Expanding your sales funnel is one of the fundamental factors for sustainable business growth and development. At the same time, some companies may have difficulty accomplishing this task. And in this case, demand generation for B2B is the best solution.

Demand generation is not a brand-new practice. However, this strategy is an extremely effective tool for achieving business goals and maximizing marketing efforts.

The reason for the popularity of the demand generation approach lies in the fact that buyer behavior has changed in our time. Thus, many people are reluctant to provide companies with their personal information, which is why such lead-generation efforts like gated content or cold emails no longer work effectively.

Thus, you should use demand generation strategies to achieve your desired audience reach and attract attention to your brand.

Let’s take a closer look at what demand generation is and what tactics you can use to boost your sales.

What Is Demand Generation

Conceptually, a demand generation strategy is a set of practices and actions you take to increase awareness and interest in your offering and brand.

The value of demand generation is that this approach covers every interaction between your business and a potential buyer.

At the core of any demand creation strategy is the consumer, namely their needs and problems. The main task of a business is to identify these needs and offer its product or service as a way to solve the customer’s problem in this case.

This approach makes it possible to attract promising leads, which is a significant advantage in the long term.

Today, popular options for demand generation are demand creation and demand capture.

• Demand creation. The goal of this approach is to raise awareness of the problem and the possible solution you can offer. Achieving this goal involves creating and distributing content through the channels your target audience uses. The benefit of this approach is that it allows you to target passive audiences who may be interested in your product or service.
• Demand capture. The purpose of this approach is different from demand creation. The main challenge here is to target an audience that is actively looking for ways to solve their problems and satisfy their needs. So, the goal of the business is to convert these potential buyers. To do this, you need the channels that customers use when they want to make a purchase, such as the company’s website, review sites, etc. Demand capture is often combined with inbound marketing strategies.

Practices For Demand Generation

Increase Your Presence On Review Websites

Today, most buyers prefer to check reviews about a product or company before making a purchase. There are plenty of sites on the Internet that display ratings of the best companies in specific industries and types of products and services. Such websites collect reviews and rank companies based on them.

Therefore, increasing your presence on review websites is an effective demand-generation strategy. This practice also helps increase your brand awareness.

Plan Live Events

Another effective way to create demand is by hosting live events. This approach helps create a community around your brand and make it more visible both among your target audience and specific accounts with which you would like to collaborate.

The main thing to remember when hosting live events is that you shouldn’t focus all the attention on your product. Instead, make the event educational.

Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

This is a particularly effective tactic when it comes to the B2B sector since it usually involves a situation where people are already looking for a solution to their problems and needs.

Targeting keywords is a great tool for ROI on advertising. Content that targets the keywords that reflect purchase intent is a perfect way to increase awareness of your offer.

Create An ABM Strategy

Account-based marketing is another way to generate demand. However, this approach is more targeted at specific accounts and companies, which is why ABM is a bonus tactic that can be used.

This approach works best when interacting with a niche audience when a business needs to generate demand for groups of buyers within its target accounts. In the case of a larger market, ABM efforts may not be enough.

Try Podcasting

Podcasts are a great option for distributing content across channels that your target audience uses. The value of this approach is that podcasting is an ideal tool to support your demand generation strategy.

Podcasts focus on creating engaging and educational content instead of leads and products to increase awareness about your brand.

Optimize Your Website

Traffic generation is one of the key factors for creating demand. And your website is the best tool to capture demand. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your organization’s website is well-optimized, user-friendly, and gets the job done.

The site should be clear first and foremost. This means that a visitor can easily contact you, quickly find the information they are interested in, and not experience difficulties due to the slow operation of the site or incorrect display of some elements on mobile devices.

Use Paid Social Media

Besides distributing in-feed content on organic social media, do not forget to use paid social media.

This approach allows you to maximize your marketing efforts while also distributing content to specific audiences. In addition, paid social media is an effective tool for retargeting. The value of retargeting is that this tactic allows you to remind users about your brand and products, which is quite valuable, especially in the medium to long term.

Learn more about B2B demand generation at Elevated Third.