Demand generation is one of the fundamental aspects of any marketing strategy or, let’s say, any business in general. It’s the process of generating and nurturing interest in your product or service, and thus, it applies to companies of all shapes and sizes. If you have a product or service, you need to generate demand for it. That’s just how business works.
However, it is a lot harder than how simple it sounds. Demand generation best practices are a systematic, data-driven marketing strategy aimed at creating awareness about your product or service throughout the customer lifecycle. To execute it properly, it leverages advanced marketing technologies, inbound methodology, and customer data. Demand generation is as much about revenue generation as it is about creating awareness or building a brand.
With the massive development in the marketing technology space, B2B marketers have started to execute their demand generation strategies through an advanced and integrated tech stack. It has not only elevated the demand generation best practices as we knew them to a new level but has also taken the entire marketing process for every product or service to newer heights. Gone are the days of big bulky advertising hoardings and expensive ad spaces; welcome to the world of small personalized, but effective marketing campaigns.
This piece looks closely at some modern demand-generation practices and how today’s marketers leverage technology for their business growth.
Table of Contents
B2B Demand Generation Best Practices & Strategies
1. Marketing Automation
Automation has been around ever since the start of the technology era. In marketing, however, it is comparatively new. Even the most seasoned marketers sometimes need help with marketing automation software and tools available at their disposal. However, if used properly, these tools can make their lives a lot easier and help businesses automate repetitive tasks that can quickly be done through marketing automation software.
Nurturing leads throughout the sales funnel is one such task. Whether you are a tech-savvy marketeer, using simple tools like email marketing, lead scoring, and lead nurturing, you can easily target the right prospect with the right messaging. From social media to audience segmentation to effective lead management tools like HubSpot, Salesforce Etc. have taken marketing automation to newer heights while making lives more straightforward and more effective for marketers.
2. Customer Data Platform
Often referred to as CDP, a customer data platform is a system designed for marketers to collect customer data from all sources, develop unique customer profiles, and analyze it. This allows organizations to build a unified customer database using other marketing technology systems. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows the marketer to create personalized marketing campaigns. Some of the particular ways marketers can use CDP include:
- Customer Segmentation: You can leverage your customer data to segment audiences and build tailored marketing campaigns.
- Personalized Messaging: CDP allows you to use customer data to create personalized offers and messaging more likely to resonate with targeted customers.
- Attribution: Using customer data for tracking the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns and channels.
- Data Analysis: Use customer data to analyze customer preferences and behavior, which you can leverage for future marketing strategies.
- Automation: Use customer data for triggering marketing automation for some of the marketing tasks, such as email campaigns or personalized website messages.
3. Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences. Irrespective of the nature of your business, platforms such as AppNexus, and Google Ads can help you get new audiences with targeted ads for creating brand awareness and even conversions.
Programmatic advertising platforms leverage advanced data analytics algorithms to identify people who have shown interest in your product or services in a particular way, either through your website or app. These platforms also automate the process of buying ad space, which minimizes manual negotiation and allows the marketers to create more effective ad campaigns.
4. Web Analytics
With the amount of customer data generated across platforms regularly, it is only fair for marketers to use that data for their gain. The web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Omniture allow marketers to track website traffic, conversion rates, and user behavior and use all that data to optimize their demand-generation efforts.
You can also use this data to identify trends and patterns in your customer behavior and use that information to make an informed decision about driving more traffic to your website or app. Web analytics tools also help marketers segment audiences by analyzing user behavior, such as new visitors, returning visitors, and high-value customers. This data further allows marketers create marketing campaigns, which are more likely to generate demand from the identified user segments.
5. Account-Based Experiences (ABX)
Account-Based Experience (ABX) plays crucial role in modern demand generation strategies. It requires you to create personalized customer experience for targeted high-value accounts. ABX employs a mix of data-driven insights and real-time personalization for creating highly customized and personalized experiences for each of the high-value accounts. This allows you to boost the engagement with the target accounts and drive meaningful conversions, as modern customers are more likely to engage with messages and content that addressees their needs and pain points directly. Account-Based Experiences also help the sales and marketing teams by providing them with a detailed understanding of target accounts and the strategies that can improve the engagement with them. Overall, ABX is an advanced tools for demand generation, enabling organizations to build stronger relationships with their most valuable accounts and drive growth.
Concluding Words
We live in a data-driven world; it would be unfair of us not to harness the power of all that data, especially given the tools and technologies available to us. This applies to all walks of life, and creating a demand-generation strategy is no different. This is why more and more marketers are adopting new and innovative ways to build effective demand-generation strategies in the digital age. We at Datamatics Business Solutions harness the power of advanced AI and ML algorithms to create end-to-end demand-generation solutions for our clients. It has helped them generate leads, which get converted into paying customers. Should you need to kickstart your demand generation strategy write to us at: marketing@datamatics.com, and we will connect you to our demand gen experts to help you get started.
