Demand generation has become an essential marketing strategy for B2B companies. The reason being its holistic nature, as it provides an integrated and in tune strategy for engaging with prospects with the ultimate aim to increase attention and interest in your products and services. Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs and needs to be fueled with high-quality account and industry insight.
Defining demand-generation
Demand generation is simply creating demand for a business’s products and services. It is more of a data-driven marketing strategy that accounts for every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey —from anonymous visitor to pleased customer.
HubSpot defines demand generation as programs to “help your organization reach new markets, promote new product features, build consumer buzz, generate PR and re-engage existing customers.”
Demand generation aims to identify prospects based on their initial behavior and nurtures them to convert them into high-quality leads. Often interchangeably used with lead generation, this strategy takes time. Demand generation involves a long-term strategy and an integrated approach to engage members of the target audience with content and messaging that are relevant and personalized to them. Demand generation could be in the form of white papers, regular newsletters, sponsored webinars, and meetup events.
Demand generation for B2B
Every marketing strategy is an attempt to find the right person with an intent to make a purchase. For B2B companies, attracting new clients is crucial for growth, but keeping a steady flow of clients can be challenging. Predominantly for companies offering demand generation services to enterprise-level B2B clients, leveraging bespoke research can result in highly personalised content and communication.
Particularly at the early stage of your demand generation efforts, what is more important than the analysis of the digital behavior of your target account is the fundamental understanding of their business. Understanding the challenges and drivers of the industry that your target accounts are operating in, knowing their priorities and needs is of paramount importance at the earlier stages of demand generation programs. Targeting individual customers at specific points in their buyer’s journey is imperative. Allowing your sales and marketing teams to work together on this strategy really helps ensure you’re contacting each lead at the right time.
Demand Gen research shows that 47% of business buyers read around three to five pieces of content online 1 before engaging with a salesperson. 95% of B2B buyers 2 end up buying from an organisation that was able to guide them through the buyer journey with content.
Your deep understanding of your target’s industry is reflected in all communications and sends out a message that you know their industry well. Moreover to the demonstration of clear understanding, there are many areas where research can catalyse demand generation efforts: you will be able to ensure meaningful conversations to attract, retain and nurture your enterprise level accounts.
How desk-research fuels demand generation efforts?
Higher quality and tailored-content through precise account data
Customized insight solutions covering topic areas such as company insight, strategy & strategic analysis, business challenges and industry drivers fuels demand generation professionals with specific and precise account data. Account-relevant data can be leveraged to reach higher personalization levels at every touchpoint with your target account throughout every stage of their lifecycle. Every piece of content serves a specific role in generating demand, so understanding how your target audience like to consume content and where they are in the customer journey is key.
Up-to-date and account relevant data can be leveraged quickly into your demand generation outreach efforts
‘Outreach’ can refer to anything from a simple hello message to a 1:1 account-based marketing campaign. After you have gathered all relevant data about your prospects through leveraging desk-based research, you can easily leverage the data into your communication with your target account into your content marketing efforts. Key insights, from industry and account relevant news to updates about your competitors can be quickly adopted into your marketing efforts to enable purposeful communications.
Spark meaningful conversations with your target account
90% of the buyer journey is complete before most buyers start thinking about brands.
Even before you speak to your target account, customized research powers you with so much information at a granular level, enabling meaningful conversations. You will be able to resonate better with your target account as you have a higher understanding of their business. Often, deeper research about target accounts can also uncover ‘opportunities for conversation’ for sales reps, a potential game-changer for marketing and sales alignment.
Empower your Lead Lifecycle Management
Having a structured research process in place to collect relevant data and insights about your target account will empower your Lead Life Management. Continuously updated insight and relevant data about your target account will ensure that your demand generation efforts throughout every stage of the sales funnel will be more meaningful and effective.
First, companies usually start with top-of-the-funnel content to increase awareness and educate their audience. From there, they try to hold the attention of their new inbound traffic via website content. The content can be either a blog, case study, an infographic, or a video. Gated content is often treated as a transition piece that helps to convert marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads. Then it the job of marketers to nurture them through drip campaigns or newsletters, making it easier to stay on top of the prospect’s mind.
Citing Business Brainz report use case
How we helped one of our clients achieve 100% customization at scale
Recently we had catered to a million-dollar global SaaS firm, which was looking to build engagement with its prospects via content. The client’s marketing team wanted to ensure that they have all the data and facts in place before they launched their industry targeted campaigns. The major challenge they were facing was: their content wasn’t able to generate the desired level of engagement.
We worked with both the UK and US-focused marketing team to deliver detailed and highly tailored industry insight reports. Our report helped them position themselves as a company that understood customer challenges better and gained significant visibility across digital channels. We cannot be elated how our reports have been instrumental for the client to achieve their marketing campaign goals.
The insight reports proved to be extremely valuable for their drip campaigns, webinar, and several blogs, and infographics. The insight reports not only 10Xed the engagement with the right audience across different social platforms but also reduced the overall cost of developing and launching campaigns.
Conclusion
Higher personalized outreach can be achieved through in-depth research which is the much-needed catalyst for your demand generation efforts. A deep-level understanding of your target account that you are directing your demand generation efforts is a necessity before your campaign planning. Research can help to identify the gaps in your content marketing funnel, resulting in the desired outcome from your demand generation efforts.