You’ve heard about lead generation, but what about B2B lead generation? With demand generation, you can create your own demand instead of capturing demand already there.
B2B Demand Generation Marketing vs. Lead Generation
Before we discuss how to create demand, let’s talk about the difference between B2B demand generation and lead generation. Capturing demand is also known as lead generation, where you go for buyers who are already looking into your products and services. They’re only looking for the right solution, which is your task to find.
With B2B demand generation, you aren’t capturing demand. Instead, you are creating it by aligning your offers to your target buyer’s needs. Your task is to lead your buyer to a better way of achieving their goals, which is your solution.
7 Steps to Generate Demand for Your Business
To help generate demand or become familiar with how B2B demand generation works, we’re here to share with you our seven-step process to generating leads. Remember: modern buyers are more intelligent in doing business than buyers in the past. The following steps should help you engage these buyers and move you up as a preferred seller.
1. Establish Your Target Audience and Niche
Do you remember when you first started your business and did your first customer profile? The first step in B2B demand generation is getting to know your customers a little more. Specifically, you want to know why current businesses love you. The answer you come up with will tell you the niche to which you can bring the most value.
The businesses who love you are the group you want to nurture, and to do that, you need to know what value you can offer them. More importantly, you want to be the only one – the essential value bringer – in that niche. This part of the process is crucial as it will help focus your efforts on getting your message to the right audience.
2. Determine Your Unique Abilities
Do you know the desired outcome of the businesses you’re serving? In this step, your task is to determine your customers’ ultimate goals, what drives those goals, and what challenges prevent the achievement of those goals. Knowing these things will help you identify what your business has to offer to your target audience.
3. Trace Your Customer’s Buying Process
Lots of marketers force the buyer to go through the sales funnel. With demand generation, what you do instead is to learn your prospect’s buying process. After mapping it out, your job is to determine what you can bring at every stage. What do you think it is? It’s to make buying easier for your buyers, of course.
It helps to write an outline of the buyer journey, such as this:
Awareness Stage
In the awareness stage, the customer is still trying to figure out what your product and service is about and why it’s relevant to their business. It’s important to present your value proposition clearly in this stage to give them the best chances at moving through the sales funnel.
Consideration Stage
After the customer becomes aware of your product or service, they will begin to look at their alternatives. In this stage, you need to prove why your company is the best option.
Decision Stage
This is where the business leader is about to decide on what brand they’d like to go with, and yours is looking like the best option so far. This is where you hit your main points home and continue to encourage the customer that you’re the best option for their needs.
Delight Stage
Once the buyer has already purchased something from you, this is where you continue to provide value so they remain loyal to your brand.
4. Match Your Content to Buyer Persona
In the first step, you have already identified your ideal customer persona. Do you also know what kind of content will engage them the most? Be sure to research your ideal customer and find insights on the things they are interested in. Create content based on the details you find out to ensure they match your buyer persona.
This way, you will attract other businesses to what you have to offer. At the same time, you can create demand by aligning your content to what your customers need. Doing this generates higher quality leads since you have less competition. The waters are a lot smoother for you if, in the eyes of your prospects, you are the vendor to go to for their needs.
5. Repurpose and Update Your Content
In B2B demand generation, you will need three to four content pillars. These pillars will be the foundation of your content marketing and the center of what your message to your audience will be. Your goal is to create only a few pieces of content each month from these content pillars, taking care not to dilute your message.
Won’t you run out of content to write that way, though? That’s okay because you can repurpose your old content. By repurposing, we mean you can turn your blogs and articles into different formats to present them to your audience in another way. For instance, you can turn them into videos or infographics. Besides repurposing old content, don’t forget to update it whenever new, relevant information comes out.
6. Distribute and Promote Your Content
Next is to distribute your content to where your targets are. You can broadcast your content by promoting it on platforms where business leaders are likely to go for valuable information. It can be your company blog, social media, and other places. You can send them to your email list or work with influencers to share your content. Paid promotions also help at this stage of the process.
7. Turn Website into a Resource
The last step is to turn your website into a hub that target customers can use as a resource. Remember that your targets will typically care more about their own business operations than your brand, so make sure you don’t put information that is only all about you. It is all about the businesses you’re serving, and with that, you want to turn your website into a place they can turn to when they need guidance, not just when they need to buy something.
Conclusion
Being at the right time at the right place is the key to generating demand successfully. This is how you can establish your business as a preferred vendor and lead the competition. You can enjoy much higher quality leads and lower competition if you can successfully do that. Your business will be in a better place with B2B demand generation marketing.
If you’d like to learn the right content marketing strategy to achieve your goals, contact Gold Lion Technologies today. Our marketing experts are here to help.
