You might have come across the term demand generation when looking at other marketing terms and wondered what it is and how it helps businesses to become successful. If you’re not sure what it is, or if you do know but you’re still not sure how it can help B2B businesses, keep reading to find out everything you need to know.
What is demand generation?
The term demand generation refers to the process of creating brand awareness in a way that results in a range of reliable leads. You might be familiar with the term lead generation and wonder what the difference is.
Lead generation is the concrete act of converting potential customers’ attention into actual leads, whereas demand generation happens at the beginning of the process and involves creating awareness and enthusiasm. Not only does it involve your existing audience, but it also relies upon reaching out to new audiences, too.
How can B2B businesses find success with demand generation?
The way to ensure a successful B2B demand generation campaign is by developing a robust process for finding and fostering leads. To really make the most out of every lead that you acquire, consider following these pieces of advice.
Have a clearly defined sales funnel
If you don’t have a clearly defined sales funnel, you’re likely to lose out on a lot of potential leads. You need to be able to filter, measure, sort and prioritise business leads to prevent missing out on exciting opportunities.
While optimising B2B landing pages brings with it a whole host of benefits including increased engagement and ROI, you need to be able to work your way effectively through the sales funnel for them to reach your landing page or website in the first place.
Ensure a good lead qualification process
In the same way that lead generation is a vital process, so is lead qualification. It’s one thing turning the leads over to the sales team but doing it without qualifying them properly will only result in a waste of time and resources.
Many studies have found that approximately three quarters of leads aren’t qualified before they’re passed over the sales people. This drives them to waste precious time getting in contact with possible customers who aren’t yet ready to purchase – time that could be better used elsewhere.
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Nurture existing leads
Making sure to follow up with and keep in contact with existing leads is a very important step in ensuring B2B business success. Even those potential customers who aren’t quite ready to purchase are likely to come around if you keep up regular contact with them.
The best way to ensure that existing leads are always nurtured is to have some kind of follow program in place, allowing you to keep track of your customers and preventing you from missing out on their services further down the line.
And there you have it – everything you need to know about what demand generation is, and how you can use it. Hopefully with these tips you’ll be able to develop efficient processes to ensure your B2B demand generation scheme is as successful as possible.