Demand Generation (Demand Gen) Guide
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is a comprehensive program of sales and marketing initiatives that aim to create interest for your product or service amongst the prospects and existing consumers. This is the process to nurture quality leads to convert them into customers and then retain these customers into loyal clients. By implementing an effective demand generation strategy, you can not only explore opportunities but can also come up with new ideas for business growth by following a data-driven approach. This will prove beneficial for making a sync between sales and marketing alignment.
Demand generation is completely different from traditional marketer, who is evaluated on the number of leads generated along with the total contribution made to the revenue.
In short, the leads given by the demand generation marketer to the sales team should be relevant for the business.
How to increase Demand and Revenue?
Demand generation is an important step in every stage of the marketing funnel right from commencement which includes landing of an unknown visitor to your web page till the conversion of an unknown visitor into your client.
It needs transparency in the funnel to figure out the gaps and opportunities which can be worked upon to improve performance. It is the ideal time to find challenges and develop a solution for continuous growth.
Challenges Associated with Demand Generation?
As said earlier, demand generation is the bridge between sales and marketing teams to ensure continuous growth of business. Below-listed are some challenges marketers have to face while performing demand generation method:
1. Not having Lucrative Web Design
Brand awareness is a must as people should know about your brand, products and services before purchasing. The biggest challenge is to build a successful demand generation strategy to create awareness about the brand. If the prospects are unable to visit your website or the landing page then you must work on resolving issues related to blogging strategy, SEO strategy or the social media strategy.
2. Not Understanding Audience
It is important to understand the audience and the demand generation strategy considers requirements of the prospects firstly. By understanding your audience, you can pitch the right product to the right prospect and experience high conversion rate and profitability ratio. You need to understand the target audience and their requirements and study them in-depth in case many of your leads are quickly turning down the offers you make.
3. Insufficient Conversion Rate of Website
Sometimes markets are overconfident about their content quality, website design, and website traffic. For the generation of quality leads your website must have lucrative deals or rewards which can be offered in exchange for some basic information such as the user’s name, email id, and phone number.
4. Low Conversion Rate
After working rigorously to find leads for the project, the thing which exhausts a demand generation marketer is the low conversion rate. This can be the result of the following reasons:
- Misalignment between Sales and Marketing team
- Lack of sales enablement materials
- Misunderstanding the customer journey
Hold a meeting with the sales team and figure out how they pitch a product to the consumer and how kind of support they need from the marketing team to ensure a high conversion rate.
5. Zero Customer Retention
Getting a lead converted into a customer does not end the task of a demand generation marketer. An effective demand generation marketer should have the sense that he/she needs to work on the consumer even after the client brought a product or service. Client marketing is an ideal way to improve retention rates, promote upsells and minimize customer dissatisfaction.
6. Having trouble in Monitoring and Measuring Results
The demand generation strategies are the best to monitor and measure results as it is empowered by data and technology. In the absence of technological support you will fail as a demand generator marketer and will no longer be able to evaluate the progress of your business as optimization is the continuous process to keep moving ahead.
Proven Strategies for Demand Generation
Demand generation comprises several effective methods. Below-listed are the proven strategies for demand generation which you should also use to take business to the next level:
SMART Goals
Generating demand by following a stable and data-driven manner is the best way to stay focused on the target audience Firstly, set sales as well as marketing goals to pitch buyers. This focused strategy will help you achieve the desired result.
Persona Development & Buyer’s Journey Alignment
A successful lead generation campaign begins with understanding buyer personas. Hold a discussion with the sales and marketing teams and also do some research to know your relevant target audience, their goals, challenges and what are the solutions you have for them.
SEO and SEM
Receive high quality leads and for this you need fully-optimized on-page SEO. The 100% result-oriented keyword strategy and paid search advertising will work in your favor. Also build an effective SEM strategy that will place relevant ads in the right spot for the right target audience.
SEM and SEO are the methods to achieve best results.You must keep in mind that search engines like Google now understand the context search terms. Hence, it is important to build an effective SEO and SEM strategy to yield maximum positive results.
Strategic Content Development
Content was earlier the king but now it is the emperor. Focus on what your client is looking for and how you can bring the same audience to your website by producing quality content. You need to develop a content strategy to publish user engaging content which should offer the information related to your product, service or a brand.
Conversion Optimization
Data-driven approach is an ideal conversion way for every business. This can start with relevant and top stage of the funnel which is call-to-action CTS and completes with the form displayed to take down the details of the users such as email id, name, phone number and name of product or service he/she wishes to avail.
These are some important things which you should know in regard to the demand generation.