Demand generation is a marketing strategy that is data-driven, and helps a company create awareness about its offerings through the use of technology.
An efficient demand generation strategy covers all the important aspects of a buyer’s journey – right from a new visitor to a satisfied customer. A large part of the demand generation strategy involves using data to make decisions related to your marketing & sales teams, budgets & ROI, and factors that would drive organization growth.
Demand generation, as a whole, can be broken down into four main parts:
- Brand Awareness
- Inbound Marketing
- Sales Enablement
- Customer Retention
Let’s discuss the four parts in detail and see their role in a company’s growth cycle:
- Brand Awareness:
The first step of demand generation is ensuring people know who you are. Developing brand awareness on a ground level will help your contacts and customers remember and recognize your brand.
Brand awareness can be done in multiple ways. Some of the most efficient ways are:
a) Building strong brand identity:
Defining your business’s core values & purpose, and presenting them to your customers will help them differentiate you from your competitors. So make sure you develop a strong brand that your prospects can relate to.
b) Identification of buyer personas:
Timely recall of your brand will take place only if you have a clear understanding of the type of people you are reaching out to. Make sure you do a thorough buyer persona research so that your activities help in reaching out to the right target audience.
c) Establishment of thought leadership:
Gaining thought leadership for your brand will help you stand out from other players in the market and you will gain some level of authority for your brand.
d) Maintaining a strong social media presence:
A strong social media presence is fundamental to brand recall, and lets you showcase your culture, values, and ideals in a genuine and relatable way.
e) Having a good GTM strategy:
A good go-to-market strategy will help you understand your potential customer’s reactions. This will help you align your brand better and position it correctly.
2) Inbound Marketing
Good inbound marketing help in converting potential leads and nurturing them into customers and also amplify your demand generation. Here are few essential inbound marketing elements:
a) Blogging and SEO:
- Blogging about topics your audiences care about and optimizing that content for search.
- Using blogs to educate your readers about your product/service and guide them down your funnel.
b) Paid advertising:
- Running run paid campaigns and targeting keywords that your prospects will be searching for.
c) Downloadable content:
- Curating white papers, guides, e-books, videos, or any other high-value content that will educate your customers during the buying process, thus increasing their trust.
- Access to email IDs for future use.
d) Lead generation:
- Qualified leads who have voluntarily provided their information will lead to a strong pipeline of warm leads and keep the sales cycles moving.
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3) Sales Enablement:
Efficient alignment of your sales and marketing teams and a comprehensive demand generation strategy will help you close more business. Here are some methods you can use for sales enablement:
a) Testimonials:
A positive word from your buyers’ peers comes across as a trust mark, assuring your expertise in your skills and offering.
b) Case studies:
Case studies provide tangible results, thus validating your work and the success you have achieved for your client.
c) Fact sheets and FAQs:
Fact sheets and FAQs are very effective documents for your sales guys so that they don’t stumble when it matters most.
4) Customer Retention:
Retaining acquired customers is as important as getting new ones. Providing excellent customer service, is the obvious way of retaining them, but few other practices are as follows:
a) Client Marketing Initiatives:
Informing your clients about your new products or services and providing them at discounted prices to your existing customers.
b) Maintaining a ticketing system:
Having a software for logging in support requests and attending to them regularly, showing your customers that they are heard.
c) Feedback & Renewals:
Interpreting your customers’ buying journey and using the insights to inform them about their renewal dates.
Consistent optimization fueled by cross-channel analysis is a quintessential pillar of any efficient demand generation strategy. This is a space where you can experiment and optimize while simultaneously drive efficiency and revenue. Thus having a good demand generation program in place is a very crucial step toward optimizing your sales and marketing funnel and increasing your lead generation efforts.