Demand generation is a critical part of marketing, helping businesses to bring awareness of its solutions to target audiences. Often, this means demand generation is tasked with identifying and defining ideal customers while delivering valuable content and kickstarting the process of nurturing leads towards conversion.
We’ve put together a guide to some of the most effective demand generation strategies and best practices so you can build more successful campaigns that contribute meaningfully towards your business goals.
Understanding the Basics of Demand Generation
Demand generation is a type of marketing designed to generate interest in a product or service. A demand generation strategy typically focuses on boosting brand awareness, building trust, delivering value and nurturing prospects through the buying journey.
This distinguishes it from lead generation, the term used to describe marketing strategies oriented around the simpler goal of converting prospects already aware of a product or service into customers. Demand generation and B2B lead generation strategies come together to form a marketing campaign that attracts, engages and converts leads.
Demand Generation Strategies
Demand generation activities come in lots of different forms, all of which are used to create broad strategies that effectively reach and engage a target audience.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness marketing acts as a foundation for demand generation strategies. It involves building an understanding of a target audience and creating a marketing campaign that reaches them to improve their awareness of or trust in your brand. This is often achieved by producing helpful content that addresses their needs or pain points and positions your company as a thought leader in the sector.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing describes any type of marketing that involves using content to attract an audience to your business, as opposed to outbound marketing which makes use of ads to reach out to them. It includes content marketing and SEO, both of which can drive organic website traffic to dedicated landing pages, blogs and content hubs. This presents an opportunity to both nurture quality leads and capture engagement data that you can later use in retargeting campaigns.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM is a demand generation strategy that involves creating content and campaigns that target individual prospects (accounts). This is often done by delivering personalized content and experiences that resonate with the specific needs, preferences, and pain points of each prospect.
Webinars and Live Events
Webinars and other virtual events like virtual conferences or workshops provide an excellent platform to generate demand. Facilitated by webinar hosting platforms like ON24, they can be used to educate an audience about industry trends, challenges, or solutions. They also present opportunities to engage with leads through interactive elements and develop a better understanding of your audience’s interests through detailed analytics.
Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns are designed to re-engage audiences who have already been targeted once or completed a website session. Ads or content used in retargeting campaigns can be tailored around the audience’s previous interactions with the brand, providing an effective way to reach out to them again with relevant messaging.
Content Hubs
Content hubs are centralized platforms where audiences can access a mix of live and on-demand content. They can be created to serve different audience segments, with dynamic content suited to segment-specific needs or preferences. This allows marketers to provide personalized content journeys to diverse audiences, creating continuous engagement opportunities.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the practice of using email as a marketing channel. It can enhance demand generation campaigns, allowing marketers to send highly personalized content directly to the inboxes of segmented audiences to drive both engagement and conversions.
Demand Generation Best Practices
Deploying demand generation strategies can help boost brand awareness in your target audience and offers countless opportunities to engage with prospects, nurturing them towards conversion. Follow these demand generation best practices to get the most from your campaign.
Align Your Strategies With Business Goals
Like any other type of marketing, demand generation strategies perform best when they’re planned and deployed to contribute towards specific pre-defined business goals. This keeps them focused, ensuring all activities are tailored to a common objective.
At the outset of the planning process, outline what you hope to achieve from your demand generation strategy and regularly review its performance against that goal so you can make necessary adjustments to boost success.
Personalize Content
Not all content will suit every prospect. The best demand generation strategies make full use of content personalization techniques to ensure content is always relevant to its audience, targeting the specific needs and interests of different audience segments with unique content journeys.
This personalization should be driven by data, which can be collected from sources like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms or website analytics software. Focus on insights that illuminate what kind of content topics and formats will resonate with each segment and use them to customize your approach in segmented campaigns.
Use Lead Scoring
Lead scoring, or evaluating a lead’s likelihood of becoming a customer, can help you prioritize your demand generation efforts. A lead scoring system can be based on various data points, including demographic information and engagement behavior, to create a full picture of the relative value of each lead generated.
This not only provides insights into where to focus demand and lead generation efforts, but it can also help sales departments become more efficient by providing clear information about what kind of lead is most likely to convert.
Integrate Sales and Marketing Platforms
Demand generation starts the process that eventually ends with the sales department converting a qualified lead into a customer. Connecting your sales and marketing platforms and teams ensures the entire process is seamlessly trackable.
Integrating your CRM with any marketing automation platforms you use is the foundation of this best practice. This will ensure that all of the data collected through your demand generation and lead generation campaigns is associated with customers, making it easier to score leads, deploy retargeting campaigns, create segmented audiences and more.
Establish Feedback Loops
The link between sales and marketing shouldn’t just be based on system integrations. Establishing strong lines of communication between both sales and marketing departments allows for the exchange of insights, helping both functions benefit from improved performance.
Feedback from sales on what key product benefits influenced a conversion can help determine the focus of demand generation marketing campaigns, for instance. Marketing insights about what pain points are most common in the target audience can also help sales steer their conversations in the right direction.
Continuously Test and Optimize
A flexible approach to demand generation marketing involving continual testing, adjustment, and optimization ensures your strategy can improve over time. Whether you’re A/B testing copy or using heatmap software to determine what parts of your website content are engaging, the insights you gain can boost performance.
Adopt an approach of deployment, analysis, adjustment, and redeployment to every demand generation strategy. This will help you stay flexible and drive better results over the long term.
Advanced Techniques in Demand Generation
The above strategies form the basis of any successful demand generation campaign, but using more advanced techniques like integrating AI and sophisticated analytics into your strategy can improve performance.
Leveraging AI and Automation in Demand Generation
Demand generation success is largely influenced by how effectively audience data insights and content personalization tactics are used. Both of these activities can be improved through the use of AI and automation, making it easier to plan and deploy successful demand generation strategies at scale.
AI-powered solutions, like the AI-powered Analytics and Content Engine by ON24, can take insights from various data sources to automate the process of audience segmentation and content personalization. This not only boosts the efficiency of key demand generation and lead nurturing processes, it can also lead to improved conversion rates.
Utilize Data Analytics to Refine Demand Generation Tactics
Collecting and tracking demand generation performance analytics can also help to improve campaign performance. A dedicated performance analytics platform can collect data from across channels including content hubs and webinars to provide clear insights into where your strategy is working best and where it’s falling short.
This can inform adjustments to your strategy, inspire new tactics, or illuminate the best content formats or topics for engagement campaigns. You can also use the insights from your analytics platform to assist in lead scoring, making it easier to prioritize your efforts.
Implement Your Demand Generation Strategy Today
Demand generation strategies built around a diverse mix of marketing techniques and content types, utilizing best practices, and taking full advantage of advanced analytics and personalization tools can drive real business results.
Whether you’re looking to grow your top-of-funnel audience, nurture prospects more effectively, or generate more conversions, demand generation software should play a critical role in your overall marketing strategy.
If you’re aiming to launch a new demand generation strategy or improve your existing approach, learn how the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform can help. It’s an all-in-one platform designed to help you boost content reach, supercharge engagement and maximize ROI.
