Every new year brings a lot of promises and hope for a better future. For the business world, it also brings a new set of challenges. Based on the business performance, market demands and customer buying behavior throughout the year, it can become slightly easy to predict what the year ahead would look like. As demand generation remains one of the most crucial business growth strategies, it would be foolhardy to stick to the same old tactics. As the customer expectations evolve, your business strategies should too.
Through this blog, we will walk through the demand generation strategies and some notable B2B demand generation trends for the year 2023.
Table of Contents
What is B2B Demand Generation?
Demand generation is the process of educating people who resemble your target audience about your products and service offerings. It focuses on creating brand awareness and informing people about your presence. B2B demand generation is primarily about creating demand for your offerings. Marketers focus on widening their audiences, generating desirable buzz about their business and increasing the online traffic – website as well as social media platforms.
The non-negotiable aspect of demand generation is identifying and understanding of customer needs, expectations and challenges of your audience. These insights help you plan your strategies accordingly and establish meaning connections through your marketing campaigns.
People often confuse demand generation with lead generation. Although they are often used interchangeably, there is a big difference between B2B demand generation and B2B lead generation.
Effective B2B Demand Generation Strategies
1. Creating Brand Awareness
The importance of standing out from the crowd increases when customers have plenty of options to choose from. Your demand generation strategies can well be the differentiating factor. To garner the attention of your potential buyers, brand awareness becomes critical. An effective brand awareness strategy will help you build trust and create long-lasting communication channels with your customers. As the B2B demand generation trends indicate, customer engagement will play a huge role in improving conversions.
2. Creating an Effective Content Strategy
The content you produce has a direct impact on your authority amongst the audience. If they find your content relevant, reliable, accurate and helpful, they are more likely to trust your services and become your customers. Increasing website traffic and strengthening social media presence are an integral part of the content strategy. You must optimize your content to suit the buyer search intent and on-page SEO hygiene.
3. Contributing for Guest Blogs
Off-page SEO can be leveraged to improve SERP ranks and boost your demand generation. You must actively contribute as a guest writer and collaborate with high-authority (DA/PA) websites that attract an audience similar to your buyer persona. Guest posting is one of the most effective and simply ways of expanding your audience reach and educating people about your business offerings.
4. Offering Easy & Free Access to Information
Prospects are keen to consume content and understand every aspect of your product and service. Free content resources work best when people are eager to know more about your business. The more information they have, the more informed decision they can make. Ensure that you provide high-quality content to address their requirements. Before contacting your sales team, they might want to conduct research of their own. This is where your free content resources can be your advocates and pursue them to become your customers.
Top 5 B2B Demand Generation Trends for 2023
Ideally, generating demand for your business should be driven by strategy and data. With the emergence of a few notable B2B demand generation trends for 2023, marketers must be on top of their game to ace those trends and stay ahead of their competition. Here are the top 5 B2B demand generation trends for 2023 that marketers must get an in-depth look at –
Leveraging Buyer Intent Data to Engage Prospects
Understanding buyer intent is one of the fastest growing B2B demand generation trends. It will take precedence over other demand generation strategies. Marketers will put in more effort into identifying what exactly their target audiences are looking for. In addition to the third-party data, they will depend more on zero and first-party data. The role of technologies like AI and ML will grow multifold as they can offer valuable intent signals from search engines and social channels.
This buyer intent data will prove to be a great asset to understand where exactly the prospect stands in the product discovery and buying journey. Further, you can proactively contact you potential customers and establish a meaningful engagement before your competitor does.
Hyper-Personalization of Content, Format & Platform
The importance of personalization in B2B demand generation cannot be emphasized enough.
Customers expect personalized communication and services. In fact, 52% of customers switch to competitors owing to the lack of personalization. This number will only grow higher in the near future.
Customers will engage more with service providers who cater to their needs and preferences. Personalization will no longer be limited to simply sharing content with prospects. Marketers will understand the preferred content formats and the most used device by the customer for consuming content. This will help them optimize their content to reach customers on their preferred platforms, at their preferred time.
Conversational Marketing & Chatbots
One of the exciting B2B demand generation trends for 2023 is conversational marketing. With customers having plenty of options to choose from, they tend to move on if their queries are not addressed instantly. To address this need of instant gratification of customers, businesses will leverage conversational marketing and chatbots. They will engage with customers through a conversation in real-time. The AI chatbots will not only understand user behavior, intention and communication patterns but also adapt to their pattern and respond accordingly. Moreover, chatbots ensure that your users get their queries resolved in real-time.
Voice Search Marketing
Voice search is slowly revolutionizing the way people search for products and services. It will become a huge part of every B2B demand generation strategy in the near future. It not only offers great convenience to users to simply speak instead of typing into the keypads to find answers. There are already about 133 billion smart speaker users globally. This number will only keep increasing. For marketers, it will be more important to optimize their website content for speech search to avoid missing out on audience groups that prefer voice search as the preferred medium.
Account Based Experiences (ABX)
Talking about B2B demand generation trends, ABX promises change how marketers approached account-based marketing. ABM has been a proven demand generation strategy for a long time. However, marketers will need to take it one step ahead and adopt Account-based Experience. They can gather, store and analyze customer data and draw valuable insights about the high-value accounts. Further, they can leverage those insights to create a personalized end-to-end marketing strategy specific to those accounts. This paves the path for ABX – Account-based Experience.
Conclusion
After covering the top 5 B2B demand generation trends for 2023, it’s quite clear that demand generation will become more data-driven and customer-centric. The use of technology will grow exponentially. Organizations will have to change their traditional business strategies and make technology an integral part and focus on enhancing customer experience.
Building an in-house team for demand generation might not always be possible for all the organizations. Skill gaps, talent shortage, extra cost – the challenges can be plenty. However, partnering with a demand generation service provider can prove to be a masterstroke in your business growth. These providers not only offer expertise and tech-driven approach to growth but also are always on top of the future demand generation trends as well.
Get in touch with our experts to discuss how our demand generation services can help you boost your business growth. marketing@datamaticsbpm.com
Frequently Asked Questions
The 4 Stages of Demand Generation
- Raising awareness about the product.
- Boosting interest in customers’ minds.
- Establishing a market position for your product.
- Persuading the customer to give the product a positive review.
Account-based marketing focuses on communicating with customers one at a time (or in smaller groups) via social media or email marketing, whereas demand generation is more concerned with generating qualified leads and acquiring new clients. ABM can serve a demand generation function in some cases.
