Demand Generation Strategy 101
One of the major challenges for businesses these days is getting people to want your services or products.
Your business revolves around your customers. To make them happy, product owners, communication experts, growth hackers, content strategies, and sales teams all aim to improve the relationship between the customer and the brand.
Demand generation has a vital role for marketing and sales professionals in positioning a business’s brand and product offerings with consumer needs.
What Is Demand Generation Strategy?
Demand generation is the umbrella term for marketing efforts that produce long-term engagement with the business or brand (like inbound marketing, demand capture, or lead generation).
It involves a series of touchpoints to create awareness of consumer concerns, position your business as a reputable advisor, produce leads, sell your product or service, and support genuine brand loyalty if done properly.
What Are the Best Demand Generation Strategies?
When creating a successful demand generation plan, collaboration among sales and marketing departments is critical, especially when both groups are engaged in attracting and recruiting customers.
These strategies can help you capture the attention of your target audience and boost engagement:
- Collaborate with an influencer
Collaborating with online influencers allows you to tap into their ready-made audiences, producing demand without obliging you to spend a big budget on creating your audience.
Go for influencers in your niche, and those in various niches which may encounter the same problems as your target audience.
- Use targeted PPC
Online ads are the most efficient way to fuel early-stage engagement. Target PPC ads to your ideal personas.
You can figure out the types of businesses and people that have concerns you can solve and the messaging they respond to by searching for patterns in your intent data. That helps inform your targeting and advert wording.
You can create testimonial ads to leverage social proof and highlight the success of your solutions.
- Create a free trial for your product or services
A trial or free tool of our product helps showcase your expertise to your potential customers. This allows them to get a feel for your services or products.
Also, a free supporting tool shows potential buyers the caliber of solutions you can make. A free trial lets you demonstrate how you can fix their existing concerns.
- Podcasting
Podcasting provides a good opportunity to show your expertise by discussing solutions and explaining case studies while teaching your audience about industry-related concerns. However, being featured as a guest on established podcasts with existing audiences that reflect your target personas is more effective.
- Host live online events and webinars
Use webinars to provide guidance on specific industry-related subjects to highlight your brand’s expertise and authority. You can also invite popular thought leaders to join you to increase your credibility.
You can utilize those live events and webinars as a sales platform to present your solutions and drive demand for your products.
When done properly, demand generation will deliver sales with qualified leads and place marketing as a revenue generator rather than a cost center.
Demand generation is also in a perpetual stage of change. However, if you can quickly adapt and make data-driven decisions, that can become your biggest advantage!