89% of B2B marketers believe that demand generation is either important or their primary focus – B2B Marketing
As the B2B sales cycle develops and buyers carry out comprehensive research before making contact with a company, ensuring it’s your company they contact is more important than ever. B2B marketers are now fully aware of the need to nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel with targeted content, but how do you get prospects into the funnel in the first place? The answer is demand generation.
Demand generation channels
When the objective is to turn prospects into leads, it’s important that they are made aware of the presence of your company and your product/service. In order to do this, it’s important that you firstly get your brand/marketing in front of them, and secondly you have content or material that proves you have a solution to their issues.
This means that the starting point for creating demand generation is to carry out in-depth persona research and get to know your prospects… very well. Once you have done this, create relevant content and host it on landing pages with contact forms. Now that you have this, you can start attracting prospective customers and generating demand.
The key channels for demand generation are…
• Social media (only choose networks that are popular with your prospects)
• Blogging
• Pay-Per-Click ads
• Email
Use these channels to attract the attention of prospects and drive them to your landing pages (using strong calls to action). Once there, they can complete the form in exchange for your relevant content – thus becoming a lead.
Measuring and improving
In order to determine how well the demand generation strategy is going, it’s important to be able to identify the source of all new leads. When prospects complete a form on your landing page, marketing automation software will be able to identify the channel they used to reach that landing page. This information means you can easily identify which demand generation techniques are working better than others. The procedure going forward should be continuing to use the best performing channels to generate demand and diverting budget and resources away from the underperforming channels.
To find out more about driving leads into your sales funnel…
