The Power of Demand Generation: Attract, Nurture, Convert
In today's competitive business landscape, simply having a great product or service isn't enough. You need a strategic approach to generate awareness, interest, and ultimately, sales. This is where demand generation comes in.
Demand generation encompasses all the marketing and sales activities designed to cultivate a market for your offerings. It's about building relationships with potential customers, educating them about your brand's value proposition, and guiding them through the buyer's journey.
The Different Stages of Demand Generation
First, let’s look at some of the main stages involved in demand generation.
- Brand Awareness is where you develop a brand identity. It’s all about thought leadership, getting to know your customers’ problems and positioning yourself as the one to solve them. This is where you’ll develop your voice and figure out which channels and approaches work best.
- Inbound Marketing. Next, it’s time to start talking to your leads and building a relationship. Inbound marketing uses content like blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, lead capture forms, and email nurture sequences to land on your leads’ radars and open up a conversation.
- Sales Enablement. This is where marketing helps sales, providing them with all the resources, data, and content they need to do the best job possible. That includes case studies, testimonials, feedback scores, and all the knowledge they’ve learned about customers that could be helpful. It works both ways, too, with sales staff relaying their own insights back to marketing.
Benefits of Demand Generation
A well-executed demand generation strategy offers a multitude of benefits for your business:
- Increased Brand Awareness: By consistently creating valuable content and engaging with your target audience, you can significantly boost brand recognition and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
- Improved Lead Quality: Targeted content attracts qualified leads who are genuinely interested in your products or services. This translates into higher conversion rates and a better return on your marketing investment (ROI).
- Shorter Sales Cycles: By nurturing leads with informative content and providing sales teams with the necessary resources, you can streamline the sales process and shorten the time it takes to close deals.
- Higher Customer Lifetime Value: By fostering strong relationships with your customers throughout the buyer's journey, you can encourage repeat purchases and build customer loyalty, leading to increased customer lifetime value.
Challenges of Demand Generation
Although demand generation is incredibly rewarding, it comes with some challenges that your teams will need to prepare for. Here are some examples:
- Targeting: You have to target your marketing and content strategy to lots of different specific people. That means carrying out research, producing lots of different content, and really getting to know your customers.
- Lead Quality: Convert the RIGHT leads — research shows that the best companies actually pass fewer leads onto sales (12% vs 17%). However, more of those leads convert (40% vs 34%) which equates to more overall revenue. In other words, a smaller number of high-quality leads is better than a lot of lower-quality leads.
- Content Strategy: Tailor your content to each stage of the buyer's journey for optimal impact. Knowing when to employ blog posts (and how) and when to use email can make a big difference to your overall conversion rates and revenue.
How to Implement Demand Generation
How does the process of demand generation work? The steps you need to take roughly map onto the stages above. Here’s how it works.
1. Know Your Customers
This is the first step and is crucial for success in demand generation. Carry out as much research as possible to get to know your target customers inside out.
Conduct surveys, talk to people, spend time on social media and in forums, ask for insights from your sales and marketing teams, and look at existing data. It can help to create some buyer personas — profiles that match your ideal customer and break down their goals, challenges, pain points, and anxieties along with demographic information.
Your main aim here should be to learn what problems your ideal customers are struggling with, so you can begin to solve them.
2. Craft Compelling Content
Once you have established who your target audience is and what they need help with, it’s time to reach them where they are and start building a relationship.
Give them all the information they need, solve their problems, and establish your brand as a reliable and trustworthy entity. Provide value and give actionable advice. Content can come in all shapes and sizes, such as:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Downloadable resources like whitepapers and ebooks
- Webinars
- Videos
- Podcasts
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a powerful asset here. It’s the process of ensuring your content ranks high in search engines so that it can be discovered by your prospects. SEO involves activities like keyword research and placement, pillar pages, link building, and so on.
The most important element of SEO, however, is simply creating valuable and in-depth content that solves your reader’s problems. Provide genuine value in your content, don’t just stuff it with keywords.
3. Optimise Conversions
Content and SEO are just the beginning of the demand generation journey. Once your prospects are on board and trust your brand, it’s time to convert them into customers.
You can do this with landing pages, email sequences, targeted offers, lead magnets, calls-to-action, and much more. Your goal is to make it easy for them to buy. Show them products and services that genuinely match up with their needs, and don’t be afraid to sell.
4. Align with Sales Teams
Demand generation is ultimately all about revenue, so your marketing efforts need to be aligned closely with your sales teams. This stream of communication between marketing and sales helps both departments and creates a process that’s more cohesive and effective.
Work closely together, share information, and give sales teams the data they need to maximise chances of getting a sale.
5. Track and Analyse
It’s important to take a data-driven approach to demand generation. This allows you to make decisions based on real feedback instead of hunches and guesswork, moving forward with real direction instead of stumbling about in the dark.
A data-based approach also allows you to justify decisions to higher-ups, backing up your actions with hard data and getting buy-in for new plans more easily.
What to Track
- Opportunities generated — which can also be broken down according to channel
- Average deal size — the total money generated from sales, divided by the number of deals closed
- Total pipeline value — the combined value of all the opportunities in the pipeline at a given time
- Cost per lead — the dollar cost of each new lead
- Average sales cycle length — a measure of how long it takes to typically complete a sales cycle
- Customer lifetime value — how much is a given customer worth to you over their lifetime?
Demand generation is an incredibly important process, one that can make the difference between a successful sales and marketing process and one that falls flat.
Conclusion
Demand generation is a powerful tool for driving sustainable business growth. By implementing a well-defined strategy, you can attract qualified leads, nurture relationships, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.
To get the most out of your demand generation efforts, it pays to work with the experts. At Adonis, we have extensive experience helping our clients convert website visitors into loyal customers with a data-driven demand generation strategy.
To find out more about how we can help, schedule your free consultation today!
