Demand Generation Overview
Are you looking for ways to maximize your reach but not looking to increase your marketing budget? Are you uncertain if you’re fully leveraging all of your owned channels? Well, look no further! In this article, we will uncover the top 7 free B2B demand generation tactics that are essential for any business wanting to generate leads and increase brand awareness.
Let’s dive in and explore demand generation tactics that might be overlooked in your current marketing plan.
Understanding the Fundamentals of B2B Demand Generation
Understanding B2B demand generation fundamentals is essential for implementing a successful growth engine. Why is orchestrated demand generation so important? Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales will occur in digital channels. This is because 33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience – a preference that climbs to 44% for millennials.
How to Create Demand and Interest while Generating Brand Awareness
Creating demand and generating interest are crucial for B2B businesses. Generally demand generation content and messaging delivers narratives and solves pain points. Strong demand generation content should be customer centric and often creates a halo effect for brand awareness. As you’re thinking through your content pillars, consider how you can weave in thought leadership.
Traditionally, B2B marketing focused mainly on lead generation, which involves capturing potential customer information. However, demand generation takes a broader approach by creating awareness and interest among the target audience, ultimately resulting in a higher volume of qualified leads. By shifting from solely lead generation to managing the full funnel including demand generation & lead nurturing, it’ll result in a continuous stream of leads and drive sustainable growth.
Aligning with the Buyer’s Journey
Aligning marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey is crucial for effective demand generation. Businesses need to understand their target audience’s pain points and challenges at different stages of the buyer’s journey. By delivering relevant and valuable content that addresses these pain points, businesses can nurture leads and guide them towards making a purchase decision.
Maximizing Owned Channels for Demand Generation
In today’s digital age, maximizing owned channels is essential for effective demand generation. By leveraging various strategies and tactics, businesses can generate demand and drive high-quality leads. In this section, we will explore key techniques to maximize your owned channels and boost demand generation efforts.
#1: Leveraging SEO to Amplify Online Presence
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in amplifying your online presence and driving organic traffic to your website. By targeting relevant keywords, optimizing your website structure, and creating valuable content, you can improve your search engine rankings and attract potential customers. Implementing SEO best practices for demand generation ensures that your business can be easily discovered by your target audience.
As you’re thinking about SEO, here are some considerations:
- In 2024, consider how you’re using video for SEO. YouTube is the second largest search engine and interestingly Tik Tok has recently been moving towards longer form video. Explainer videos are an example of this type of content. Integrating video in your social media plan can also help you drive more engagement in those channels.
- Don’t try to do effective SEO without a keywords tool or some form of martech. There are fairly inexpensive tools that can aid in the process. I’ve been using Keywords Everywhere recently, and found it fairly user friendly. The three key functions of keyword tools are:
- Estimated search volume of a keyword to help determine viability.
- Alternative related keywords or long-tail keywords with search volume to help you build clusters of keywords
- Providing an estimate on difficulty to rank for a term
- Build an excel file with your primary and secondary keywords
#2: Creating Online Experiences that Keep Users on Your Website
When visitors arrive on your website, it’s important to provide them with a seamless and engaging online experience. You should think about the buyers journey and how to move users to the next step. For example, if you are sending users to a landing page to learn more, build in a next step after someone completes a form that mirrors their journey. By optimizing website design, navigation, and ensuring fast-loading pages, you can create a positive user experience that encourages visitors to explore further and engage with your brand. A user-friendly website not only helps retain visitors but also increases the chances of converting them into leads.
#3: Developing Lead Magnets with High Value Content
Lead magnets are a proven practice, and central to an effective inbound marketing strategy. Lead magnets need to be valuable for website visitors to feel compelled to provide their contact information. By developing lead magnets such as e-books, whitepapers, or guides that address your target audience’s pain points, you can capture leads and nurture them through the buyer’s journey. Create lead magnets that provide high value and showcase your expertise to position your brand as a trusted industry resource.
Content creation is a topic within itself. To get started, use any insights you have around pain points to brainstorm a list of topics. Then estimate the search volume using a keyword tool. This will enable you to prioritize your topics and ensure there is an audience for the content. Another option is to create shorter form content than a full lead magnet, such as a blog article, short-form video, even a social media post to test a couple of copy variations – and use these as a barometer for the long form content. This extra step can raise your confidence in while improving your efficiency, as you’re now creating content that has proven to drive engagement.
#4: Utilizing Consistent Social Media Engagement & Building a Following
Social media platforms provide a powerful channel for engaging with your target audience and building brand awareness. By consistently posting relevant and informative content, actively engaging with your followers, and leveraging social media advertising, you can expand your reach, attract new prospects, and nurture existing leads.
Building a loyal following on social media generally doesn’t happen overnight unless you stumble into a post that goes viral. And if your post does go viral, it likely will attract users that are outside of your audience. Depending on which social media channel your post went viral, your engagement might take a hit as your following now has users that were interested in the one viral video, but may not be long-term followers. On Instagram, having low engagement could limit your ability to get your posts shown, so just keep in mind that while going viral has many perks, steadily building a following has longevity.
#5: Public Relations
Public relations and generating media coverage isn’t completely free, but there aren’t advertising placement expenses like paid media. The reality with PR is that the story must be newsworthy and not advertising in disguise to get covered. The media is looking for stories and providing value to their readership base. Topics that generally get traction are case studies, innovation, new product releases, and topics that relate to a news cycle. While you’ll get some coverage just by posting a release on the wire, the reality is that media relations is still the most effective mechanism to get coverage.
Additionally, winning industry awards can provide validation and help drive brand awareness. Awards typically don’t require significant investment and can be an effective contributor to demand generation.
#6: Creation of a Newsletter
A newsletter provides an effective way to nurture and engage with your prospects and leads. While there are costs to creating a newsletter and potentially email fees in deploying, I’d consider this a lower investment tactic. The trick with a newsletter is not to use it as a selling tool. Readers see through that and you’re engagement metrics are likely to suffer if there is too much selling in the newsletter. It’s important provide genuine value in a newsletter. By regularly sending valuable content, updates, exclusive offers, or industry insights, you can stay top of mind and build a loyal subscriber base. Tailor your newsletter content to address your audience’s pain points and provide solutions, fostering a sense of trust and loyalty towards your brand.
#7: Actively Managing Online Reviews
Online reviews can have a significant impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions, especially with the proliferation of social media. Actively managing and responding to online reviews, whether they are positive or negative, demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction and builds trust with potential customers. By maintaining a positive online reputation, you can enhance your brand’s credibility and generate demand.
Degree in Difficulty to Execute
So what’s involved in maximizing owned channel, let’s take a look at how difficult these tactics are to launch, execute and maintain as well as what skills are required.
| Tactic | Difficulty to Launch | Difficulty to Maintain | Skills Required |
| Leveraging SEO | Straightforward but SEO can have a learning curve | Difficult if not experienced in SEO | Keyword Analytics, SEO Writing, On-Page SEO, Web Publishing |
| Creating Online Experiences | Fairly difficult to do correctly, need to define journey | Straightforward once the strategy and journey are defined | Experience Strategy, UX, Writing, Design, Web Publishing |
| Lead Magnets with High Value Content | Not difficult if you are a SME and enjoy writing | Straightforward as long as familiarity with analytics to attach | Content Writing, Design, Landing Page & Campaign |
| Consistent Social Media Posting | Not difficult but requires significant discipline | Fairly easy to execute but must remain on top of trends | Social Media, Writing & Design |
| PR | Straightforward if newsworthy | Specialized resources required to continue to get coverage | PR writing, Media Relations |
| Newsletter | Typically time consuming but not generally difficult | Typical website management to keep links live | Planning, Writing, Design, Coordination |
| Online Review | Fairly easy to set-up online review profiles | Fairly straightforward | Product Marketing, Reputation Management |
Measuring Success in Demand Generation
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your demand generation strategies and make informed decisions, it is crucial to measure success through tracking relevant metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). By understanding these demand generation metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement. In this section, we will explore two important aspects of measuring success in demand generation: top-of-the-funnel KPIs and conversion metrics that map back to demand generation sources.
Top-of-the-Funnel KPIs
Top-of-the-funnel KPIs provide insights into the initial stages of your demand generation efforts, where the focus is on generating awareness and attracting potential leads. These KPIs help you assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies in reaching and engaging your target audience.
The most critical KPIs for demand generation are:
- Number of Prospects Generated
- Cost Per Prospect
- Landing Page Visits
- Number Prospects By Source
- Number Prospects & Engagement/Click Through Rate (CTR) by Tactic
- Number Prospects By Content and Content Type
Conversion Metrics that Map Back to Demand Generation Sources
At the bottom of the funnel, you’ll need to go Conversion metrics allow you to measure the success of your demand generation efforts in terms of lead generation and customer acquisition. These metrics indicate the number of leads or customers generated as a result of your marketing activities and can help you identify which demand generation sources are driving the most conversions.
Some important conversion metrics to track:
- Classic Bottom of the Funnel KPIs: Measure win rate, deal size and pipeline contribution – and breakdown by source, content and tactics.
- Lead conversion rate: This metric measures the percentage of leads that have taken a desired action, such as filling out a form or requesting more information. A higher lead conversion rate indicates the effectiveness of your demand generation strategies in capturing and nurturing leads.
- Conversion by Lead Stage: Evaluate all the leads stages: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLS), Sales Accepted Leads (SALS), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLS) and Closed Deals
- Cost per lead (CPL): Calculating the cost per lead allows you to understand the expenses incurred in generating each new lead. This metric helps you assess the cost-effectiveness of your demand generation efforts and optimize your budget allocation.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer. By tracking this metric, you can assess the profitability of your demand generation strategies and make informed decisions about customer acquisition.
- Attributed revenue: This metric assigns revenue generated to specific demand generation sources or campaigns, enabling you to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts and prioritize high-performing channels.
By monitoring and analyzing these demand generation metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your demand generation strategies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, demand generation plays a crucial role in B2B marketing. Without a healthy demand generation effort, the rest of the funnel will suffer. Throughout this article, we have explored the fundamentals of demand generation, the importance of maximizing owned channels, and what metrics are optimal to measure demand generation success.
Understanding the fundamentals of demand generation is essential for developing a successful strategy. By creating demand and interest while generating brand awareness, you can capture the attention of your target audience and feed the top of your funnel. Additionally, aligning your marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey ensures that you are providing the right content at the right time, which increases the likelihood of converting leads into customers.
Maximizing owned channels, such as leveraging SEO, creating valuable online experiences, and engaging with your audience on social media, allows you to generate demand without relying solely on paid advertising. By actively managing your online presence, building a following, and leveraging public relations opportunities, you can strengthen your brand’s reputation and attract more leads.
Measuring success in demand generation is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your strategies. By tracking top-of-the-funnel KPIs and conversion metrics that map back to demand generation sources, you can identify what is working and make data-driven decisions to optimize your efforts.
So, don’t wait any longer! Start implementing these top 7 free B2B demand generation tactics today to fuel your business growth without breaking the bank. By combining these strategies and continuously testing and refining your approach, you can create a powerful demand generation strategy that drives sustainable success for your B2B business.
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