The rapidly evolving digital age has enabled consumers to find solutions for their pain points with a few clicks of a button. Your company aims to deliver quality products to help users identify and solve problems, drive customer satisfaction, and ultimately guarantee better revenue.
However, with the overwhelming amount of content on the Internet, your brand’s voice could be drowned out by the noise. Reaching prospective clients is more challenging in the B2B environment.
Creating a demand generation strategy B2B companies can cut down on spending significant resources for sales and marketing purposes by pushing their products as the best possible solutions.
Learn more about demand generation, factors to consider when creating a B2B demand generation funnel, and how to close deals faster to acquire more revenue by building demand for your brand offerings.
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation, also called demand gen, refers to the marketing strategy of creating strong brand awareness and demand for your company’s particular product or service to drive growth and revenue.
Demand gen aims to build interest in your company’s solution in your target audience. Your sales and marketing teams reach out to prospects, help them identify their needs, assert your authority in the market, and eventually convert them into high-value leads.
By communicating with your clients early in the customer journey, you can educate them about achieving their business goals faster with your services and gain customer loyalty. With an efficient demand generation strategy B2B companies can close deals faster and drive up ROI.
Any business that creates marketing strategies to spread awareness about providing a service or product to assist another business in meeting its corporate requirements is an example of B2B demand generation.
Demand Generation vs Lead Generation
Demand generation and lead generation are erroneously used synonymously. While these processes have their respective similarities, they differ in the objectives these processes are meant to achieve.
Lead generation is an element of demand gen. The latter is a top-of-the-funnel (ToFU) process that involves generating interest in your product or service to assert your presence in the market as the best solution customers can trust to solace their pain points.
Lead generation gathers prospects through various means, like relevant content, webinars, social media posts, etc., to convert them into qualified leads. Leads are gradually warmed by nurturing them with marketing efforts and gated content to motivate them to purchase.
While both processes focus on acquiring more customers, a demand generation strategy aims to create interest for your brand and help customers identify their requirements first to provide them with your brand offering.
5 Demand Generation Strategies That Actually Work
Now that we have answered “What is demand gen?”, let’s look at the various techniques to find the optimal demand generation strategy B2B companies like yours can implement to build brand awareness, stand out from the crowd, and close deals faster.
One thing to note is that when companies want to adopt a demand generation strategy B2B organizations do not target the average consumer. Instead, their target audiences are company owners, executives, and other key decision-makers of a particular organization.
Consequently, the message your sales and marketing teams convey must be consistent and offer a personalized solution for a pain point they might be facing (i.e. if they are even aware of it to begin with!).
Here are the 5 demand generation strategies you can implement to build brand awareness:
Content Marketing
Creating content that answers customers’ questions with relevant answers based on what your buyer persona might be looking for. Providing resourceful content that offers solutions for customer pain points lets you establish yourself as the authority in the market.
Writing blogs, eBooks, creating videos, etc., allows you to provide insightful content to your customers on their buyer journeys. If your audience trusts you as a reliable source of information, they will trust your brand offering and solutions over competitors.
Recommending solutions through your content is a softer sell than a sales call and helps provide more information so your prospects can feel more secure when purchasing.
Valuable content can help start conversations with key decision-makers of your target company while reinforcing a positive impact on brand awareness and demand. Focus on segmenting your information that answers the primary solutions provided by your brand.
ABM (Account-Based Marketing)
Account-based marketing (ABM) refers to focusing on a smaller segment of your audience consisting of qualified targets and companies that represent a greater demographic who can be targeted using appropriate sales and marketing efforts.
ABM requires understanding the narrow range of target prospects you want to convert using various sales and marketing tactics. Your team needs to identify the major steps in the customer journey of high-value prospects to build demand.
ABM can be achieved with inbound and outbound marketing tactics such as email marketing, LinkedIn ads, direct mail, personalized content, etc.
Acquire the necessary technographic and firmographic data to identify the companies that fit your ideal client profile (ICP) and target them with content that provides solutions for possible pain points and generates demand for your product and services.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a relevant demand generation strategy B2B example as it’s an effective way of putting your brand name in front of the targeted clients. Sending personalized emails with relevant content is an excellent way of creating demand.
Although you can utilize email automation tools, your email outreach must stand out from the crowd if you expect your targeted prospects to open your emails. You can ensure higher click-through rates if your emails don’t sound too sale-sy.
With a thorough understanding of your prospects, you can highlight specific obstacles they might be facing and present them with your solutions to pain points. Doing so lets your clients know that you understand their requirements, thus generating demand for your service.
Email marketing can complement a sound content strategy where your emails can contain website links and call-to-actions (CTA) that direct the reader to blogs, videos, whitepapers, etc., to inform your prospects further.
An attention-grabbing subject line, concise but personalized writing, and diversified brand offering are the secret to an effective demand generation strategy through email marketing.
Targeting With Customer Intent Data
Customer intent is a particular motivation for the customer to interact with a business and undertake the buyer’s journey to make a purchase. Intent data can be acquired by monitoring your prospect’s online behavior to understand their requirements.
Knowing intent data can help you create relevant content that draws in more prospects and help existing prospects move faster through the B2B demand generation funnel and provide optimal customer satisfaction.
Intent data enables you to create a detailed customer journey map to identify their requirements at any stage of the funnel and be the first to provide them with the necessary solutions.
You can locate the prospects who are ready to buy. Sales and marketing teams can focus on converting them by building brand demand instead of artificially inventing demand.
Customer intent data also helps you guide your clients through the buyer’s journey, from identifying requirements to making a purchase faster and eventually convincing them to opt for your solutions as the best choice in the market.
Optimize Your B2B Demand Generation Funnel
Finally, we will discuss how optimizing your B2B demand generation funnel can increase brand awareness and assert your presence in the market as an authority.
The demand gen funnel visually represents the various stages your prospects go through when converting into paying customers. Your sales and marketing teams need to generate demand for every stage of the funnel.
While the visual representation might have several similarities with an inbound marketing funnel, each stage varies in its purpose:
- ToFU (Top of the Funnel) – The top of the demand funnel focuses on creating awareness for the problems your prospects might be going through and showcasing your company’s services as the ideal solution.
Buyers need value-driven content to learn more about possible solutions before you can present your brand offering so that they eventually convert into paying customers.
- MoFU (Middle of the Funnel) – In this stage, prospects are actively researching and gathering more information about possible solutions, alternatives, and related terminologies to make an informed decision.
They consider several factors such as pricing and available features of various companies through search engines like Google or review sites. You need effective landing pages to capture demand and retain prospects for longer.
The more prospects interact with your brand through form submissions, demo requests, etc., you increase the demand for your products.
- BoFU (Bottom of the Funnel) – The last stage of the demand funnel involves the ultimate purchase decision of the prospect to convert into a paying customer. Here, the prospect has shown explicit interest in communicating with your brand.
Your marketing and sales teams must work together to make the conversion process seamless and identify highly interested leads to focus on and close deals faster.
Another thing to consider in the demand generation funnel is the dark funnel. A dark funnel refers to marketing attribution data that cannot be tracked when creating a buyer’s journey.
While the dark funnel contains activity regarding client consideration that you cannot identify, marketing teams must focus on creating demand based on long-term strategies whose success does not need to be measured with attribution software.
With the best demand generation strategies laid out, you can implement any of these techniques to grow your brand presence and generate interest for your services.
However, marketing to B2B companies is a significantly more challenging task. Aside from the content overload, decision-makers must go through several stages of consideration before they move through your demand generation funnel.
To stand out from the crowd and guide high-value prospects through the demand funnel faster, you can use Fozzie to schedule meetings with them and present your sales pitch for a better chance at converting them.
Fozzie: Your New Weapon For Effective Demand Gen Strategies
Fozzie is an intuitive meeting scheduling tool where you can search for high-value executive leads and book meetings. Our platform enables you to interact with key decision-makers of your target companies so you can reliably present your brand offering.
With Fozzie, the demand generation strategy B2B companies create can be optimized further by connecting you with your choice of expert leads over scheduled meetings starting at just $1, making us the most cost-effective alternative to traditional sales methods.
Fozzie lets you search for prospects manually or use filters to look for expert leads by choosing the “Company Size,” “$ Range,” “Job Title,” “Role,” and “Industry.”
You can guide prospects through your sales pipeline to the bottom of the funnel faster by sending them a direct request for a meeting to verified LinkedIn profiles. Every expert lead sets a fixed rate for every meeting, and you are charged after the meeting concludes.
For experts, Fozzie allows you to sign up with the pricing rate of your choosing, connect Calendly with native integration, and finally choose the meetings you want to attend. We also give you the choice to donate your earnings to a charity of your choice through our Pledge to Integration.
Conclusion
A robust demand generation strategy is crucial to assert your brand’s presence in the market. By growing interest in your product amongst target B2B companies, you can stand out and never miss lucrative marketing opportunities.
The content overload created due to thousands of brands trying to reach the same customer base causes your brand offering to be drowned out by the rest. Without effective outreach, you could waste significant resources on ineffective sales strategies.
Fozzie helps you cut the cost of reaching out to high-value leads by enabling you to schedule meetings with verified LinkedIn contacts from prices starting at just $1.
Close more deals and present your sales pitch to expert leads with Fozzie today!
