As a B2B brand, it’s more important than ever to invest in brand awareness to get on the radar of potential customers early on. And, moreover, to keep them moving through your sales funnel for as long as possible. How do you maximize inspiration for your potential target audience? By creatively generating demand for your brand or product. Enter: demand generation. Our account manager Joren explains!
Why would a potential customer choose your product over a competitor’s? Many companies and marketers today still focus heavily on lead generation. In doing so, they often lose sight of a very important target group higher up in the funnel.
This is where demand generation comes into the picture. This form of content marketing centers on the following 5 principles:
And all this while staying true to your own values, because nothing is as important today as authenticity and credibility, especially when it comes to demand generation.
Does that mean lead generation is dead? Far from it. But if you want to build long-term relationships with high-quality consumers, it’s best to invest in a TOFU content offering. Play your strongest content cards and match your product offering as closely as possible to your customer’s needs. This paves the way for a long-lasting customer relationship.
Identify which potential problems you can solve for your potential customers. By developing content about how your product, application, or service can solve these specific problems, you create demand for your company and deliver that tailored message. In this way, you are fully engaged in demand creation.
Demand capturing, on the other hand, is crucial for determining where that content is most effective and who the perfect lead is at that specific moment. And ultimately, to capture the person behind that lead using the most suitable converting message.
The best place to set your demand gen sights? Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it. Because that’s where potential customers pick up and read (commercial) content en masse.
For example, it can be a good idea to post (part of) your blog directly on LinkedIn instead of sharing a link to the blog on your own website. Or to extensively present certain products or references from your website through various posts on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Furthermore, social media platforms are doing everything they can to keep as many users as possible on their sites. Letting people click through to your (external) website is increasingly penalized. The shift from classic link ads to lead forms integrated into the social platform is just one of many examples of this trend.
Share free, high-quality content that creates demand for your product or service, and do so directly within your potential customer’s world. Without digital walls or gated content.
By focusing on maximum exposure for your strong content rather than click-throughs to your website, those email addresses will come in anyway further down the funnel.