🕵🏻‍♂️ Demand gen tactics

Written by Adechina Odjo, Content Marketer @Trenches

Hey ,

In today’s newsletter, we'll take you through the nuts and bolts of demand generation and show you how to make the most of it.

Let's start first with what demand gen is.

What is demand generation?

Simply put, demand generation is the process of creating awareness and demand in a target market. It consists of creating a pool of engaged accounts that are curious about your product.

Demand gen gets you lots of qualified leads and helps your brand drive long-term engagement and acquisition.

But how?

By raising awareness and positioning your company as a reference through insightful and useful content that shows potential customers that you are the right company to do business with. That awareness can be created through:

• Thought leadership SEO;

• Emails;

• Podcasts;

• Webinars;

• Newsletter;

• Guest posts;

• LinkedIn organic;

• LinkedIn advertising, etc.

You can use demand gen to:

• capture the interest of companies and prospects that meet your Ideal Customer Profile;

• deliver the right content to the right people, at the right time, with total confidence that what you are offering meets their specific needs;

• drive awareness throughout the entire buyer and customer lifecycle;

• help customers understand your brand;

• make sure you’re not leaving good revenue on the table.

Now that you know what demand gen is, and what you can use it for, let’s tackle how you can develop a successful demand gen strategy for your company.

How to build a successful demand generation strategy?

As mentioned above, demand gen can help you make your company's marketing messages more credible and resonate with potential customers. Down the road, this will help you increase your revenue by attracting quality leads.

But what are the steps to developing a successful demand generation strategy?

Step 1: Build awareness

In today's competitive sales and marketing landscape, brand awareness is critical to achieving a consistent flow of quality leads. While it may seem like an easy thing to do, brand awareness isn't just about grabbing a potential buyer's attention.

A real and lasting brand awareness strategy leaves potential buyers with a persistent positive impression of your brand and puts you in a prime position when the prospect is finally ready to move forward with a purchase decision.

Here are some ways to achieve positive brand awareness:

1- Have a clear brand identity

First and foremost, you must have a consistent and strong brand identity:

• Who are you?

• What problem do you solve?

• What is your unique value proposition?

Building a strong identity will act as a guide for your outreach campaigns.

2- Leverage positive reviews

One of the best ways to build brand awareness is to leverage testimonies and customer reviews.

Reviews are important in the sense that they provide an unbiased view of your business, and it's something many people value when making purchasing decisions.

Customer reviews act as candid consumer feedback related to real-world use, free from marketing hype.

3- Establish a strong social media presence

These days, almost everyone is on social media in one way or another (even my grandmother). But mind you, don't sign up for every social network out there just because your competitors are doing it.

Do your due diligence and identify the platforms most used by your potential and current customers. Once you've done that, establish a strong presence on those platforms and you'll continually stay in their mind.

4- Position yourself as an authority and an expert

Developing industry expertise is a key component of successful demand generation. Industry expertise means your brand is perceived as an authority in its field from the first interaction with a potential customer.

This type of expertise helps build customer trust and lays the groundwork for important conversations about customer pain points and the solutions your company has to offer. Because the fact remains that people buy from people they know, like, and trust.

So, position your company as an authority with insightful and useful content related to your industry to show potential customers that you are the right company to do business with.

In today's market, every day is a battle to cut through the noise. But the truth is, maintaining positive brand awareness will ensure that new prospects flow into your funnel on a regular basis.

Step 2: Develop a content strategy

A solid content strategy that offers timely and helpful insights at every step of the buyer’s journey is the best way to generate demand.

Whether it's increasing traffic, customer loyalty, or upselling, content plays a critical role in every stage of demand generation.

Case in point. Jason Fried, CEO @Basecamp, launched his email service, Hey, in 2020. But long before that, he had painstakingly been building an audience interested in data privacy content. Come launch day, Jason collected the email addresses of 13,000 people eager to try the new product.

13,000 people in less than 24 hours. How did he do it? He strategically generated demand for a privacy-centric email service by using content as a communication channel.

However, it didn't happen overnight. While it's possible to speed up demand generation, it still takes time. That is why it is essential or even indispensable to diversify your content marketing canvas.

This typically involves creating content that aligns with the traditional marketing funnel; content and resources to meet the goals of:

• the top of the funnel (TOFU);

• the middle of the funnel (MOFU); and

• the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

After all, the goal is to capture a large volume of attention at all stages of the funnel.

But this is not as simple as it sounds. What should a demand generation-focused content strategy look like?

1- Clear and specific goals of your company: what are you trying to achieve and how can content help you in your marketing and sales strategy at large?

2- Organic growth: even if your SEO strategy is a stand-alone entity, it’s still important to clarify how content contributes to organic growth.

3- The Who (target audience): who are you targeting? What are their pain points and how do they relate to your offer? What keeps them up at night? What are the specific results they want to achieve?

4- The What (materials): how will you help your audience overcome their difficulties? At this point, detail as best as you can the topics and content formats you will cover. Formats include blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, social media posts, and videos, just to name a few.

5- The Where (distribution channels): as explained in the previous section, understand where your target audience is hanging out:

• Where do they spend most of their time?

• How will you generate qualified traffic and make your content available to them where they are?

Here, Sparktoro can be of great help.

6- Key performance indicators (KPIs): what would success look like for you? How will you track progress and what indicators will you measure?

7- The workflow: describe your content production process, specifying all the players involved at each step of the process, from ideation to distribution (planning, briefing, production, promotion, etc.).

Step 3: Nurture high-quality leads

Once you’ve made first contact with a potential customer, your marketing team hands over the lead details to the sales team and congratulates each other on a job well done, right?

WRONG! Healthy, reliable demand generation requires a full lead nurturing strategy from first contact through decision and purchase.

Marketing teams should work alongside sales throughout the purchase journey, remaining in tune with the buyer's questions, concerns, and attitudes. Depending on how robust their resources are, marketing teams should continue to interact with the leads all the way through purchase by providing helpful content to answer their questions.

Your marketing team should focus on the types of content prospective clients need, as well as the most appropriate channels to share that information. The goal of this kind of targeted nurturing campaign is to reach customers with the right content or assets at the moment when that information is most helpful to them.

Upcoming Community Event

ABM ON LINKEDIN

Join Andrei and Vlad today sharing their refined ABM ON LINKEDIN framework.

​​Here's what you'll learn:

​​⚡️ The LinkedIn ecosystem and how to leverage it to create awareness in target accounts

​​⚡️ How to create a LinkedIn demand generation funnel

​​⚡️ Simple content frameworks to generate demand for your product

​​⚡️ How to recognize the buying signals & engaged accounts

​​⚡️ LinkedIn marketing planning: how to develop ABM process that requires max 3-5 hours per week.

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• 6 steps to build a cohesive demand generation, demand capturing, and ABM model on LinkedIn (Read here)

• April 20th is global “Prematurely Killed Revenue Programs Memorial Day” (Read here)

Questions from fellow Trenchers

Dear , your help is needed. If you can answer any of the questions below, please click on the link and share your ideas.

• Hello, we are struggling with intent keywords in Demandbase. The CSM came back stating that the target account is not showing intent for keywords we had supplied. Is there an approach or guidelines for the keywords? How should one go about doing it?

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO