is a data-driven marketing strategy companies use to build interest and awareness for products and services. The campaign focuses on delivering content and conversations throughout the customer journey. Each touchpoint is accounted for in the demand generation campaign.
Demand generation campaigns are the marketing tactics that you use to build out your full demand generation strategy.
While each campaign may serve a different purpose, the main aim of these strategies is to:
- Boost brand awareness
- Educate potential buyers
- Qualify leads
- Demonstrate expertise and authority in the market
- Accelerate the sales cycle
- Identify possible sales opportunities
- Increase the conversion rate
Elements of a successful demand generation campaign
Every brand’s demand generation campaign is different. But there are some steps that every campaign should incorporate to give you the best opportunity of generating interest in the service or product offered by you.
It is essential to use strategies that are relevant to your business and to the stage of demand generation you’re in. Here are some critical aspects of the demand generation campaign.
Generating a need for your product or service
As said before, initially your customers are unaware of the pain points that your service or product addresses. You have to explain why the challenges your customers are facing before you start generating demand. Maybe you need to demonstrate how your product can make an aspect of the work or life of your prospective customers more successful.
You should create informational content
The whole and sole purpose of the content should be to educate and introduce people to a problem they’re facing.
Then, you should make efforts to make the content popular. In modern era, you have many avenues to present the content and decide to take it to as many people as you can. You can use various digital marketing techniques. They can popularize the content to their customers so that they know about what you are offering to them and how it can bring change in their lives.
Social media is another powerful platform, which can quickly convey information to a large audience.
Share a free report
When introducing your audience to the problem you want to solve, it helps to have definite, concrete, and quantitative data that can support your claims.
This can be easily done by sharing free reports or statistics about your industry. Thus, your customers can understand the problem you’re trying to bring light to. The purpose is not just to create visibility for your brand but to provide valuable information to them, which can be used for making future purchasing decisions.
Offer a free tool
This is another very useful trick. When you offer a free tool to the audience so that they can understand what you offer, they can make use of it for a solution.
You can learn more about which segment of your audience is most interested. Also, you should define the pain point that your audience is using your tool to solve.
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