How to Generate Demand
for Your Business
Katie Batchelor
What is demand generation?
How is demand generation different from lead generation?
Why is demand generation so important?
Build customer relationships: Sharing valuable targeted content to specific customer audiences through channels that they already use so that they become aware of how you can help them and solve their problems.
Establish trust: Educating and inspiring your customers through content helps your brand to establish authority and gain consumers’ trust. Even if your potential customers aren’t ready to purchase at this stage, this will help to gain their trust and your brand will be in the front of their mind when they are ready to purchase.
Gain more targeted leads: Identifying common traits will help your campaigns to be more targeted which will generate higher-quality leads.
How do you generate demand?
1. Set clear goals
Target specific touchpoints to engage future and current customers:
To do this, ask questions such as, what channels does my brand’s target audience use online? What specific touchpoints make up their complete customer journey? Aim to engage your target audience before and after purchase by using a range of platforms online and offline.
Focus on solving your target customer’s problems:
When generating demand, instead of telling your customers how great your brand is, instead you should be showing them how your product/service can help solve their problems and help them. You should be highlighting your experiences with customers who have had similar problems and how you solved them.
Segment your leads:
Narrowing down your leads and clearly identifying different segments will allow you to customise your content for those specific segments and nurture the customers according to their needs. By personalising the customer journey, the more people become engaged with your company.
2. Implementing suitable strategy tactics
- Create top-of-funnel content to engage potential customers:
Use social media campaigns, blogs, your website and PR to optimise content on topics your customers are interested in.
- Use opt-in forms on your website:
By creating valuable content this will move people towards your website where they can then fill in a lead generation form.
- Use email automation:
Email is a great way to continue providing valuable content and offers to your leads.
- Work with your sales team:
By liaising with your sales team, it will help ensure that the content you’re creating is attracting quality leads.
- Use ad retargeting
Continue to provide existing customers with useful information and ad retargeting, this helps to build brand loyalty.
- Organic SEO:
Implement tactics to increase your search engine ranking and authority. E.g. content schedule for your website’s blog, analyse which topics are attracting the most viewers and for how long.
- Social media:
Create conversations with your audience to build trust. Think about how you can engage your customers, what content can you provide them with and what can you ask them to start a conversation?
- Paid advertising:
Organic search is often the go-to as it’s a relatively cheap but extremely effective source which provides results. However, paid ads for social or search are a good way to build traffic and boost conversions quickly when clear goals are set, and you are targeting a specific audience.
- Lead scoring:
Assess the quality of your leads by evaluating all the actions they have taken whilst engaging with your brand.
How do you measure a demand generation strategy?
Demand generation requires a lot of moving parts so by planning your marketing campaigns on a calendar, this will help you to have full visibility of how your strategy is being executed.
Some useful metrics to measure the effectiveness of your strategy are:
- Number of meetings generated:
Meetings booked with your sales team are a great leading indicator for the quality of leads you are acquiring.
- Average deal size:
This represents the average value of each new customer. To calculate, divide the total amount gained from paying customers by the number of deals closed in a given time period. This is a useful metric to help you forecast revenue and decide what types of customers you should target.
- Customer acquisition cost:
This tells you how much you spent to acquire a single paying customer from a specific campaign. To calculate, divide the total campaign costs by the number of customers acquired in the specific time period.
- Revenue generated vs budget investment:
This is the most important metric to measure you company’s profitability.
Key points to remember for your demand generation strategy
Every campaign should include:
- A goal which is measurable.
- One big idea – a hook or general concept which is connected to your audiences’ interests.
- A key message – the main proposition you would like to communicate.
- Strategically selected channels – use social channels and offline mediums that will best convey your message. You don’t need to use every single one, remember to target specifically.
- A plan to measure results – know how much demand that you are actually generating from your strategy.
Need help with your demand generation strategy? Get in touch!
