What is demand generation marketing?

When you own a business, the best way to increase productivity is to boost awareness and demand for your brand, service, or product.

Your goal is to expand the visibility, reach a new audience, and build authority. Also, you want to generate interest around your company, which ensures high-quality leads.

Among various tools used by marketing managers to achieve this goal, Demand Generation is quite popular. It covers a wide spectrum of activities that actually trigger much before you identify a prospect.

And it doesn’t end once you convert the prospect and sign him on as a customer.

What will you do for an effective demand generation? Well, you will have to align your sales and marketing functions and bring transparency between their working. Both teams should be able to find out blockages or gaps and mitigate them.

A few salient aspects of Demand Generation

• Demand generation is a marketing strategy, that includes any activity that can drive awareness and interest in your brand, product, or service. The ultimate goal is to create a predictable pipeline. It will bring growth to your business. To do this, demand generation marketers potential prospects based on behavioral data and guide them through a nurturing process. Marketers ensure that the sales team receives high-quality, highly-qualified leads.
• Demand generation covers all your marketing and sales initiatives at every touchpoint. In the journey of a customer, whether it is the stage of upselling something to an existing customer, or it is about generating interest among potential buyers, Demand generation will add value.
• Does demand generation mean you force demand? Or does it mean you trick people and motivate them to buy something that they do not need? No, not at all. On the contrary, it is the way of providing the correct information to them at the right time. Thus, they know that what you are offering them is the best fit for their needs.

While demand generation marketing has many things similar to lead generation, this strategy is more time-consuming. Also, it spans various touchpoints and campaigns.

Five stages of demand generation

As mentioned in the blog before, you have to look into it carefully because demand generation is so The primary five components of demand generation are:

Goals

When you know what are your end goals of your campaigns up front, it is easy to plan the rest of the strategy around your goals.

For instance, if you jot down the booking revenue goals of your business, it is easy to work backward to figure out how many opportunities you need to reach the target.

It will guide you about planning marketing programs you are supposed to undertake for generating the leads.

Identify your audience

Before you move further, it is essential to decide what the program entails. You need to know who are the customers you are targeting.

When you understand your audience and build customer profiles around that, you will be able to target marketing activities more precisely. It is beneficial to develop personas based on the needs, roles, and objectives of your target customers.

Experts say that the more details are included, the better it is.

But there is a catch. Since people are annoyingly overloaded by information,  your target audience is also not an exception. Moreover, people have control over which brand they engage with, in the form of Ad blockers or Email opt-outs.

People nowadays reject brands that do not meet their communication preferences. That is the reason, you need to carve strategy more systematically.

Content

Once you give shape to your goals and audience, it is time to plan and produce the best content for every stage of the marketing funnel.

The top of it is the Pre-purchase stage. It builds brand awareness and highlights a need. Finally, it drives the desire to buy the product.

In the middle portion of the funnel, there is the  research and consideration stage. You need to educate your buyers at this stage about the possible challenges. Also, you should help them in solving the issues.

At the bottom of the funnel, you’ll deliver company-specific information. Examples are demo offers, case studies, and third-party reviews.

They will reinforce the fact to the customers that your product is the best.

Distribution

It is not sufficient to create great content. It is of no use unless it is distributed to the right audience.

You will need well-defined, robust programs to deliver content to your prospects and direct them to the right place.

It will need a balanced mix of all channels: email, social, direct mail, and even live events.

Distribution channels at every stage of the funnel are different.

Measurement

Unless you measure, it is impossible to understand how the program is moving.

You need to determine and track your key performance indicators (KPIs) to check if your demand generation program is achieving its goals or not.

A properly formulated, implemented, and monitored Demand Generation Marketing Program will take the organization’s performance to great heights.