What to Know About Demand Generation Marketing

What is Demand Generation Marketing?

Demand generation, also commonly referred to as demand gen, is a marketing strategy that is known for being both data driven and technologically based. With more competitors present in the global marketplace than ever before, demand generation marketing tactics are being utilized more frequently.

In order to be successful, demand generation strategies must address every buyer journey step. The buyer journey consists of the initial awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage.

Catching the interest and awareness of potential customers in the target audience through content marketing and identified pain points demonstrates the value that a company's products and services have. As such, demand gen is an intentional, focused, comprehensive, and integrated marketing strategy option.

Both sales teams and marketing teams benefit from a great demand generation campaign. The sales team can expect the generation campaign to supply high quality leads that have stronger sales conversion rates potential.

The marketing team benefits from an ability to better understand what marketing tactics work best. With a wide range of marketing tactics including social media posts, search engine optimization, inbound marketing strategies, and email marketing available, it is incredibly helpful to have the ability to pinpoint which tactics are most effective.

Demand gen focuses on the revenue cycle in its entirety from the initial attraction of potential clients to the conversion of high quality leads into successful sales. Existing customers are a top consideration in successful demand generation campaigns due to their value for continual revenue contributions and upselling potential.

Importance of Demand Generation

A primary goal of any marketing strategy is to generate more revenue for the company. Demand gen does an outstanding job of aligning sales teams and marketing teams to generate long term consistent revenue.

A successful demand generation campaign is important to business success as it aims to increase quality leads among a target audience that will ideally result in the purchase of the products or services offered.

Additionally, a great demand generation program will keep existing customers engaged long term through thought leadership and high quality content marketing tailored to the target audience.

Demand generation strategies offer a consistent approach to addressing pain points and retaining the interest of both potential customers and long term existing customers. Considering that many companies generate the bulk of their revenue from their existing customer base, the importance of demand gen should not be undervalued.

Not only is demand gen incredibly comprehensive, but its success can be quantified and tracked through marketing automation and other tools. Due to its ability to be tracked and measured, demand generation marketing campaigns can analyze what marketing tactics are successful and which are not.

Marketing programs benefit from the ability to comprehensively view which of their marketing tactics are worth investing in further, and which are not helping the company generate revenue. Sales teams benefit from the consistent supply of high quality leads that have stronger conversion rates as they pass through the marketing funnel and sales funnel to become existing customers.

Alignment and compatibility between a sales team and marketing team have incredible long term potential for consistent revenue generation. As such, demand gen marketing strategies offer companies a clear path to long term business success and bottom line profitability.

Challenges to Look Out For

Although there is a massive potential for profitability, demand generation campaigns can also carry many challenges. Brand awareness is a notable challenge, as in order for demand gen campaigns to be successful, potential customers must reach a company's website.

If brand awareness is a problem, companies should investigate factors including their search engine optimization strategy and social media marketing strategy. Additional components to consider include the quality of blog posts and the accuracy of buyer personas.

Buyer persona issues can also lead to difficulties with target audience interactions. When potential customers do not convert into long term existing customers it could indicate a larger buyer persona problem.

Another issue that may negatively impact conversation rates is an incompatibility between the sales team and the marketing team. To address this issue, frequent meetings and interactions between sales teams and marketing teams should be encouraged.

Conversion rates can also be increased by obtaining valuable potential customer data with which marketing tactics can be better personalized. Offering a free tool or email marketing entry form for potential customers to engage with can help supply important customer information.

High levels of customer churn and an inability to retain customers long term may signal challenges with existing customer engagement. Both sales teams and marketing teams must recognize the importance of existing customers and make sure to include them in demand gen campaign efforts.

Measuring generation campaign success is crucial for determining which marketing tactics necessitate attention and which are performing adequately. If a company feels tracking or measuring results of their demand generation campaign is challenging, marketing automation platforms can help simplify and streamline the process.

Key Takeaways

• Digital marketing is increasingly adopting demand generation strategy and its success to grow business revenue generation.
• Demand gen addresses pain points and aims to retain a reputation of thought leadership within an industry.
• Challenges of generation campaigns range from a lack of brand awareness to a failure to invest in marketing automation software.