As a new business or marketing team, your primary goal is to generate demand for your products and services. One of the biggest challenges any startup faces is demand generation. In this blog, we’ll explain what demand generation is and what strategies you can implement to drive interest in your business and keep your lead pipeline healthy.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation, simply put, is a systematic, data-driven marketing process of creating awareness and demand for products and services. It involves every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey from website visitor to delighted customer. This marketing method focuses primarily on generating revenue. In other words, demand generation aligns marketing with sales to help businesses achieve their goals.
To make things easier, think of demand generation as a collaboration between your sales and marketing team, and potential customers. Marketing drives, nurtures, and qualifies leads before passing them on to the sales team.
Difference between lead generation and demand generation
People often use these two terms interchangeably. However, it’s important to understand the difference between the two. While lead generation involves outbound marketing practices, demand generation is about identifying prospects based on their intent and then nurturing them to help sales teams get highly qualified leads.
Compared to lead generation, demand generation is a more thorough and collaborative process that takes place over a significantly longer period. Marketers use inbound marketing tactics to nurture prospects while helping them resolve their problems.
Three Demand Generation Strategies for Startups
Now that you understand what demand generation is and how it supports business growth, let’s take a quick look at three key demand generation strategies for new brands:
1. Focus on content creation
Content creation is a key part of a demand generation marketing strategy. You must provide your audience with valuable resources. Content creation is a long-term investment and most new businesses fail to create valuable content on a consistent basis.
Research-backed, high-quality blog posts are just one example of a healthy content creation strategy. If you want to launch a meaningful demand generation strategy, start investing time and resources in your content creation.
2. Take advantage of lookalike audiences
When it comes to creating a lookalike audience, Facebook is probably the most effective social media platform. You probably have a Facebook presence and use paid means to generate leads.
Lookalike audiences are a group of people that resemble users that have already purchased your products or taken an interest in your brand. The good thing about Facebook is that it lets you create lookalike audiences based on the data that you’ve already gathered from different marketing campaigns.
Related: How to Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences: The Complete Guide
3. Offer a free tool or resource
As a new brand, offering a free tool, app, or resource can be an effective way of creating a successful demand generation campaign. Of course, doing this may mean a significant initial investment but giving away something truly valuable creates a sense of trust between your brand and your audience.
If you offer something that demonstrates how your products and services can make a real difference to your audience, they will keep coming back to your website time and time again.
This tactic will also help you attract prospective customers.
We have highlighted just three potential ways in which you can enhance demand generation for your business. From optimizing email marketing campaigns to partnering with industry leaders, you can do a great deal to create a solid demand generation strategy. For more ideas visit our site and learn more about how we’re helping agencies and brands with their demand generation needs!