DEMAND GENERATION STRATEGIES
What is a demand generation strategy?
Demand generation is a marketing workflow that bridges the gap between a company’s sales and revenue operations. It may include multiple touchpoints, from blogging to email list creation, to social media promotion — all inbound marketing tactics are a subset of a company’s overall demand generation strategy. However, as a whole, demand generation is much more than inbound strategy and is not synonymous with lead generation. Generally speaking, demand generation is strongly connected with the brand. Such as
• A sponsored white paper
• A weekly newspaper
• A meet up event
• A company-sponsored a webinar
What it is not is a quick fix in the form of a cold email blast or banner ads, where you speculate for a lead.
The Brand Touch Points
Choosing the correct touchpoints that align with your target audience ensures you are prospecting, engaging, and persuading your potential customer effectively. Ultimately pushing customers through the conversion funnel towards a purchase decision. Crafting a demand generation strategy and campaigns for your marketing team can be a tall order. Your marketing mix should consider —industry, the skills of your team, your marketing budget, and your target customer
Top-of-Funnel Demand Generation Tactics
Awareness stage
Insight Based Blog Articles
Inspiring articles are the best fit for newest prospects. This involves getting to know more about the brand, product or service. At this stage, you might want to educate the audience about the need for the service—Focusing on the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of the service.
Online Sweepstake/Quiz
This is a great choice for the new people, who are just speculating if they have got that specific pain point. Therefore, host an online sweepstakes contest where users could submit profile or contact information to enter. You can also create a theme based quiz.
Informative EBooks
Through an eBook, you might delve deep into more clarity over the various connected concepts and keywords. eBook offer value for customers who are very busy to stay and read all the information over the web. You can include formats like “10 Reasons Why” or “5 Tips When” that can prompt prospects to opt in via email address.
Educational, persona-based Ad campaigns
Use gated, educational/informational eBook in your ad campaigns to target relevant personas.
A Joint Webinar with a Thought Leader
A thought leader in your industry can bring a huge impact to your webinar registrations and elevate your brand. Often, people are influenced by peer and veterans in making serious decisions.
Middle-of-Funnel Demand Generation Tactics
Engagement stage
Strategy focused articles
After you manage to get the customer to the next stage of the funnel, it’s time to give relevant information to those who are speculating a purchase decision.In the process, you should be omnipotent to engagement over various channels. During the stage, they ask questions around strategy, usefulness, implementation, and feasibility — so you want to answer all of their questions and put their concerns to rest on a positive note.
Webinar hosting with product-related Themes
People tend to see and believe more. More so, the advantage of providing product features over a live webinar is an opportunity for interactive communication. With the questionnaires, it is equally possible you might be able to explore more about the pain-points of your audience.You might want to be more expressive with the usefulness, implementation, and feasibility of your product.
Joint ventures
Joint ventures are a yet another great strategy which involves partnering with other companies who target the same (or similar) personas as you do and host a field marketing event (or series of events).With this strategy, the viewership is distributed among both the parties, thereby increasing the chances for more sales.
Retargeting campaigns
Retargeting is a great demand generation tactic that can re-engage a user who has taken a previous interaction (ad click, or download, or website visit). This basically reminds of completing or giving a second thought to the purchase decisions.
More Insightful E-books
Again, with these eBooks, you want to give detailed insights about the technical part. For instance, You have created this incredible tool. In such, in this funnel stage, you will give the various configurations and other accessorial information to help them use it effectively
Persona-based Ad campaigns
The priority of every marketing mix you try in this stage totally depends on enabling the audience for the better execution part of your product or service while lessening their pain points. For that, you can use the content and themes you’ve developed with articles, webinars, and eBooks (earlier ), set up persona-based ad campaigns on paid media platforms to target (or retarget) mid-funnel prospects.
Bottom-of-Funnel Demand Generation Tactics
Conversion or purchase stage
The “How to” articles
Your audience at this stage, are very close to conversion. Therefore, you want to feed them with very deep-funnel articles that are specific to your product or service. Additionally, these might even be classified as sales-enablement content and turned into short instructional documents or one-pagers that sales can send to decision-makers through email marketing.
Customer case studies
The fundamental aim of any business should be establishing authority and credibility. And, a great way is to back it up with social proof. One of the ways to get feedback is to update customer case studies by sending a list of questions and using those answers into a short but impactful customer case study.