HOW TO KICKSTART YOUR DEMAND GENERATION STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS: TOP OF FUNNEL GUIDE

Simply put, the end goal of demand generation is to drive revenue, which is achieved by fostering brand awareness to create a high-quality lead pipeline. A successful demand generation strategy effectively reduces costs by increasing CLTV with initiatives that retain clients, boost their loyalty, and encourage brand evangelism.

Demand generation also delivers the following benefits:

In short, demand generation is a long-term marketing strategy, whose full-funnel approach makes for a cohesive, seamless client experience (CX) as leads are attracted into and progress through your sales funnel. Effective demand generation tactics also include delivering remarkably engaging CX even after a deal is closed—increasing client loyalty with this continued support creates opportunities for renewals, as well as for brand evangelism and social proof resources to be built. The post-sale stage of demand generation marketing is often responsible to drive the most value from each client, be it via these strategies or with tactics such as cross-selling and upselling.

Demand generation is most effective when supporting full-funnel nurturing approaches to keep brands and solutions top of mind, while also qualifying leads. As more qualified leads result in a higher chance of successful sales conversations, ultimately leading to more conversions, demand generation is therefore intrinsically tied to increased revenue growth.

Before launching a demand generation strategy, however, it is essential to understand some key concepts that enable its success. These include branding, lead generation, and the sales funnel.

Branding strategies are a core component of demand generation, due to its end goal of driving long-term brand awareness among audiences. Although subjective, branding derives from a company’s mission and messaging. This includes brand voice, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, as well as the aesthetics and overall brand experience that prospects and clients receive (graphical elements and UX).

Essentially, branding is what differentiates your business from competitors, and plays a big part in defining how leads perceive, relate, and respond to your campaigns and business as a whole. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of your audience is crucial to inform your branding efforts and ensure your marketing initiatives are relevant, valuable, and engaging. Anchor your strategies and knowledge with a combination of marketing segmentation, buyer personas, Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs), psychographics, and social listening to glean powerful insights.

Another key facet of demand generation is its capability to support lead generation strategies. Although lead generation can stand alone as a marketing method, demand generation helps establish a stable pipeline of opportunities for sales due to its focus on establishing long-term brand awareness and relationships, especially when combined with lead nurturing.

Lead generation as a method on its own, however, can easily fall into the trap of overprioritizing quantity over quality, focusing on increasing the number of generated leads regardless of how qualified they are. This can dramatically decrease conversion rates, leading to poor marketing performance and wasted budgets. Therefore, it is important to focus on attracting qualified audiences, which will result in a higher probability of conversion, rather than prioritizing marketing spend on filling the top of the sales funnel above all else. This is a core tenet of demand generation, which boosts revenue in this way by reducing costs and increasing income.

The concept of the sales funnel has served as a model for marketers and salespeople to follow for over a century, by breaking down the buyer's journey into three distinctive steps, guiding the development of specific strategies at each stage to effectively engage prospects.

Most usually, the sales funnel is divided into three different stages: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU), and bottom of funnel (BOFU). The TOFU stage, also referred to as the "awareness stage", comprehends the moment in which prospective buyers become aware of your brand for the first time, up to the point of their first interaction. In the MOFU stage, prospects have settled into a small range of options, and are comparing these offers and considering their differences. Finally, in the BOFU stage, although leads have already identified your brand as a potential solution provider, they still need further nurturing to become entirely convinced and close a deal.

This classic outlook on the buyer’s journey is essential for demand generation efforts, in order to better understand the progress of your leads throughout their journeys and adjust your nurturing strategy accordingly. This ensures the progress of your leads throughout the funnel, and seamlessly transitions them to the sales team at the appropriate stage in their journeys.

The following infographic illustrates how the different aspects of demand generation marketing approach each funnel stage.

Here are four basic building blocks to get started with demand generation strategies:

Effective branding is the foundation for a successful demand generation campaign. As previously mentioned, ensuring that your content has consistent messaging is crucial to driving the outcomes you expect from your audience. Additionally, branding helps to foster client trust and establish brand authority, which in turn supports awareness. Below are some possible strategies to help drive brand awareness.

3 ways to drive branding for demand generation:

Qualified leads are those most suitable for your solutions, and therefore most likely to become clients. Several factors can be utilized to qualify leads, such as buyer intent data and psychographics.

In order to achieve ROI, it is paramount to focus on audiences whose members are aligned with your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) to inform targeting and avoid wasting marketing spend on blanket campaigns with poor outcomes.

4 ways to attract qualified leads:

Up next, it is imperative for your marketing efforts to obtain opt-in contact data from your audience, both to gather further information on these new leads and to start delivering nurturing sequences empowered by high-performing content. Typically, capture is done primarily via lead magnets, highly valuable assets that sit behind gates, i.e., forms requiring visitors to share certain information prior to accessing the content.

Although lead magnets are most commonly seen as part of lead generation methods, they are also a common strategy for demand generation efforts to attract audiences and drive conversions. Some ideas of gated content that can serve as lead magnets are:

The goal of lead nurturing is to establish relationships and build trust to drive sales, as well as encourage client loyalty and brand evangelism.

The key to lead nurturing is to identify frequent objections and knowledge gaps, and develop content or resources that address said needs and contribute to a positive experience. Providing leads with value and educational materials via lead nurturing can establish your brand as an authoritative source of information in your niche, which supports long-term brand awareness and word-of-mouth marketing.

Tracking the ROI of demand generation can be challenging, especially for omnichannel campaigns, as it requires granular analysis of a combination of metrics to correctly evaluate its outcomes and success. As a result, KPIs should be defined prior to launching campaigns, and continuously measured to enable adjustments as needed.

Some KPIs that can be utilized for demand generation are:

These indicators can be utilized to create a simple overview of your ROI. However, tracking lead progress until a sale or a dropout, as well as combining predictive analysis with already-owned data, can provide a clearer view of the actual ROI from demand generation.

While this guide focuses primarily on TOFU efforts, it is essential to consider the performance of demand generation campaigns as a full-funnel approach. Tracking metrics for leads as they progress through the middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU) stages is therefore also crucial.

Here are some metrics to keep track of during the later stages of the funnel:

To help you craft your own targeted strategies, below are two examples of demand generation campaigns built to drive engagement with specific audiences.

LingCorp, a freelance B2B translation company, decided to create a demand generation campaign designed to boost their influx of qualified TOFU leads (the end goal of this campaign).

The primary KPIs determining the success of this campaign were the number of leads generated, the average cost per lead, and lead quality.

For this step, LingCorp’s marketing team referred to their mission statement, vision, values, and unique value proposition (UVP) as the foundation for building the campaign—and ensuring consistency.

Considering the elements above, LingCorp’s marketers created style guides to properly communicate these values to their audience. The brand voice followed a familiar and clear tone, supported by warm colors and design elements.

Furthermore, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives were planned, focusing primarily on celebrating the diversity of different cultures, with posts on holidays and events across the globe. These not only supported a stronger brand image, but also contributed to solidifying LingCorp’s brand values to their audiences.

Market research by LingCorp revealed a common pain point of its audience: a lack of satisfaction with AI-backed translation services, due to their inability to process more informal texts, as well as to maintain a desired brand voice in messaging.

The research also revealed that most of these services cater exclusively to B2C. Lastly, firmographic and demographic analysis of LingCorp’s audience revealed that most buyers held manager positions in marketing and design teams.

This data was used to create a buyer persona, as well as inform a GTM strategy focused on highlighting the human-based aspect of LingCorp's translation services and other UVPs. This persona served as the target for this first demand generation campaign.

Informed by the research from the previous step, LingCorp’s marketers developed snackable, short-form content that offered value and positioned the brand as an authority by leveraging original research and data insights. This was combined with addressing the common challenge of crafting messaging for particular cultures as the main topic. Simultaneously, in-depth studies on marketing to global audiences were published as gated assets, serving as lead magnets. These exclusive research reports were linked to in CTAs throughout the short-form pieces. LingCorp’s marketers also ran paid advertising and social media campaigns to drive traffic to these pages from multiple channels, engaging the leads with educational content and earning their opt-in information via the lead capture forms.

As the campaign evolves, LingCorp’s marketers collected data and gleaned additional insights on their audience, thanks to the previous lead capture efforts.

Further segmentation of their audience revealed particular pain points of target accounts, which were then individually targeted with personalized content. For example, accounts with an interest in CSR are directed to content on related topics, whereas others who demonstrate concerns about the quality of translations received assets that addressed these objections.

Midway through the campaign, LingCorp’s marketing team assessed how the campaign performance was measuring against KPIs, revealing points of optimization. For example, high levels of engagement on social media and ads informed which channels to prioritize in the channel mix, supporting maximum ROI on campaign outreach strategies.

TaskForce, a B2B SaaS company with an extensive portfolio of project management software, had the end goal of increasing the average quality of its TOFU leads—and therefore, also supplying its sales teams with a greater number of opportunities.

The selected KPIs focused primarily on meeting lead qualification criteria, sourced from sales reps' feedback on the common traits of leads that successfully convert.

Input from their sales teams revealed distinct audience segments, each with its own pain points, which empowered TaskForce’s marketing team to craft personalized nurturing cadences.

The company identified that medium-sized businesses required more cost-effective solutions compared to enterprise-level accounts. This was also prevalent in the publishing and software verticals of its target audience. This information helped TaskForce determine the messaging and priority targets for its demand generation campaign.

TaskForce repurposed old content, by updating it with new data from in-house research, in order to optimize spend on its outreach. Short-form assets with this data were also published, focused mostly on increasing performance and staff care—both topics of interest to TaskForce’s audience, identified via social listening. By creating both snackable and full-length versions of its research, TaskForce was able to tailor its content to a variety of preferences.

TaskForce's marketers leveraged co-marketing and content syndication campaigns with valuable partners to increase its outreach at a low cost. This strategy successfully attracted qualified leads for TaskForce, engaging them with multiple content pieces across different channels, which supported nurturing and confirmed leads met the company’s specific qualification criteria.

TaskForce analyzed the data from its co-marketing and content syndication campaigns to glean new insights into buyer objections. This information was then leveraged to craft more accurate nurturing cadences, as well as case studies that addressed these objections and encouraged conversions.

Demand generation is capable of driving long-term brand awareness and client trust, establishing a steady flow of high-quality leads, and increasing revenue. However, its implementation requires the right approach.

These are 5 key takeaways for ensuring your demand generation campaign drives successful outcomes: