Demand for your B2B company’s product or service doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Buzz and excitement are never guaranteed.
That’s why every demand generation campaign needs a strategy.
And a demand generation strategy begins by defining your overall goal.
Do you want to create brand awareness by increasing your market share, or do you want to create a new market entirely?
Either way, our team of B2B marketing experts can help.
Building an effective demand generation strategy requires 5 critical steps.
1. Figure out your buyer persona; what makes them tick?
“Generic” is a bad word when it comes to demand generation; avoid at all costs. Instead, you have to determine your buyer persona, also known as the person you want to engage with and eventually sell to. What do they like to do, read, or explore? What’s their career path, and what pain points are they currently experiencing?
This will help inform the ways in which you create, disseminate, and repurpose content in your demand generation campaign.
2. Define the B2B buyer’s journey.
To efficiently and accurately nurture your leads in a demand gen campaign, you must know when and how they’ll move down the sales funnel.
There are 4 main stages of the journey:
Awareness → Consideration → Validation → Evaluation
Awareness: It should come as no surprise that awareness is critical in demand generation tactics. This is where you must address the buyer’s current problem—even if they’re not even aware they have a pain point. At this stage, it’s not about who your company is; it’s about what your company can do—and making sure that message gets in front of their eyes.
Consideration: Here is where you must build your market share. The B2B buyer knows exactly what type of product or service they’re looking for, but they’re now in the process of researching what’s available to them. Sometimes, this will include buy-in from the C-suite and other stakeholders; so all decisions must be justified. This is where you must provide relevant, informative content in order to support your brand.
Validation and Evaluation: Often lumped together under the word “decision,” the validation and evaluation stages are multi-faceted. Costs, preparation, and implementation are all part of the conversation; the strategy will now shift toward brand-specific talking points. At this point, case studies and customer testimonials touting your success and know-how will serve as valuable marketing resources.
3. Develop tailored content.
Once you know who your customer is and what their journey will most likely look like, it’s time to create content. This includes ads, landing pages, e-books, webinars, social media posts, press releases… the list goes on. Not only must these assets be personalized, but they should also represent your company or product the way in which you want a client to see you.
See examples of B2B creative assets by The ABM Agency team.
4. Unify cross-channel messaging.
If your messaging isn’t consistent across channels—in any B2B marketing campaign—there will be a disconnect. This is especially true when it comes to demand generation. You can’t expect a customer who might not even know they need your service to connect the dots themselves. Aligning your messaging builds trust, reliability, and general recognizability, which are all key to demand generation success.
5. Track leads as they move down the sales funnel.
Finally, every demand generation strategy requires a way to keep track of engagement or traction amind a campaign. The ABM Agency uses account scoring, a compilation of data points (including intent data and on-site interaction), which informs the marketing and sales teams about a lead’s current position in the buyer’s journey, the effectiveness of content, and where to spend more (or less) of the budget.
Is your company looking to implement a demand generation campaign—or expand on your current marketing strategy? Contact our B2B marketing agency today.
