91%1of consumers visit a brand’s website after interacting with them on social media channels. This statistic is telling when it comes to the vital role that B2B demand generation plays in acquiring new customers. This marketing strategy uses a variety of thought leadership content to promote on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., to establish brand awareness and authority. If you are trying to reach new customers, a B2B demand generation strategy is an excellent step.
How and Why Demand Generation Works
B2B demand generation is a complex series of steps that nurture the consumers throughout their journey. Packed with content, data, and strategies that undergo constant testing, demand generation is an umbrella term used to describe traditional marketing initiatives that use a series of touchpoints to attract a potential customer through awareness. Because demand generation participates mainly at the top of the marketing funnel, it is an excellent start to any successful marketing campaign.
Creating a B2B Demand Generation Strategy
Creating a demand generation strategy begins with understanding your target audience and building content that addresses their pain points and prompts them to learn more about the product or service you provide.
1. Define Your Target Audience
Before building a B2B demand generation strategy, you must understand your target audience. Defining your audience narrows your prospective customers so your brand can promote content on the appropriate channels and address the pain points specific to them.
2. Construct Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target audiences. Combed from actual data of your existing customers and potential clients, buyer personas help establish messaging, voice, type of content, and even the design aesthetics for your demand generation content. You can have more than one persona, each representing a separate segment of your target. For example, if you sell fashionable work attire, and your best customers are GenX working moms, you would have a buyer persona that would include her name, her demographics, and identifiers including where she lives, what her goals are, and what marketing message resonates the most with her. You might also have a persona for a millennial single working woman as a newly identified target.
3. Develop Content Pillars
Content pillars, also known as content clusters, are the foundation of successful content marketing strategies. Forming content pillars allows you to organize your content and ensure you create content that drives awareness. If you take the first step seriously, it will be easier to narrow down the subjects your audience is not interested in. Content pillars are an excellent starting point to start building your demand generation strategy.
4. Create Optimized Content
Now that you understand your target audience and the type of content that interests them, it is time to build optimized content that will transform potential consumers into loyal customers. Using gated content is an excellent starting point to drive interest and collect information for retargeting purposes later. In a B2B demand generation strategy, there is a variety of content that brings your audience into the top funnel, including:
Blogs
Blogs not only position you as an industry thought leader but play an important role in your search engine rankings. As a result of this quality content and the quantity at which your product them, more visitors will be attracted to your website.
White Papers
Whitepapers are thought-leadership pieces that go in-depth on a topic, covering statistics and facts that potentially influence readers. In turn, B2B businesses begin to build trust. Blogs do this, too, but whitepapers often take thought-leadership a step further.
E-Books
This electronic version of a book provides an opportunity to connect with your audience as an industry expert. If you can say you “wrote the book” on something, that gives you initial credibility. Leverage this content on social media to generate demand and build top-funnel traffic.
Vlogs and Videos
There is no better way to get in front of your audience and position yourself as a thought leader than with informative vlogs and videos. In a survey by Wyzowl, 96% of consumers say they have watched a video explaining a product or service, and 88% said that a video influenced their purchasing decisions. Because this is a successful strategy in any marketing campaign, 86% of businesses leverage videos in their marketing efforts.
Vlogs: Video blogs where brands can share information within a video format instead if using text or imaging.
5. Promote Your Content
Now that you have built quality content, it is time to get your content in the hands of potential customers. While using organic social and search methods is a start, it is essential to use some of your marketing dollars to hone in on your audience to get your content in front of the right people. Social channels and Google search tools are a great way to ensure your content is leveraged best.
Paid and Organic Social
With 3.78 billion2 social media users worldwide, using paid and organic social media is an excellent way to drive top-funnel engagement. However, with that comes plenty of competition in your industry. Because social media is widely used, it is essential to promote your content using paid social media campaigns that come in two forms: boosted (promoted) posts and paid ads.
Boosted Content
While it is not an ad, brands can boost content by putting some marketing dollars behind an organic post to amplify it. This ensures you reach your followers or target an audience. These posts are listed as “sponsored” in a newsfeed.
Paid Ads
As stated above, paid ads differ from boosted posts. While you are targeting an audience in both, boosting content does not offer the same customization features you will find in platforms like Facebook Ads Manager. These platforms provide different ways to reach a potential audience, and the ads are not displayed on your followers’ news feeds unless they are targeted.
Organic Search
Search engine optimized blogs naturally begin ranking on Google for the terms you target after using keyword research and mapping. Since we took the time to understand our audience, develop content pillars, and do keyword research, these blogs will naturally fall in front of our target audience and begin driving traffic and awareness.
Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation
Lead generation and demand generation are different marketing strategies but work together if appropriately implemented. For example, lead generation is used to drive potential customers through awareness using content like blogs, white papers, videos, etc. So, when they revisit your website, they are more likely to share their information to read gated content such as white papers. Demand generation starts with driving brand awareness and moves through the funnel. It prioritizes getting people interested in the products or services.
For example, a technology company helps clients boost their communications by invoicing and statements. Teaching people that they can use billing as communications is part of demand generation. Lead generation is more about getting the contact information, nurturing these leads, and pushing for conversions.
Start Generating Demand for Your B2B Company Today!
Bullseye Strategy is a digital marketing agency with an expert team that will create effective B2B demand generation strategies, so you can get one step closer to closing in on qualified leads. Contact Bullseye Strategy today to learn more about how we can help you craft a high-performing sales funnel.
