What Demand Marketing Actually Means

All marketing efforts have one goal: to delight customers and consumers at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

People who are happy can be effective brand promoters and spread the word about your products and services.

Demand marketing is at the core of everything. We are all familiar with many B2B marketing strategies that we are immersed in, from lead generation and nurturing to conversion acquisition and sales. Most marketers overlook the importance and impact of demand marketing.

What is Demand Marketing?

Demand marketing is how marketers get people to be excited about a brand or product in order to create demand.

Demand marketing is all about generating interest and increasing awareness. Demand is the umbrella of all marketing and sales programs that gets people excited enough to learn about your product and then realize its importance in their lives.

Demand marketing can be done through multiple channels and platforms. It also includes structured sales programs. Demand marketing includes establishing awareness, positioning relevance and supporting validation. It also helps to mitigate customer evaluations.

Demand marketing is a holistic approach that links marketing efforts with sales processes and awareness building. Demand marketing is different from other customer acquisition efforts because it is committed to maintaining brand enthusiasm and interest through long-term business relationships.

Demand marketing goes beyond branding. B2B marketers use demand marketing concepts interchangeably, such as demand generation, lead generation, and demand creation. It is important to distinguish between these two concepts.

Demand Generation vs. Demand Creation vs. Lead Generation

Marketing experts define demand generation to be targeted marketing programs that increase awareness and interest in products and/or companies' services. There is demand, but marketers need to create more demand in order to increase sales and revenue. This can be done by nurturing and maintaining relationships between prospects and customers.

Image source: ImagineLLC.com

Demand creation on the other hand is the process whereby marketers create demand for products and services that are not yet available. When the demand is not yet proven or tested, demand creation is often used to create new products and services. Marketers want to study and create demand for products or services that are targeted at specific consumers.

Presence to Market is the key goal in demand creation. Here, initial efforts include media coverage and thought leadership. You are pushing your product and brand into the market to create new interest and demand.

The next step is to collect leads from the demand that you have established using lead generation techniques such as SEO, content marketing, email marketing and social media. The main purpose of lead generation is to gather contact information from sales prospects (based on the generated demand), that can be used to nurture them to customers. You can use gated content like whitepapers and case studies to get people to complete your lead generation forms.

Simply stated, demand generation is about increasing demand by creating brand awareness.

Demand generation and demand creation are both marketing strategies. Lead generation, on the other hand is sales-oriented. It aims to generate leads that can be used to guide the sales funnel and then to the sales team to close the deal.

Both demand generation and demand creation focus on the awareness stage of the buyer journey. Lead generation efforts, however, focus on the latter stages of the buying process such as the consideration or decision stages.

Marketers must first understand the core principles of demand generation in order to develop a successful strategy.

The Pillars of Demand Generation

Understand Your Audience

A good marketing strategy begins with understanding your target audience. This must go beyond basic demographic information. A buyer persona is a way to get to know your market and their needs, as well as their motivations.

Find your ideal customer. Spend some time interviewing customers and prospects to find out more about your ideal customer. You can create better strategies to meet their needs by understanding where they are coming from and how they want information.

Knowing who your target buyer really is will allow you to deliver the right content at the right time to them.

Engage Your Audience

It is not enough to just produce content. Engaging with your audience is key. To build and sustain strong brand relationships, you need to get prospects to interact with you brand.

You must remember that building awareness is also about creating demand for your product. You want to delight prospects from the beginning so that they become ambassadors and promoters for your brand.

In the case of demand generation, it is about building and educating relationships with existing customers, new markets or newly defined target audience.

Deliver added value

To build awareness and generate interest in your brand, you must be thought leader and have industry expertise. You can do this by creating content that educates and informs your target audience. You should give them all the information they need to make informed decisions about your products or services.

Although there may be plenty of content already out, demand generation strategies must distinguish your content from the rest.

This is not a traditional promotion effort. This is not a promotion effort to sell products. Your goal is to offer something unique to your audience, sparking their interest and encouraging them to interact with you in the future.

Incorporate marketing efforts

It's crucial to integrate all marketing strategies when creating buzz and generating buzz about your brand. This will ensure that your message is consistent across all channels.

To make your content more search engine-friendly, you should publish valuable content to your blog or website.

Integration with social media is another option. Promote your content on various social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. To nurture and build relationships with the people you have captured, your content can be integrated with your email marketing strategy.

Marketing automation tools are a great way to integrate all your marketing channels. You can increase productivity and efficiency by using marketing automation tools to help you manage your marketing strategies. They also automate repetitive tasks like posting content to different social media sites or sending out multiple emails.

You can measure your results using data

It is important to analyze and measure the performance of any marketing campaign. You can use metrics and KPIs like engagement, click-through rate, website traffic to determine if your demand generation strategies are generating interest.

• Are there people sharing your content and leaving comments?
• Search engines can people find you?
• Is your website possible to be found on different social media channels

These are the most important questions that data analysis can help you answer. The process should be similar to any other data analysis:

Five Tips to Increase Demand Generation

Create Multiple Buyer Personas for Your Target Audience

Demand marketing is all about understanding your target audience. Multiple buyer personas will help you create content and strategies that are relevant to your audience.

Start with a holistic buyer persona. Then, do a character study for each buyer type. Once you have created buyer personas, you can create strategies for each type of buyer.

Prospects and buyers are constantly changing so it is important to keep your data current. While a prospect may not be interested today in your offer, they could need it tomorrow. Your marketing efforts will be more accurate and timely if you have the latest data.

For free, provide content that is personalized to each buyer persona

Now you have multiple buyer personas. These buyer personas will help you choose the right content format and channel to reach them. You don't have to create new content. Instead, you can reuse your existing content in ways that will help you reach each buyer.

Imagine, for example, that you have written informative content about your solar energy business to appeal to three buyer personas. These are Jim, Barry, and Edward, the Operations Director for a manufacturing company.

Your research reveals that Jim enjoys whitepapers and eBooks more than Barry, while Edward prefers to read short blogs and infographics.

The same content can be repurposed into three different formats. They will all contain the same information, but they will be presented in different formats to suit the needs of each buyer. Make sure that each format can be shared and used to spread your brand's message.

Get together with industry celebrities or influencers

Establish relationships with industry stars. In exchange for industry influencers sharing their products and trials, you can send them free products or trial offers.

Demand generation's goal is to increase awareness. How can you get more people to know about your brand and new products than by leveraging the existing audience of influencers who have earned the trust of their followers.

You want to ensure you reach the right people. Make sure the influencer you choose has access and influence with the audience you are trying to reach. Your chances of success are higher if they are closer to your buyer personas.

Invest in Paid Ads

Paid ads, such as display remarketing and search ads, can reach audiences you wouldn't otherwise be able reach with organic traffic. Paid ads allow you to target the right people more quickly and accurately because you can set profile targeting criteria.

Display remarketing ads are a great way to generate website traffic and build awareness about your brand, products and services.

Try Facebook's Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences is a tool that allows you to advertise on Facebook. This new feature in Facebook ads can help you expand your reach by casting wider nets.

Facebook allows you to create custom audiences that are similar in appearance to users who have clicked on your ads or website. This increases the number of people you can reach, allowing you to build awareness more quickly and efficiently. You are targeting users who “look like” your existing customers, fans, and buyer personas.

What is demand marketing?

Effective demand generation strategies are essential for any business looking to grow.

Demand generation is what plants the seed. And demand creation is the water and sun that makes it grow. Demand generation is a way to lay the foundations of your business and increase awareness about your brand among the people who matter most: your ideal customers.

Demand generation is the only way to generate leads. Generating leads is difficult if there isn't enough demand. Understanding what demand generation is for your business, and how it differs from lead generation, will help you plan and create your marketing strategies to maximize your return on sales and marketing investments.

To learn more about our SEO Blog Writing Services, or to schedule a consultation for a free consultation, click here.