Demand generation marketing may seem like any other B2B marketing buzzword, however, it is a method which can futureproof your brand like no other. Demand generation poises your brand for long-term growth with outreach that continuously reminds audiences of your unique offerings.
In this guide, you will learn what is demand generation marketing and how to implement your own campaigns with our six-month playbook. Crafted by our demand generation experts, our playbook includes actionable advice to generate interest among prospects during two fiscal quarters.
What is demand generation marketing?
The goal of demand generation marketing is to build long-term awareness, and as a result, demand for your company’s products or services.
This is achieved by provoking discussions in an audience about their problems, promoting your brand as the solution to these problems, and priming purchases in your favor when they are ready to buy.
Becoming a household name is harder in B2B, making brand building even more important to create awareness and interest. However, a few brands probably come to mind when you think of Client Relationship Management (CRM), which proves this feat is not impossible.
Demand Generation Marketing
VS Lead Generation Marketing
Often used interchangeably, demand and lead generation marketing are methods that complement each other, but have different end-goals:
Demand Generation Marketing:
Creates long-term growth by promoting brand awareness.
Lead Generation Marketing:
Incentivizes prospects to fill in forms in exchange for content or tools, and thus, builds lead lists.
Lead generation is centered on capturing contact information of prospects. While demand generation marketing often results in this, with many campaigns having points of entry for prospects to convert into leads, the success of demand generation is not determined by capturing leads.
Many campaigns (such as promoting brand awareness by sponsoring an event), do not have a specific lead generation goal.
Learn all the differences in Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation, with a list of strategies for both methods
powerful demand generation methods
Successful B2B demand generation campaigns often involve multiple marketing tactics and channels in order to pique the interest of a target audience.
BELOW ARE FIVE COMMON METHODS TO GENERATE DEMAND AT SCALE:
1. Content syndication and co-marketing
Content syndication is a method to distribute brand content through publishing networks. There are dozens of B2B publishers available, each with different fees, guidelines for content, and crucially, access to specific audiences.
This is a fairly popular and low-barrier content distribution method. Therefore, it is ideal for brands that are starting out and wish to generate demand at a low cost.
With co-marketing, your brand partners with another to launch a marketing campaign, blog post, tool, or event. The idea is to reduce spending and share the generated leads between all parties.
That being said, for co-marketing to work, it is important that you partner with a brand that not only shares your values, but also a similar audience. Obviously, the brand must also not be a direct competitor.
With 67% of event professionals expecting in-person events to return to pre-pandemic levels within one or two years (according to American Express), events are poised to return to their former glory as a demand creation method for B2B companies.
In the case of an in-person event, this can include making a speech, joining round tables, or even distributing guides to attendees. Always try to bridge the offline-online gap by providing merchandise or flyers with scannable QR codes, as well as incentives in exchange for contact information (such as gift cards or free product demos).
The return of in-person events does not mean, however, that virtual events have not come to stay. According to Statista, 40% of events in 2022 will be virtual, which means a sizable chunk of the B2B events niche will remain online-only.
There are also hybrid events, which allow attendees to either commute or watch sessions from the comfort of their home.
Be sure to conduct research on the preferences of your audience and leads to assess which event type will be most effective, as well as take into account the geographic location of most of your leads. Remote and global brands have focused on digital events as they are the easiest for reaching target leads located in different areas at a lower cost.
Events can be a huge undertaking, which is why they can be organized with another brand (co-marketing), or you can sponsor an event to participate as a spokesperson if its audience is aligned with your ICP.
Consider also holding on-demand events for remote audiences. This allows attendees to consume your content at their own pace and can also result in reaching a greater amount of potential leads. While this technique sacrifices live interaction, any engagement you manage to encourage can be the perfect opportunity for creating related content to further nurture new prospects.
3. Community building
Building a community that fosters organic discussion is a key method to generate demand and keep your brand and unique offerings top-of-mind. Brands such as Salesforce and Oracle have reputable and well-established forums, where clients ask questions and get answers from other members, as well as staff.
Communities can either be hosted on your own website, or you can use social media channels like Reddit, LinkedIn or Facebook to create communities for clients and leads. While there are branded communities, it is possible to build a brand around a topic or join a well-established community as a member to plug your brand when appropriate.
Community building is high-effort (especially at launch) and a long-term task that has potential to generate huge ROI when it becomes established with enough members to organically promote brand awareness. A community has achieved its goal when:
Members answer questions for other members
Members post content and the brand is not the only “active voice”
Leads can be attributed to the community
Brand evangelists are active in the community and assist new clients with FAQs
Encourage community building by demonstrating how feedback is taken on to improve your client experience and incentivizing brand champions who can help to moderate your forum.
4. Thought leadership and content marketing
Thought leadership has the power to prompt discourse and shape opinions in an audience. When done correctly, thought leadership generates demand as followers associate the value of thought leaders with their brand and products.
Therefore, establishing unique voices in your brand and allowing C-Suite members to promote the brand in their own words is a key demand creation tactic in B2B spaces.
Unlike B2C, where consumption is quicker and the decision making process is simpler; in B2B, buying committees may take months to consider purchases—making regular thought leadership essential for influencing their decision making in your favor.
As for content marketing, it is a promotional method that includes all media published by a company, and in the case of demand generation, the main focus is to promote long-term interest with the content being published. While gating is an option for boosting lead generation, this is not necessarily its primary focus.
This is why think pieces, reports, analyses, and guides shine in B2B demand generation marketing. Successful content marketing informs your audience and brings them value, positioning your brand as a helpful and reputable source in your niche.
However, it is important to note that approaching this strategy as “content = lead generation” may often result in content not living up to its full potential in demand creation.
While lead generation may be attributed to ungated content marketing, this should not be its primary benchmark for success. Make sure content for demand has brand awareness as a key long-term goal from the start to not disappoint stakeholders later on.
Advertising is where demand generation marketing started, prior to the internet, and is perhaps one of the most reliable ways to generate demand for your business—especially if you expect quicker results and to drive awareness at scale.
Contrary to organic demand generation outreach, advertising requires paying for media space. However, one key benefit is the evolution of advertising tech, allowing you to pinpoint revenue to engagement easily to optimize an ongoing campaign quickly.
THERE ARE SEVERAL METHODS OF ADVERTISING AVAILABLE FOR B2B:
Pay-per-click (PPC)
This form of advertising is directly tied to performance marketing, in which you spend per engagement (or per click in this case). This makes PPC one of the easiest advertising methods for measuring ROI.
These ads use machine learning and algorithms to select the best placements for your ads across a proprietary publisher network.
The process has two main elements, the supply-side platform (SSP) and the demand-side platform (DSP):
SSP: Responsible for displaying the ad and also collecting data on users to select the best ad according to their preferences.
DSP: Selects ad space from the SSP and bids automatically according to the advertiser’s criteria and budget.
Targeted display ads have the benefit of working automatically and at scale, requiring less hands-on intervention compared to other advertising methods.
Commonly attributed to B2C, influencer marketing is gaining popularity in the B2B space, as the industry shifts toward a human-to-human (H2H) approach and leverages psychographics.
For B2B influencer marketing, you can either hire a third party to promote your products, or tap into talent at your business that already publishes “influencer-worthy content”.
Before determining influencers for your brand, you should first define clear criteria to evaluate their potential. This combined with background checks and setting processes helps to reduce the risk of backlash.
Influencer screening checklist
Social media presence: The content they publish, engagement rates, topics covered, hashtags used.
Job history: Where they worked, which industries, comments from peers.
Red flags: Does the influencer’s behavior align with brand values? Any signs of troublesome behavior in the past?
Publications: Check the media that the influencer has published online and offline.
These four items can help gauge how appropriate an external or even internal influencer is for your brand, and if you should move forward with your strategy.
Influencer marketing supports B2B demand generation by promoting brand values and products through a trustworthy voice. It shares a similarity with B2C, since influencers in that industry also encourage purchases from their followers primarily based on trust.
The difference with B2B is that influencer marketing will likely act as a component of the buyer’s journey with less of an impact on the final decision making process rather than the sole reason for a purchase.
However, to fully leverage the power of B2B influencers, be sure to orchestrate strategies to capture and encourage their audience to enter your brand ecosystem, such as promoting a newsletter or a tool.
Learn more about planning a B2B influencer strategy in our Outlook 2022 report
B2B demand generation playbook: Build a campaign in 6 months to promote long-term growth
This six-month playbook is based on a fictitious campaign, as an example to help illustrate the points and make each step easier to follow.
The playbook also provides insight into the selection of marketing channels and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine your success and inspire you when building your own campaign.
1. Define your end-goal and KPIs
Setting clear goals is essential for securing buy-in from stakeholders and evaluating campaign success, particularly since B2B demand generation is a long-term process. Investing time at this stage will better enable you to build campaigns aligned with company goals and growth.
THE EXAMPLE FOR THIS SIX-MONTH PLAYBOOK IS:
Thought Leadership RevOps Series for Small Businesses
End-goal: Generate awareness among small business owners of the
brand and its RevOps solution.
KPIs:
Cost per acquisition (CPA): This KPI measures the cost of conversion, which can be attributed to a sign-up, purchase, click, or download.
In this example, since the goal is to generate awareness, acquisition will be defined as clicks to the product landing page. The cost will be the total ad spend to promote the thought leadership content across social media and content syndication networks.
Conversion rate for the top of the B2B marketing funnel: Since this campaign is essentially thought leadership, the goal is to measure how many top of funnel leads (TOFU) are generated.
Although not all TOFU leads can be attributed to the campaign, tracking URLs in thought leadership content can help evaluate the percentage tied to this new demand generation strategy.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): This evaluates the number of leads that meet the brand’s “marketing qualified” criteria. In this example, the goal will be to check if the demand generation campaign is converting leads into MQLs through the planned promotion.
Content engagement metrics: To evaluate the performance of content, several statistics can be combined for an overview of audience engagement. Since this is a thought leadership campaign, the following metrics will be tracked:
Click through rate (CTR): Clicks on links to the landing page of the RevOps product.
Time on page: How much time visitors spend reading the brand’s thought leadership content.
Bounce rate: The amount of visitors leaving the content early. A high bounce rate means the content is not capturing the interest of the target audience.
Number of pages visited: If visitors access other pages after reading the thought leadership content. This will indicate whether content has inspired them to learn more about the brand.
Social media engagement: Likes, comments, and shares from promoting the content on proprietary social media channels. If syndicated or co-marketed, this data can also be supplied from partners.
2. Plan a campaign
When planning a demand generation campaign, it is possible to focus on two main components: content and marketing channels (including distribution).
This works particularly well for the example in this playbook, but in the case of an event or community-building campaign, you would need to consider other elements (such as logistics, outreach to attendees, partnership with other brands, etc.).
CONSIDERING THIS FRAMEWORK, THE REVOPS THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN WOULD BE BROKEN DOWN AS SO:
Content
In this example, the content in question is thought leadership on RevOps for small businesses. However, for the campaign to work, content must be granular in specificity and, therefore, targeting.
Start with a list of topics. Here are some for the RevOps campaign, to be penned by the CEO:
How RevOps is the only way forward for small businesses
5 RevOps lessons to apply now at your small business
You are measuring results incorrectly— let me explain why
Ideally, you would build a list of topics to cover the whole campaign, which in this case would be six months. To ensure a consistent publishing cadence with set deadlines, assign members of your own team to create this content or outsource to fulfill this need.
Multiple formats should be considered as well. For this example, the campaign could include videos with the CEO, participation in a podcast, and an on-demand webinar. Do not forget to also plan infographics, slides, charts, ebooks, etc.— cover as many fronts as possible that suit your audience’s interest to avoid spending time creating content when the campaign is already running.
Once you have planned the content, it is time to determine the best method for promotion to ensure it reaches your target audience.
Accuracy in choosing the correct channels for distributing your content is essential for the success of your demand generation campaign —without the right channels, you will be unable to achieve the reach and visibility you require among your audience members.
For the RevOps example, the channels would be:
Social media: For the RevOps campaign, content would be promoted on the brand’s LinkedIn and Twitter as well as the CEO’s personal profile.
YouTube: Videos and clips from the RevOps webinar would be published on the brand’s YouTube channel.
Audio streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.): The CEO would participate in a podcast with a strong base of small business owner listeners, which would be available on the most popular audio streaming platforms.
As for distribution, the platforms would be:
Content Syndication with ITCurated: To reach decision makers at scale, the CEO’s thought leadership would be published as articles in the industry verticals of most interest to our small business audience.
Guest posts in small business blogs: The marketing team will reach out to reputable small business blogs to pitch the CEO’s content and publish it as a guest post backlinking to product pages.
Display ads: Select articles will be compiled and edited into an eBook, which will be promoted with targeted display ads to entice PDF downloads.
Launch your campaign with a roadmap for at least one quarter (three months), as assessing performance at the halfway point will empower the changes you make in the next step.
Be mindful to continuously track KPIs and make sure no activity is left undetected to gauge the initial reception of your campaign. Aid your analysis by collecting feedback from incentivized surveys or interviews. Social listening tools can also be invaluable for fielding insights from your audience on social channels.
This combined feedback will guide your adjustments for the next step.
Brainstorming the changes to make to your campaign can be helpful, however, you should wait for the quarterly results before acting upon them.
4. Adjust campaign based on results
Halfway through the campaign, check your KPIs and make a plan to address underperforming components. In this step, the more laser-focused the adjustment, the better. Invest time to pinpoint the cause of why you are not yielding the results you expected or which elements deserve extra resources and budget.
In the context of the example campaign of this playbook, a potential performance issue could be low CTR and TOFU conversions, while other KPIs are performing surprisingly well.
This could indicate that your CTAs need some work. The solution would be to adjust and test the design and positioning of the CTAs for all content pieces, as well as landing pages. This also sets the stage for the next step.
BELOW ARE SOME IDEAS TO IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR
DEMAND GENERATION CAMPAIGN:
A/B test: Run A/B tests of ads, syndicated content, and email marketing to assess which channel has the highest performance. Make each version have a clear difference from one another, such as a business vs. casual brand voice.
Improve personalization: Your content may require further personalization to strike a chord. In the case of the thought leadership example, this could be achieved by personalizing articles for each publisher (for content syndication and guest posts), as well as copy for emails and LinkedIn messages.
Improve marketing segmentation: If performance is down across the board, this may be indicative of a need to fine-tune your audience to better reach your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). By carefully selecting your firmographic, demographic, and behavioral criteria, you can better assess who is your ideal client and refocus your outreach to engage them.
5. Evaluate campaign performance again
After implementing the changes in the previous step, you should see results by the end of the next quarter. If not, it may be time to reevaluate the demand generation campaign altogether.
Reevaluating can mean three things:
1. Developing new adjustments to be made and assessed after another quarter.
2. Abandoning the campaign and recycling high-performing assets for a new, revisited demand generation strategy.
3. Abandoning the entire campaign and starting from scratch with a new perspective, data, and feedback from your audience.
The severity of the underperforming elements, as well as the time needed to implement efficient changes, should determine the option you choose.
Option three should only be reserved for critical situations. For example, this may be in the case that all KPIs are not being met and content can not be repurposed because the topics are not adequate for your audience, or you discovered your ICP is in an entirely new audience altogether.
Do your best to salvage demand generation campaigns when possible, check metrics and make changes as you gain feedback from your audience on their desires and pain points (as well as the best ways to address them).
6. Build follow-up demand generation campaigns
As your demand generation strategy comes to a close after six months, you should have plenty of insights on your audience, as well as generated awareness for your brand and solutions.
At this moment, plan a follow-up demand generation campaign to further build rapport with your audience, generate leads, and prepare them for a sales conversation when the time is right.
The idea of the follow-up campaign is to shape the topics and pain points already discussed during the first six months to meet the interest of your leads and encourage their progress from the top of the funnel toward the middle or even bottom stage of the sales funnel.
In the case of developing the thought leadership campaign presented in this article, this could mean nurturing prospects with more data and actionable advice on RevOps solutions.
BELOW ARE SOME IDEAS OF FOLLOW-UP DEMAND GENERATION CAMPAIGNS
TO IMPLEMENT IN THIS LAST STEP:
Start an email cadence:Build a lead nurturing cadence with six to twelve touchpoints to continue the conversation and present in-depth details on the topic. This is the time to promote eBooks, on-demand webinars, case studies, as well as other content that serves to further educate leads on your brand and its unique solutions.
Create an Account Based Marketing (ABM) list and strategy: Filter prospects and leads from your demand generation campaign to see if any are aligned with your ICP and are appropriate for an ABM strategy.
Launch an event: Organize an event and invite the prospects and leads from the demand generation campaign. Center the event around an exclusive announcement or product demo that educates leads and still makes them feel valued at this stage. If invites are sent out “personally” by the CEO, then this strategy becomes even more effective as it shows credibility and approachability.
Plan a follow-up social media content calendar: Revisit the topics of the past six months and add in comments and unique insights from the brand’s leadership to add value to your content. The idea is to empower your audience to further their knowledge on a topic of their interest, rather than consume repetitive content. Plan a calendar, add in previous topics with new insights, and make sure to include assets that prime leads to buy—this can be commentary by the CEO on a case study, for example.
Launch a deep media nurture campaign: Deep media nurture is an omnichannel method to engage leads at precise moments with messaging toward a sale. It employs a mix of LinkedIn inMails, phone outreach, and exclusive partnership programs to engage leads in personalized, memorable ways. Learn more about the INFUSE Deep Media Nurturing solution.
Conclusion
Demand generation is a long-term strategy to promote lasting awareness and interest in a brand and its solutions among target audiences. While lead generation is possible, this is not the key indicator of the success of a demand generation marketing campaign.
Demand generation is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Reach the finish line by keeping a steady, reliable pace with your marketing strategy, outreach, and content.
Follow the six month process to generate demand as explored in our expert playbook to set a foundation for growth in your business. Measure engagement to assess campaigns and adapt for the better with direct feedback to overcome challenges as they occur.
TOGETHER, LET’S BUILD A CAMPAIGN THAT EXCEEDS YOUR MARKETING GOALS
Our INFUSE Demand Strategists are available on your schedule to plan a unique strategy informed by your challenges. Build a campaign that generates demand performance, creates a steady pipeline of incoming qualified leads, and makes your ROI scalable and predictable.
Achieve growth with true demand for your brand by talking with our seasoned experts in planning, executing, and tracking campaigns for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
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