It's easy to believe that sales is a numbers game. More leads equals more sales success, right? Not if a focus on quantity leaves your sales team attempting to sift through and convert reams of poor quality prospects. 

One of the causes of this issue is a common oversight in B2B marketing strategy. The absence of an effective demand generation strategy.

A B2B demand generation strategy involves creating and implementing a thorough marketing plan to attract and engage potential customers. In today's competitive business environment, demand generation is vital for companies looking to win new business.

Demand generation is not just the answer to keeping the peace between sales and marketing. It also addresses shifts in B2B buying behaviours that have undermined traditional lead collection methods. 

Today's buyers have a world of free information at their fingertips. They’re also more reluctant than ever to part with their contact information. Instead, they want the opportunity to self-educate and self-select suppliers before talking to a rep.

Sales teams who have been bogged down by sorting through unqualified leads should breathe a sigh of relief. The promise of marketers focusing on educating and empowering their buyers is in the quality of the resulting leads.

Demand generation doesn't just precede and power lead generation. It seeks to cultivate interest with ideal fit buyers. This ensures a steady stream of well-informed, enthusiastic, and qualified leads, paving the way for improved conversion rates.

Creating a Demand Generation Strategy

We’re all well acquainted with the traditional lead gen funnel. With a focus on lead generation, you emphasise securing a contact’s details, with the qualification process occurring afterwards.

A shift in focus to demand generation prioritises cultivating interest in a product or service prior to capturing their contact information.

The demand generation funnel connects with potential customers throughout their journey. From awareness, through discovering a solution, to recognising a need for a particular product or service and evaluating suppliers. It’s only at the point of identifying a solid purchase intent that the lead is passed on to sales.

5 Questions Your Demand Generation Marketing Strategy Needs to Answer

In order to target and connect with suitable prospective customers, it is crucial your marketing plan considers five key questions:

1 Understanding your Value Proposition

It's important to know what sets your business apart from the competition. 

How do your solutions compare to those of others in the market? What makes you unique? Why do your customers come to you and not someone else? 

Without this knowledge, it can be difficult to clearly define your target audience and to communicate with them effectively.

2 Defining your Target Audience

The first step in developing a successful B2B demand generation strategy is understanding your target audience. This involves identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP) and conducting market research to understand their pain points, challenges, and needs. 

With a clear understanding of your target audience, you can create buyer personas. These help you to personalise your messaging and content, increasing relevance and effectiveness.

3 Developing a Content Strategy

A comprehensive content strategy that maps to the buyer's journey is key to the success of any B2B demand generation strategy. This involves creating educational and informative content addressing your target audience's pain points at each stage - awareness, consideration, decision. 

By investing in high-quality content creation, you make your brand more discoverable while building a relationship with your prospects. Educational content helps them to make sense of their problem and make informed decisions about solutions. It also positions your brand as a thought leader and trusted advisor helping you gain credibility and trust.

4 Establishing your Multichannel Strategy

To maximise reach and engagement with potential customers, it's important to leverage multiple channels for demand generation. This includes social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and other digital marketing tactics.

Each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses. It's important to tailor your messaging and content for each channel to increase relevance and effectiveness.

Think about your target audience. Where do they spend time online? Also consider the type of content you are sharing and its suitability for each platform. By thinking things through, you can create a content distribution plan that will reach your target audience and drive results.

5 Optimising for Conversion

Digital marketing offers a wealth of data points for analysis and optimisation, so never stop experimenting and optimising. By identifying data sources, analysing the data, and tweaking your strategy based on the findings, you can consistently enhance the performance of your demand generation activities.

Consider all aspects of the buyer's journey. Make sure your solution is discoverable and potential customers can easily answer their purchase questions. Your website should be optimised for search, offer an excellent user experience, and a seamless sales process. Your marketing efforts, such as email campaigns, social media advertising, and content marketing, should be effective. 

The Journey Through the Demand Generation Funnel

Creating Demand

Unless you’re willing to give up on 95% of your potential market, it’s essential to focus on demand creation. This allows you to engage with a larger segment of your potential market, rather than just the 5% who are actively searching for a solution.

Turning Awareness into Demand

Start by focusing your demand generation campaigns on awareness. Effective awareness building goes deeper than making your brand visible. You need to align yourself with your audiences’ needs. Address the problems they’re grappling with, and help them to define ones they haven’t even discovered yet.

Once your audience is aware of their problem and recognises your brand, the next goal is to foster demand for your solution. This is where your role as an educator comes in. Aim to enlighten your audience about better ways of addressing their issue. Turn their recognition of a problem into a desire for a solution.

Tactics for Demand Creation

Inbound marketing is key to attracting the attention of potential customers. Create SEO content that helps to illuminate the problems your audience is facing, and educates them on the solutions.

By promoting content on platforms where your ideal customers consume content passively, you can tap into their current discussions and needs.

Different buyers consume different content in different ways. You need to understand your audience's content consumption preferences and diversify your content creation efforts. Keep an eye on your analytics and conduct market research to identify the content types and topics that most appeal to your ideal buyer.

Blog posts, podcasts, video, live streams and webinars can all be harnessed to highlight your customers’ problems and the solutions you offer. As you build awareness, you can start to offer more in-depth pieces. Branch out into thought leadership pieces and comprehensive guides, longer white papers, and webinar and email series.

Remember, content should aim to educate and advise, not sell. Customers at this stage in the buyer's journey are seeking trustworthy advice, not a sales pitch. 

By maintaining an emphasis on education and consultation, your brand becomes a trusted resource. Aim to build trust and authority, positioning your brand as the go-to subject matter expert. That way, when the customer is in the market for the solution you offer, your brand will be top of mind. 

Capturing Demand

What about the other 5% of the market? The people who are actively looking for a solution. By directing your efforts here, you can rapidly convert potential customers, offering a fast increase to your bottom line. And maybe gain loyal customers who will continue to engage with your brand in the long term.

Capturing existing demand is about visibility and customer experience. Consider the jobs your prospective customers need to do, and aim to create an environment that helps them complete them.

This means providing them with the right information, at the right time, and in the right place. Then making it easy for them to access your conversion process.

Your brand needs to be visible where it matters most - the high-intent channels where customers conduct their research. They won’t just be digging around on your website. Pay attention to peer review sites like G2. Also, check out discussions on platforms like Reddit and Quora, and use social listening to keep track of what's being said on LinkedIn.

Focus on keywords with commercial and transactional intent in content marketing strategies. Additionally, targeting PPC and social ads on buyer-intent can help to boost visibility, particularly in the short term before organic content starts ranking.

This segment of the market is already aware of their problem and the solutions available to them. They are now in the consideration phase and are comparing suppliers on criteria such as pricing, features and specifications. Optimise your website so visitors can find information effortlessly, preventing them from facing difficulties during the conversion process.

However, remember that people need more than just hard facts. They need to be able to see their future success in your existing portfolio. 

Case studies and testimonials should be engaging and targeted to specific audiences, speaking to their unique needs and concerns. Focus on benefits and results. Give your prospect the hard facts that will validate their decision and help them to convince other members of their buying committee.

Converting Demand: Now and In the Future

A potential buyer only becomes a true lead at the last phase of demand generation, after showing a clear interest in having a sales talk. Regardless of whether your procedure includes a demonstration, consultation, discovery call, or a pitch invitation, this is when it's evident that you've made progress.

Companies need to make sure the sales process can be repeated to close more deals, increase the value of deals, and speed up the sales cycle. This requires a clear understanding of the post-conversion journey of leads and a clearly defined set of steps to avoid missing critical actions.

The digital footprint created by each prospect as they explore the customer journey can now be leveraged to smooth the way. Marketing automation with integrated CRM provides a unified view of each prospect, streamlining the transition between marketing and sales.

Automation platforms improve the transition from marketing to sales. Many offer tools to automate the scheduling of meetings and the process of following up.

The analysis of marketing data can also help teams to work together to identify potential high-intent leads earlier in the process. Knowing where the chance of conversion is higher can help guide ABM strategies, hyperpersonalised content strategies, or simply remind sales teams to follow up.

Finally, creating measurable feedback loops is key for marketing to assess the effectiveness of various campaigns or channels. By collecting data and analysing results teams gain valuable insights into what is working and what is not. They can then make informed decisions about how to optimise future campaigns and adjust strategies.

This collaborative approach needs to extend beyond data sharing to offer the best customer experience. For instance, teams creating content can help sales teams by providing resources that make it easier to explain the benefits of a product or service to each customer.

Sales enablement content like price sheets, sales decks, case studies, and playbooks helps the sales team to uphold brand consistency and exhibit expertise during every prospect interaction.

From Creation to Conversion

B2B demand generation is not optional. It's an essential strategy that can provide better quality of leads, greatly enhancing sales team productivity and driving revenue growth. 

Success hinges on seamless collaboration between marketing and sales, and leveraging shared insights to create an unparalleled customer experience. With the right resources and skills, businesses can achieve notable success even in today's competitive digital market.

If you want to expand your reach, enhance your brand credibility, increase your conversion rates, and accelerate revenue growth, start implementing effective strategies today. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you master the modern B2B demand generation process.