What is Demand Generation?

Demand generation is a marketing strategy that generates interest and positive brand awareness of a company’s product. The key is to create sustainable, long-term demand that helps drive lead generation efforts and fills the prospect pool with potential customers genuinely interested in your product.

To implement effective demand generation, sales, and marketing teams must be aligned.

Why is Demand Generation Important?

Demand generation is essential for every B2B business because it creates positive brand awareness. A demand generation strategy aims to target ideal audiences with engaging marketing materials and content that not only resonates with them but establishes your company (and its products) as reliable, trustworthy, and worth investing in.

People are more likely to purchase products they recognize and know are valuable. Referrals and positive reviews help but aren’t guaranteed, so it’s essential to implement an effective demand generation strategy.

If you don’t excite your own company, who will? Whether you’re targeting new audiences or engaging with existing customers, communicate your product’s unique features, show off how it works, and prove that it’s the right choice.

The efforts put into creative demand generation are seen further down the sales pipeline when informed prospects convert to customers.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation

“Demand generation” and “lead generation” are two terms often used interchangeably but differ from one another.

As mentioned above, demand generation focuses on marketing tactics to get audiences interested in your product. This engagement may or may not convert people into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Demand generation occurs at the top of a funnel (TOFU) and bolsters interest.

Lead generation, in contrast, focuses specifically on creating relationships to convert leads into customers. The end goal of lead generation is to grow a customer base and occurs at the middle (MOFU) or bottom (BOFU) of a sales funnel.

Lead generation wouldn’t happen without demand generation. They’re both necessary for sales but ultimately have different end goals.

Effective Demand Generation Strategies

To enhance and boost demand generation, businesses can implement the following strategies:

1. Create Meaningful Content

Engaging, memorable content is essential for demand generation. To entice people to learn more about your brand and product, you can leverage various channels such as social media, website, newsletters, and ads to increase their recognition. Traditional eBooks, blogs, and guides are great but don’t overlook the medium that converts the best—video. With an effective video marketing strategy, you can create different types and styles of video content to boost engagement at every funnel stage.

Once people are interested in your offering, sales reps can begin nurturing relationships and moving them through the sales cycle.

2. Create Ideal Customer Profiles and Personas

When creating demand, focus on targeting the right audiences. Otherwise, your efforts are wasted. Use existing data to develop ideal customer profiles and personas to outline the specific types of customers you’re looking for and how to interact with them successfully.

3. Promote Free Trials and Tools

Product-led growth (PLG) is gaining popularity as virality and word-of-mouth generate product-qualified leads for you. Offering a simplified version of your product on a free trial basis will attract potential customers and allow them to see exactly how it works. Ensuring a positive experience will increase demand to keep using the product. This is an easy way to score new customers.

4. Measure engagement

Like everything else in sales, demand generation tactics should always be measured. How many people are being reached, how are they engaging with your video content, where are they engaging with it, and how are these actions converting to opportunities for the sales team?

All of this data will help sales reps make informed decisions and also help pinpoint exactly how to engage with audiences successfully.