What is Demand Generation? A Comprehensive Guide to Success



The marketing world keeps moving

The marketing world keeps moving, and for businesses, that means an unending need to not only capture but also hold customer attention and interest. Stiff competition breeds hardly any room for “me-too” products or services. When it comes to demand generation, some might call it a necessary evil; call it what you will, but there is no denying that it is an essential part of the lives and lifeblood of companies today. Some marketers might even say demand generation is the very reason they have jobs. What follows is a look at demand generation in the context of modern marketing, its strategic importance, a surfacing definition, and a few key tactics.

What is Demand Generation?

The practice of demand generation is a comprehensive marketing effort aimed at inciting interest in a brand’s product or service. “This goes beyond simply attracting prospects to the funnel,” said Derek Slater, vice president of demand generation at Seismic, a marketing technology company. “This is more about educating and engaging your audience and cultivating long-term relationships.”

Understanding the Core Definition of Demand Generation

The wide scope of demand generation often leads to misunderstandings about its purpose and activities. At its essence, demand generation comprises marketing programs that create awareness among prospective buyers and establish the necessary trust and credibility for the brand to enter the consideration set. Demand generation is not about asking for the sale or even giving the appearance of asking for the sale. It is about instilling enough curiosity and intrigue in the buyer so they take the next step on their path to purchase. The reality is that too many brands demand too much of their named demand.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: Key Differences

The terms “demand generation” and “lead generation” are sometimes conflated, yet they are clearly distinct in scope and execution. Demand generation is the broader marketing function that makes an audience aware of a brand and its offerings. It sets the stage for generating leads later in the marketing funnel. Lead generation zeroes in on converting interested prospects into contacts that can be handed off to a sales team.

Demand Generation:

This is concerned with initiating interest and educating audiences. This stage is about creating demand for a product or service, often targeting a very broad audience.

Lead Generation:

A subset of demand generation, this stage concentrates on gathering contact information from prospects who show intentional or declared interest. This might involve forms, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, or gated content. Balancing these two strategies places a business in a very healthy position.

Why is Demand Generation Important for Modern Marketing?

More than a mere buzzword, demand generation is a vital marketing strategy for businesses—especially in the B2B sector—where purchase decisions are complicated and buyer journeys can last months. The potency of demand generation derives from its capacity to do the work of marketing at several levels: It builds brand authority; It educates the audience; and, It fuels the engine of sustainable growth by generating demand and converting that demand into revenue.

Establishing Credibility and Trust

A potential benefit that demand generation can bring to a company is the establishment of credibility. By delivering valuable content and demonstrating an industry-specific expertise, a company places itself in a leadership position—quite literally, as the term “thought leadership” insinuates. This may, in some cases, serve to eradicate any lingering doubts a potential buyer might have about partnering with a company.

Aligning with the Modern Buying Journey

Today’s purchasers perform considerable research before they even interact with a sales representative. Hence, companies must align their approaches with the contemporary buyer’s journey—which heavily consists of digital research and omnichannel, independent decision-making. Demand gen ensures that businesses remain top of mind and continue to appear relevant across these many touchpoints; it also ensures prospects remain on the path to becoming a sale, from the initial awareness phase to the final conversion act.

Crafting a Winning Demand Generation Strategy

Cohesive, multi-faceted campaigns are the secret to demand generation’s success. They utilize content, technology, and customer insights. Here are the essential ingredients for crafting and executing a demand generation strategy that creates demand and drives revenue.

Identifying Your Ideal Audience

A successful demand generation campaign starts when the real target audience is understood. Businesses should establish Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) that recreate the demographics, psychographics, needs, challenges, and preferences of their actual customers. The better the demand generation team understands the profile of their actual customer, the more efficiently and effectively they can campaign.

Leveraging Buyer Personas

Buyer personas enhance ideal customer profiles by providing more detailed, narrative-based portraits of your audience. They help marketers get into the minds of their prospects and, as a result, allow for more personalized and emotionally appealing campaigns.

Implementing Content Marketing for Demand Creation

At the center of demand generation is high-quality, value-driven content. This can take several forms—blog posts, eBooks, videos, webinars, infographics—but it always addresses the audience’s needs rather than trying to sell them something.

Educational Content for Awareness

Content like thought leadership articles, market trend analyses, and industry reports can be very useful in drawing in prospects who are just starting to look for solutions to their problems. At this stage, the aim is not to close a sale but to provide valuable information that can help the prospect make a more informed decision when the time comes.

Demonstrating Expertise with Case Studies

As leads progress deeper into the funnel, they can examine case studies and success stories that demonstrate how your brand has addressed the same kinds of problems they are currently facing. They can see—vicariously, through your chosen clients—how your brand has performed. These are the kinds of materials that help build trust.

Optimizing SEO and Paid Strategies

A solid SEO strategy guarantees that your education content is found at the right time and by the right people. Pairing this with targeted paid advertising, such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns or LinkedIn ads, ensures that you have premium placement with specific audience segments.

Harnessing Social Media for Awareness

It is essential to raise awareness on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, which are vital tools for this purpose. These platforms are where users spend much of their time, and it is there that brands can best communicate their value. Yet, with so many options and accounts, how can a marketer hope to manage their message? WoopSocial is a tool that helps simplify the process of account management, enabling a brand to better engage with its audience on its chosen platforms.

Measuring the Success of Your Demand Generation Efforts

Marketers must set up key performance indicators (KPIs) if they want to avoid having to wonder about the effectiveness of their demand generation efforts. These indicators, both leading and lagging, give us insights into how a campaign is performing.

Leading Indicators of Success

Primary indicators assess the first contact and interaction with initial brand awareness. These are:

• Organic traffic directed to pages with a clear intent to convert
• The number of people searching for the brand
• Engagement with the brand on social media and through referrals
• The number of visitors who come directly to the website

The Role of WoopSocial in Tracking Social Performance

A social media management tool like WoopSocial can make tracking social engagement metrics like shares, impressions, and follower growth much easier. Tracking these metrics and understanding their influence on more traditional demand generation metrics (like leads and opportunities) can help refine and enhance overall social media strategies as part of more comprehensive demand campaigns.

Lagging Indicators Tied to Conversion

The indicators that follow behind assess how effectively the primary interest has changed into conversions. They comprise:

• The expense incurred to gain each new customer (CPA)
• How fast prospects move through the sales funnel (pipeline velocity)
• The amount of cash that a customer will probably generate for the firm over the duration of that customer’s relationship with the firm (CLV)
• The ratio of proposals made to prospects that actually result in the prospect becoming a customer (proposal-to-close rate)

Final Thoughts on Demand Generation and Tools Like WoopSocial

Sustainable marketing success has its foundations in demand generation. Not simply about generating leads, demand generation is about establishing a culture of trust and authority around your brand. By putting money to work in the form of educational content, your business can resonate with target audiences. Doing this in a way that also spaces the customer journey (the decision-making process a prospect goes through before they become a customer) at the forefront becomes what we call demand gen magic. A lot of companies aren’t doing this effectively. And these companies? They’re not growing. Still, social media can play a role in the customer journey, in making the prospect more “hot.” And if you achieve that in 2022, you’ll find that demand generation and social media will appear more and more closely intertwined.