B2B Demand generation is often mistaken with lead generation though it is significantly different. Let's make it clearer here. Demand gen is a long-term activity to create awareness and needs about the product or service in the minds of prospects, whereas lead generation is mainly about getting contact details through various marketing activities. This makes lead generation a part of any best b2b lead generation strategy but not the whole of it. However, both processes are a crucial part of the buyer journey and equally important marketing effort.
Moreover, b2b demand generation is a marketing campaign that involves educating your potential customer and convincing them how your brand can help the problems they are facing. The activity bridges the gap between marketing and sales teams. The demand generation marketing process encompasses all the communication with the prospects right from brand awareness to the time they become successfully retained clients. In other words, the purpose of demand gen is not only to generate demand from new customers regularly but also nurture them so that they become a part of your sales cycle and further opt for your product or service.
And to do so, every company needs a strategy with a B2B demand generation activity. Without a proper step-by-step plan, it is difficult to judge the buyer persona and take them from point A to point B. If 2019 was not a satisfactory year for demand generation then let's gear up for the year 2020 to make the best. In this blog post, we have made a list of 7 B2B Demand Generation Strategies for 2020 which will surely add more qualified leads in your sales funnel.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
The audience is getting mature day by day in terms of what they actually need and from whom. They prefer a trusted solution to their problems. This is where your brand comes in. First and foremost, you have to work on making your brand recognizable, strong, and promptly accessible. This will make your brand stand out from other competitors and you will get loyal customers. This can be done through different digital marketing mediums like email marketing, social media marketing, paid media, and more.
What does your business provide to people? Why should people come to you for a solution? How is it different from others? Asking many questions like this to yourself will help you in creating a brand with a strong message. Having a strong brand presence helps in saving time to convince customers and also standing out differently from your competitors. This majorly saves the effort of spending time and money on multiple marketing programs. This makes your B2B demand generation program fall into place a lot easier and reach the right prospective customer.
2. Create a Free Tool
If you know what is the pain point of your customers and if you are a technical company, then you can create a free tool that can be used to solve that particular problem. Using this marketing automation platform will make people visit your website which will ultimately bring traffic and increase the demand for your product thus increasing conversion rate.
A free tool, which is making tasks easier for your sales and marketing team or something which is helping make some decisions will always be liked by the audience and they will come to your website for further use. This demand generation process will bring you more inbound leads than expected.
3. Send Free Reports
Offering free reports to your customers is another great way to be in touch with them. If you have created a tool or software, then generating personalized reports is a great idea for demand gen. This inbound marketing activity will make people curious about how they are performing and which are the key points they can focus on to increase profit exponentially.
People who have a real interest in the business will head to download the report and these high-quality leads have strong chances of getting converted as clients. The revenue generated through such leads is comparatively higher than the leads generated through other B2B demand generation tactics.
4. Identify Various Buyers and Segmentation Strategy
As a B2B marketer, to plan a good demand generation strategy, you need to understand who is your target audience? How to interact with various buyers? Who are the ideal customers and who will become loyal customers for a longer time? Are you understanding everyone's needs and giving them what they want? Are you conducting regularly lead nurturing activities to keep them engaged? Finding solutions for these will also help you in building a strong lead generation strategy.
Finding answers to these questions will help you in dividing your contact database depending on buyer behaviors and you can connect with each group with a different approach.
5. Arrange Industry Webinars
If you are a marketer then arranging webinars is one of the ways to create buzz and demand marketing for your product or service. Of course, arranging webinars with industry experts is not that easy but again not too difficult to not even try. As a B2B company you have to connect to subject experts and maintain a strong rapport with them, so you can go in further requesting to give webinars. While giving webinars, it is advisable to give tips, strategies, and suggestions which will be helpful to your target audience.
What is the best time to organize a webinar? What tools are used for recording? When should webinar promotion emails be sent? These are the questions that webinar organizers frequently need to answer. Deck 7 studied and collected data from over 5,619 webinar campaigns run for various industries and came up with a detailed webinar benchmarks report. It answers your most common and critical questions about webinars and gives tips for organizing and promoting webinars, and strategies for getting the desired number of attendees for your webinar.
6. Update Website with Amazing Blogs
Writing and publishing blogs continuously on your website is good for both, readers as well as your marketing automation plans. If how to bring traffic to your website is the question, then you have to find amazing demand generation content related to your company product and give some value to your readers. If you are finding it difficult to get an idea of what problems or challenges are faced by your customers, then you can easily reach out to your sales team who can give you potential questions to write blogs with answers to those questions that perfectly fit the points that you are targetting in your marketing strategy. This content marketing strategy is an excellent way to create and syndicate quality content.
7. Use Social Media for B2B Demand Generation
Increasing use of the internet has resulted in the importance of social media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are no longer just for entertainment. They are giving a great inbound marketing opportunity for companies to maintain a good relationship with customers. You can interact with your social media followers with what you offer and it will automatically generate demand for your offering.
With proper social media strategy planning, you can always find what type of content can work for you. The next step you do after this is engaging with your customers by responding to their messages. This will also help you segregate people who are just watching your ads or posts and people who are actually more interested.
And finally, with the best use of this inbound marketing activity, you can constantly remind your users what offer and how best you can offer a service to resolve their problems.
Takeaways
Demand generation is a never-ending process for businesses. Depending on the results you are getting for your demand generation campaign, necessary actions need to be taken and monitored.
Some of the basic or generalized things you can include in any B2B demand generation strategy for your business are:
1) Educate people on the product need
2) Raise brand awareness
3) Show the benefits of choosing your brand
Keeping these points in mind, you can proceed to make a strategic B2B demand generation plan to bring more customers to your door in 2020.