Demand generation is the art of getting the customers that your business deserves. For most B2B organizations, demand generation is an inbound marketing strategy that leverages data to create awareness, popularity, and interest from your prospects towards your brand and product. The process is focused predominantly on the top of the sales funnel. For this reason, building a demand generation framework requires special consideration to create strategies that can empower and educate your prospects so that they see you as the perfect solution to their pain points. Before we move forward, let us revisit the primary definition of demand generation to refresh our memories.
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What is Demand Generation?
In a nutshell, demand generation could entail a whole range of activities, including activities to boost brand awareness, exercises to increase long-term engagement with the brand, and a set of processes that position your product or service as the ideal solution in front of the right customers. All this while considering every single touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
It is also the most simplistic approach to look at demand generation and the easiest way to differentiate it from lead generation, which often gets used interchangeably with demand gen, but ideally, it should be and is different.
With that out of the way, let us begin our journey toward building a demand-generation framework. Let’s look at some of the critical elements that can make your demand-generation framework a success.
5 Key Steps for Building a Successful Demand Generation Framework
Step 1: Building Awareness
Brand awareness for any business, irrespective of its domain and nature, is critical to maintaining a consistent and healthy flow of leads. Whether you operate in a B2B domain or are a B2C business, the current sales and marketing landscape require a strong brand presence. And although building brand awareness seems a relatively straightforward task, it is far from anything specific, for it isn’t only about gathering the attention of a potential customer.
To have a solid brand awareness strategy, you need to build a lingering, positive impression of your brand in the minds of your prospects. And the easiest way to do so is to present your product or service as the ideal solution to the customer’s needs or challenges. The easiest way is to listen to your customers’ and prospects’ feedback. You can also use the existing customer data to identify your customers’ pain points. This will help you tailor your services and products to meet the need of your customers and consequently build awareness toward them.
Step 2: Do the Groundwork
Building a successful demand generation framework will require you to put in some serious groundwork and research to understand your customers’ actual needs. Thus, it would be best to lay the groundwork well. Some easy ways to do so include –
- Building Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
- Building Buyer Personas
- Analyzing Customer Feedback/Reviews
- Defining Customer Segments
- Analyzing Buying Patterns
- Mapping Solutions to Buyer Personas
Each of these steps will help you understand your customers better and the best mode of communication/channel to approach them with your demand-generation tactics. This will also help you tailor your messaging to resonate well with your customers.
Step 3: Chalk Down the Specifics
Once you’ve built the awareness and done your groundwork, the next logical step to have a demand generation framework with maximum impact is to chalk down the specifics of your demand generation campaign. Depending upon the nature of the campaign you intend to run, these specifics could include several small steps. To help you with it, here are some of the specifics you will want to address –
- Marketing Channels: Inbound, Outbound, Social Media, Events Etc.
- Length of the campaign with specifics such as time, period, days Etc.
- Type of content that will sit well with your audience.
- Marketing Budget
- KPIs: lead generation, brand awareness, brand awareness, qualified leads Etc.
Each of these steps will further unfurl the path ahead for your demand generation framework by giving you the next actionable item in your course to build a demand generation framework that will work just as you want it to.
Step 4: Content Creation
Creating content for demand generation or lead generation is a no-brainer. Yet, the number of perplexed marketers pondering over the cause behind the failure of their campaigns is just unrealistically high. The number of times you will hear, “We did create killer content for our campaigns, wonder why it failed?” during a marketing meeting is impressive. And the main reason behind such a high fatality rate when it comes to demand generation content is that the marketeers often miss Step 3.
We consume all sorts of content daily, be it brand-generated or UGC (User Generated Content), yet the content that mostly stays with us is the content that we can relate to most. This is why, despite the content being King, it is of no use if you are not creating user-centric content. The best demand generation framework will always stress creating personalized and relatable content instead of creating content to meet the need of the campaign. The world is moving towards hyper-personalization; it’s about time your demand generation framework moved too.
Step 5: Nurture Qualified Leads
The countdown to conversion begins when you make the first contact with a potential customer. Yes, you’ve generated a high-quality lead and handed it over to your sales team, but your job is not done yet. To have a healthy demand generation framework, you must have a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy right from the first time you contact the information through the decision-making and purchase-making phase.
At all times, marketing teams should be beside the sales team throughout the purchase journey to stay in touch with the customer’s questions, concerns, or qualms they might have. They must help the customer with any helpful information they might have and think can help them make their purchase decision.
An effective lead nurturing method is to help the client understand your offering through different forms of content across various channels. You should have a consistent supply of useful information that you think will help your customer in making their purchase decision fast.
Put Your Demand Generation Framework to Action
Demand generation is a crucial step towards growing revenue, and if done right, it could have compounding effects on your business growth. From building awareness to creating and nurturing leads, Datamatics Business Solutions have listed a systematic approach to building a practical demand-generation framework. Following these steps will help us build a robust demand generation framework, which will help your business bring in high-quality leads and consequently grow your business.
If you need help designing any aspect of the demand generation framework, we have our demand gen experts ready to help you. Just write to us at: marketing@datamaticsbpm.com, and we will connect you to one of our experts and get things rolling.
