Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs a Demand Generation Campaign

 What is a Demand Generation Campaign?

A demand generation campaign focuses on building awareness and interest in a brand’s products or services. This interest is stimulated by helping audiences to recognize an issue they didn’t previously realize they had. Furthermore, a demand generation campaign makes that issue worth finding a solution for.

Demand generation campaigns are a data-driven marketing strategy. The main focus of demand generation strategies is to build content and stimulate conversation throughout all points of the consumer journey. Through demand generation, every touchpoint is considered for maximum effectiveness. 

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Generation?

Lead generation campaigns tend to follow demand generation campaigns: the demand has been created and now it’s time to bring in those prospects. Lead generation is the next step in the sales funnel, where prospects can become customers. At the point of lead generation, your audience has already realized that they have had a problem and are now looking to solve it. Lead generation campaigns provide strategies that help to increase conversion rates.

Building a Successful Demand Generation Campaign

A successful demand generation campaign will provide a number of benefits to your marketing strategy, which include:

• Building awareness, visibility, and attention
• Getting people engaged with your content
• Demonstrating thought leadership
• Generating interest
• Building brand trust
• Stimulating the intent to buy
• Making it easier to generate leads.

Initially, you’ll have to decide who your ideal prospects are. Characteristics you’ll need to understand about them are:

• Their pain points
• The questions they ask
• Their buying behaviors.

More than anything, a successful demand generation campaign begins by identifying your prospects’ needs. Their needs are what will fuel the motivation to purchase a product/service from your business. The difficult part here is that the consumer does not know about their needs yet, so it is imperative that they are shown which of their needs are not currently being met.

Steps to Creating a Demand Generation Campaign

 A demand generation campaign should be taken as seriously as a lead generation campaign. Here is an outline of steps to have the most successful campaign possible:

1. Set goals: Setting goals is vital as it establishes the objectives of the campaign and the direction of the campaign, while also giving you something to measure your success against later.
2. Identify your audience: Arguably the most important step, you must have a very clear and specific scope of exactly who your audience is.
3. Establish their problem/need: Your research should be mostly focused on uncovering the unmet needs of your prospects.
4. Build a need for your product/service: Now that you’ve identified the need, consider what tactics will best help educate your audience on this need.
5. Create informative content: Your content is where all your planning comes to life. Take pride in your content and ensure it is informative, educational, and fun.
6. Start conversations: Stimulating conversations online helps to offer insights, develop a strong social media presence for your brand and establish your authority in the industry.
7. Develop lead magnets: Now that you’ve educated your prospects on their need and gained their attention, your lead generation campaign can take over.
8. Measure success: Never forget to critically evaluate what you’ve achieved. Look towards your bounce rate, traffic, and lead conversions.

Demand Generation Tactics

The most successful tactics in any type of campaign will always come from observing what your audience responses well to.

The best demand generation tactics focus on educational content to help educate the audience on their issue. The audience needs to be convinced that a problem actually exists, and that a solution is worth investing in. A demand generation approach needs to be more proactive and get the attention of the audience.

Here are some top demand generation tactics:

• Collaborate with relevant influencers and experts
• Develop story-driven emails
• Share video content
• Share case studies to start discussion
• Create a must-have industry report
• Host a webinar with a live Q & A
• Create downloadable content
• Show authenticity by also posting unrelated content
• Sharing blog posts that answer questions
• Have guest posts on your blog
• Create fun and educational infographics

3 Real Examples of Demand Generation Campaigns 

Here are some examples of tactics that have worked successfully in companies’ demand generation campaigns:

1. HubSpot: Free Tools are the Best Kind

 Providing free tools to their prospects allows the prospect to trust the website before they join HubSpot. By trialing the tools, prospects also begin to realize they need such tools to become successful or be more efficient. This is an effective example of trust-building and needs recognition demand generation.

2. Zoom: Update your Prospects via Social Media

Zoom use their social media presence to inform their customers that they are always updating, proving their service continually meets new needs. They achieve this by using attractive and informative graphics to educate their customers on the most recent update.

3. Uber: Made for Scanners

In a clever email created by Uber, they made unnecessary words almost transparent while keeping the important ones in black, appealing to people with a busy schedule. This campaign was to promote the ability of consumers to sync their calendars with Uber. This efficiently presented a new need that prospects could have met through using Uber.

Creating a demand generation campaign is vital to your marketing strategy. Being at the very beginning of the customer journey, it’s a critical step needed to entice your prospects in. By getting their attention, and educating them on an unknown need, prospects will become interested in your company as their solution. Demand generation is truly the tool to see accelerated results emerge from your marketing strategy.

If you want to better understand how demand generation strategy can benefit you and your business, get in contact with the Marketing Eye team here.