4 April 2014
It’s not a bad thing for you to expect more and more people in your lead generation pool. The conversion rates across the board keep falling down and it’s a sound strategy to have the top of the sales funnel filled with as many qualified leads as possible.
Qualified is the keyword here. Getting people who might buy your offering to notice your brand and getting hold of their information for exploring the possibility of a pitch is what demand generation is all about.
Demand generation strategies focus on spreading awareness and make people warm up to your brand. Without much ado, let us jump right into the ideas that’ll help generate more demand for your business!
As with everything in life, demand generation strategies yield better results when there is a proper plan and a clear roadmap in place. Devise a plan that will generate enough demand to meet your business needs and capacity. Tie this plan to a timetable to facilitate better implementation of all the demand generation strategies.
Before jumping in to acquire more and more eyeballs to your business, you need to know if you and your infrastructure is ready to handle the sudden spike in demand. It’s important to ensure that the sudden inflow at the top of the funnel trickles smoothly down the various stages in the sales pipeline management without any hitch.
The last thing you want is more potential customers turning up at your doorstep with no one there to get the sales cycle started. Try hiring more people in pre sales to handle the volume.
With a clear roadmap, you won’t have to hire all the required manpower in one go. You can save a lot of money by hiring in tranches and it will become far more easier to train and handhold new employees with this approach.
Define a set of metrics to track and monitor. Analyze these numbers and fine tune the roadmap for better results. This feedback loop is important to make your lead generation efforts streamlined and efficient.
The day you detach your brand from a longlist of features is when you become a leader in your industry. Instead of selling the product or service, move your pitches towards a value centric proposition. Conveying how you can solve the customer’s problem and add to his bottom line goes a long way in building the image of your brand.
Once you position yourself as a brand that provides far more value than the competition, generating more demand for your offering becomes less of a chore. It gets easier to spread the word around and keep the positive buzz around the brand for a long time.
Not every aspect of demand generation is done in house. Positive word of mouth is an exponentially powerful tool to generate demand. People don’t recommend a brand to their peers without being sure of the positive returns from your offering. Being known as a brand that adds real value will get you past that stumbling block.
For demand generation strategies to work, every team member has to be on the same page. It’s a collaborative effort and keeping everyone in the loop of the upcoming activities is vital to run a well oiled machine.
Aligning your sales and marketing teams in line with the demand generation roadmap is far more important than anything else. It’s possible that collaboration within the sales team is phenomenal in your business. So could the collaboration between members of the marketing team. However, ensuring that these two teams work together and are in sync at all times will make or break your entire demand generation strategy.
Automating the task of sales and marketing team collaboration is key to ensure synergy. A centralized solution to keep track of messaging, branding, team communication and lead tracking does most of the heavy lifting for you. A small business CRM is something you might want to deploy to keep an eye on lead management and demand generation.
The idea behind aligning the sales and marketing processes is to ensure that the messaging and customer communication are clear, relevant and helpful to customers. Such clarity will help customers navigate through the purchasing process faster without encountering any bottlenecks along the way.
Thanks to growing adoption of smartphones and social media, it’s far easier than it used to be to generate demand. If you want to drive thousands of people to your website or a landing page, it’s isn’t an impossible task at all. However, the real question is - are these people who you are targeting?
When C-Suite executives are your target audience, there is hardly any reason for mom and pop business owners to visit your website in droves right? Right from the get go, the goal of the demand generation strategy is to acquire targeted and qualified leads.
Prior to involving in demand generation efforts, set aside some time to identify the right set of customers to target. Define the right industry segments, demographics, geographies target etc. that you find profitable to your business. Basically, build customer profiles that you think would be an ideal bunch of people willing to pay for your offering.
After building customer personas, come up with the right set of demand generation efforts that will grab their attention. By creating content and messaging that will entice these customer personas and getting it in front of them in places they frequent becomes a breeze. From there you are on the fast track to speed up sales cycle.
There are quite a handful of offline and online marketing channels available at your disposal for lead generation efforts. Barring a few exceptions, using online marketing for demand generation has become ubiquitous across all industry verticals.
Be it offline or online, content that you generate has the potential to get people’s attention. It’s by far the quickest means to get yourself branded as a thought leader in your line of business. When you have people’s ears, the reach and trustability of your brand shoots up, giving all your demand generation efforts a filip.
Quality and engaging content is the lifeblood of content marketing. Churning interesting content of all types - blogs, case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, slides, videos - forms the core of pushing more people towards the top of the funnel.
Generating quality content is just half the problem. Distributing it to places where you can reach maximum eyeballs is the other half. Social media eases some pain from this process.
When it comes to content marketing, it’s always a better idea to start with your own customer base. They are your brand ambassadors and they have to be convinced in the first place that you are a thought leader.
The company blog is the first place to start. Keep a content calendar and involve people from various departments of your organization to add to the content mix.
Guest blogging is the next logical step and when you after that strategy, make sure you contribute only to blogs that are relevant to your vertical. This helps not only in targeting customers better, but also to stay away from SEO landmines like link spam.
Sky is the limit when it comes to demand generation via social media. Hundreds of millions of people are active in a wide variety of social platforms and they are all connected with their peers as well. This network effect is what make demand generation via social networks highly lucrative.
There are social networks of all types and sizes in the market. Depending on the nature of your business (B2B or B2C), you can narrow down the ones that you want to target. This, in combination with the customer personas that you have come up with will help you target with precision.
The crux of the strategy is to engage potential customers in productive conversations and to distribute your content. That said, each social network is unique and there has to be a tailor made strategy for each one of them.
When it comes to Facebook, you have the opportunity to interface directly with customers. Tap LinkedIn if you are targeting businesses and influencers. In the case of Twitter you have customers, businesses and influencers in the mix. Google+ is meant for some engagement with a lot more focus on SEO.
Irrespective of the social network you go after, creating groups is a sound strategy to bring your audience closer. They offer a network of peers to talk to, debate and gather feedback. Listen patiently, give room for everyone to share their thoughts and respond only when you have something valuable to add.
Shameless self plugs have to be carefully sprinkled in between a heavy dose of highly selective content curation for achieving the desired effect. Revisit your digital marketing strategies and perform an audit to benchmark your progress.
Social listening opens up many doors for your business. Follow relevant hashtags and set the right filters to listen to what potential customers are talking about and looking for.
The sheer volume of this social intelligence is enough to keep the top of your sales funnel filled to the brim, if not overflowing, all year long!
