Above all, we need to understand the psychology of today's buyer. Nowadays, buyers collect information online, through various sources and according to their own wishes. That's why marketers need to focus on understanding the buyer's needs and helping them with their buying process instead of making direct requests.
Demand generation is about qualifying and targeting customers and nurturing qualified leads that can eventually lead to sales. It also aligns marketing with sales and analyzes results for future use.
Demand generation: What is it exactly?
Demand generation is one step closer than lead generation. It creates demand for your product or service. It involves many conversations between the lead generation manager and the prospect before the lead is actually passed on to the sales team.
A demand generation process has multiple components that vary depending on the size and complexity of a sale. These components include, but are not limited to: awareness, positioning adequacy, validation support, and mitigation of client assessment. It's simply about creating demand for your products or services from customers through different strategies. The strategies used here are different marketing methods and the result is that the customer is more likely to buy the product or service.
Lead generation and demand generation
The two services can work together as long as each person you interact with is handled by either the request or the lead generation process. Do not try to apply them both at the same time.
The difference between lead generation and demand generation
Lead and demand generation are crucial and important processes of marketing strategy. However, demand generation focuses on the most important part and helps build better B2B sales with qualified leads . Lead generation can attract and retain these types of customers through campaigns, events, blogs, webinars, and emails.
The demand generation process seems more technical than lead generation which focuses solely on lead nurturing , lead scoring and measuring the rate of return on investment (ROI).
How to work with lead generation and demand generation?
Each professional needs to understand which one should be applied first. Lead generation is all about promoting the value of content and building a solid database for the team through different marketing campaigns like email, telemarketing, and personalized marketing activities.
However, generating sales through demand first creates interest in your product. Indeed, it provides open information about the product and prospects who are interested in your product will get to know it. This can be done with the help of content, as some content is well suited to creating demand in the market.
Whatever strategies you apply, never forget that lead and demand generation are two different activities and they can be woven together if necessary. Most marketing companies normally apply the lead generation rule and then the demand generation rule.
Tips for generating demand
Here are some factors you need to consider for your demand generation strategy:
- Understand the buyer's area of interest: The best way to understand what appeals to a buyer is to know their digital body language or, in other words, their online behavior.
- Using marketing automation to generate leads: The next step in the process is to use an automated system to spot leads. This system makes it possible to determine at what stage the buyer is in the sales process.
- B2B marketing campaigns: Personal B2B marketing campaigns can yield good results. This requires further personalization of targeting, timing, and delivering the right message at the right time.
- Use of metrics: When you show that marketing is a revenue stream rather than a cost center, you become a trusted member of the lead management team and build marketing credibility within the company.
How to succeed with demand generation?
All B2B marketers today focus on revenue, customer centricity, content marketing, and marketing automation as part of their strategies. So it seems that they have the perfect combination of components to build and administer modern demand generation programs. However, despite all efforts, modern B2B demand generation tends to collapse in its execution.
Successful demand generation requires bringing people, processes, content and technology together and making these elements work in harmony. This will align buyer training with the different stages of the lead qualification process. It will also coordinate the efforts of marketing team members while facilitating tracking and transfers between technology systems.
Data quality and management play a critical role in demand generation. It is of utmost importance that marketers store potential buyer data in their database for future use. They must ensure that the buyer's data is clean and up-to-date.
In addition, this data must be standardized, especially for marketing campaigns . The reason for this is that marketing campaigns are now carried out through marketing automation software in order to achieve the right results by following a specific time and content. This tactic ultimately contributes to lead scoring.
To sum up, a marketer needs to create a successful relationship with their buyer. Gone are the days of phone calls and emails. Demand generation is about creating demand by creating a conversation with the buyer, understanding their needs, and nurturing them. The demand generation process will streamline your company's lead generation tasks and improve your company's return on investment or profit rate.
