If, like many businesses, you’re laser focused on lead generation and sales, have you thought about taking a step back to take a look at the bigger picture? Namely, your demand generation strategy.

Demand generation’s purpose is to create an awareness of, interest in, and buzz about your products and services. It attracts potential customers and delivers the right content to them at the right time to educate them on their issue and persuade them your offer provides the solution. 

In this article, we’re going to clarify the differences between demand generation and lead generation, and show you how to create a coherent demand gen strategy that really works.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is an all-encompassing term for the variety of sales, inbound marketing, and service tactics that attract, convert, and retain customers. 

It's not just about discovering prospects that are in the market to buy, although it is that too. Demand generation is about creating interest when people don't know anything about you yet, or don’t realise they have a problem worth solving.

The primary aims of demand generation are to generate awareness and interest so you have the chance to nurture a relationship, turn them into customers, and retain them for the long term. It’s about providing the right information to the right people at the right time so that what you’re sharing is the perfect fit for your ideal customers’ needs.

However, demand generation marketing doesn’t have to stop there. It continues throughout the buyers’ journey and beyond the sale to continue developing demand in existing customers.

The importance of demand generation marketing

Without demand generation campaigns, it’s likely your business will grow far more slowly than it otherwise might. Because demand generation is specifically designed to reach out to people who don’t even know they need your product or service yet, you’re not waiting for people to come to you. It means you’re taking the initiative and setting out a strategy to expand your market.

With the right demand gen strategy in place, you can get your target audience genuinely excited about your company’s product and services. You can target both their pain and passion points to get them to engage with and explore your offering, driving traffic to transform interest into action. This facilitates discovery, rather than taking a more passive approach.

You can increase brand awareness and reach, generate more high-quality leads, and accelerate your pipeline. You will also increase your conversion rate and your revenue.

Demand generation is the starting point for attracting customers to you, drawing them into your sales cycle, and beginning to lead them through the customer journey.

Demand generation vs. lead generation

Many people confuse demand generation and lead generation or use the terms interchangeably. They’re not the same thing, and both are needed for successful business development and growth.

Lead generation is a part of a full demand generation strategy. It focuses on gaining people’s information so you can continue to market to them, convert them into qualified leads, and finally sales. Lead gen includes activities further down the sales funnel, such as lead nurturing and lead scoring.

From this definition, it’s clear to see that without demand generation, there can be no lead generation. You have to create demand and awareness of your business before you can begin to move people through your pipeline to the point where you’re applying your lead generation strategy.

So, while demand gen has a broader focus than lead generation, a well-executed strategy will naturally increase your ability to generate leads.

The savvy B2B marketer employs both strategies to attract their ideal customer, get them into the top of the sales funnel, and move them through into becoming not just a buyer, but a brand advocate.

Tips for stronger demand generation

Get to know your customers

It all begins, as so much of marketing does, with knowing your target audience. Buyer personas can help your sales and marketing teams work cohesively by creating clear targets for your advertising and content strategies. 

For each profile, consider who this person is. What challenges do they face in their work? What practical and emotional needs influence their purchasing decisions? Where do they find their information? Who do they listen to and respect? Who influences their decisions?

The other point about buyer personas when you’re selling B2B is that you’re not necessarily selling to only one person but a buying committee. If you sell equipment to big pharma, for example, you’ll have the scientists in the labs who need the equipment, but you may also have the lab director, the CEO and CFO, and a range of technical experts whose opinions matter.

Scientists and technical experts are going to want detailed specifications, features, and benefits, including manufacturing safety data sheets and certifications. The lab director will need financial information to ensure the purchase is within his or her budget. The CEO may want the full picture, and you can guarantee that the CFO will be looking at the bottom line over and above anything else.

Knowing your customers and how their needs align with your products and services allows you to segment, personalise, and optimise your campaigns. You will be able to reach your prospects with ads and content that are relevant to their experiences, interests, and challenges. This can go a long way towards winning over new customers.

Connect with different content types

Ensure you are creating and promoting content that addresses the needs of your target audience throughout the  customer journey.

Increasingly, B2B buyers are educating themselves by using content to do their research before they ever reach out to a salesperson. This requires you to have a thought-through content strategy as the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. This ensures you know what to create and when for your target audience to allow them to persuade themselves to a certain extent.

Demand generation initially takes place in the very early stages when you’re trying to raise awareness and interest. At this point, you’re building brand awareness and looking at how you can position your company as an important source of solutions. You’re looking to build trust and authority, and educate your audience with informative blog posts, free tools, and videos.

Further down the funnel, your content needs to engage buyers who are already in the market and looking for a solution. Here, your content is more likely to centre on delivering something more in-depth, such as ebooks and white papers.

Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, case studies and blog posts need to be more targeted to people who are already poised to buy. You may also find that your prospects appreciate personalised webinars at this point, too. 

When you know your own customers and understand the customer journey, you know what they’re going to want to know at each stage and how they’d like it delivered. Now all you need to do is give it to them.

Track everything

When we say everything, we mean everything. Decide on your most important metrics at the beginning and then track your results as you go. Data analysis, and continuous testing will be important to this process.

Keep checking that what you’re doing is bringing you the right results. Check whether your content is being read and shared. Look at which headings and subject lines get the most response, and if you have the numbers use A/B testing to try different headlines and calls to action.

As trends begin to emerge from your marketing programs, you'll be able to connect marketing activities to key success metrics.

How to measure the success of your demand gen campaign

It’s vital to measure the impact of your campaigns. Making data-informed decisions based on real results is key to delivering results with demand generation. You need to be able to connect the dots between your demand gen efforts and actual business growth.

Not only is this helpful when planning ahead, but it’s equally important when budget time comes around. If you can prove that what you’re doing really does add to the bottom line, it’s not your budget that’s getting cut next year.

However, there are some things to think about when measuring your results. First of all, skip the vanity metrics. Yes, likes are great, and we all love an interesting comment, but you need to focus on what really matters to your business.

Every organisation will focus on slightly different metrics for their demand generation, depending on their business goals. Once you’ve determined which KPIs are most relevant to your business, then you can track them across your customer journey and ensure that what you are focusing on really is creating success for your business.

Use marketing automation

Make life easier by using marketing automation to help you generate demand and generate leads. You can schedule content, of course, but marketing automation can help you with your tracking too.

You can consistently analyse your demand generation channels. This gives you the opportunity to orchestrate the customer journey. You’re able to  track and analyse every customer interaction to get a 360-degree view of your customers and their behaviour.

You can also observe how the people visiting your website interact with it. This reveals their interests, pain points, content preferences, and even their urgency. All of this is valuable data for content creation, but also for sales when approaching customers later in the buyer’s journey.

Marketing automation is what allows you to target the right audiences, provide personalised experiences, and run efficient campaigns at scale. You can run a demand generation program without marketing automation, but we really wouldn’t recommend it. There are far too many balls to juggle, and you’re aiming for success here, not an administrative nightmare.

Demand generation is such a vital part of business development, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. It is complex in that there are so many moving parts, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Create a clear strategy, keep tracking, testing, and iterating. If you’d like to find out how to use content strategy, online advertising, social media and automation to increase the demand for your products and services, get in touch.