One of the biggest challenges for today’s brands is creating demand for products and services. Demand generation aims to identify potential prospects based on their initial behavior and guides them through a nurturing process so that the sales team receives high-quality, highly-qualified leads.

While demand generation marketing has a lot in common with lead generation, this strategy takes time. It spans multiple touchpoints, campaigns, and pieces of content and includes just about anything your brand does to generate buzz, awareness, and recognition.

What is the goal? Better conversations between buyers and sellers, which leads to higher conversion rates and more closed deals. First, it includes the initial campaigns so that your target audience opts in to your mailing list. Furthermore, it guides your audience to engage with your content, attend your events, and more. Demand gen marketing nurtures and engages your prospects, keeping your brand top of mind.

• What is Demand Generation?
• What is the Best Demand Generation Strategies?
• Demand Generation Objectives
• What Does a Demand Generation Marketer do?
• Demand Generation Ideas
• What are Examples of Demand Generation?
• What is Demand Generation B2B Marketing?
• Top 5 Essential Steps to Build a Demand Strategy
• Demand Generation vs Lead Generation
• How to Build a Successful Demand Generation Campaigns
• Demand Generation Books
• Demand Generation Courses
• Demand Generation Marketing Examples
• Demand Generation Marketing Salary
• Demand Generation Marketing Job Description
• Demand Generation Marketing Strategy
• Is SEO a Demand Gen?
• Who is Responsible for Demand Generation?
• What are the Six Steps in the Demand Generation Process?
• What is a Demand Generation Funnel?
• What is Demand Generation Content?
• Demand Generation Marketing Manager Salary
• Demand Generation Marketing Interview Questions
• What is Demand Generation in Sales?
• Demand Generation in Healthcare Business
• What Does Demand Generation Look Like for a B2C Model?
• How to Measure the Success of Your Demand Generation Strategy
• Demand Generation Companies
• How to Create a Demand Generation Plan
• Interactive Tools for Demand Generation
• Why is Demand Generation Important?
• What are Demand Generation Campaigns?
• What are Demand Generation Activities
• Is Demand Generation B2B or B2C?
• Demand Generation for Saas
• Demand Generation Specialist
• Demand Generation vs Demand Harvesting
• Demand Generation vs Product Marketing
• Demand Generation vs Demand Capture
• Demand Generation vs Inbound Marketing
• Demand Generation vs Growth Marketing
• Demand Generation Best Practices
• Demand Generation Benefits
• Demand Generation Career Path
• Demand Generation Framework
• Demand Generation Lead Salary
• Demand Generation Quotes
• Demand Generation Statistics
• Demand Generation Tools
• Demand Generation Specialist Salary

What is Demand Generation?

Demand generation refers to any activity that drives awareness and interest in your product or service with the ultimate goal to create a predictable pipeline that will grow your business.

It’s an umbrella term that covers all your marketing and sales initiatives from every touchpoint in the customer’s journey–from initial prospect interest to upselling customers.

Read Also: Acquisition Entrepreneurship

Demand generation marketing today is no longer just about creating demand for sales. Demand gen isn’t about forcing demand or tricking people into buying things they don’t need. It’s about providing the right information to the right people at the right time so that what you’re sharing is the perfect fit for your ideal customers’ needs.

What is the Best Demand Generation Strategies?

Below we have listed the top 10 demand generation ideas to help you fill your sales funnel. And it may come as no surprise, but they’re all awesome content marketing examples that you’ve probably seen before.

1. Blogging

Blog posts full of thoughtful, helpful information that address audience pain points and feed their interests are a cornerstone of long-term awareness and affinity building. Blogging is one of the most popular forms of content marketing to gain visibility online, attract relevant traffic, engage with your audience, and guide them to download relevant content, sign up for webinars, or otherwise take a next step in learning more.

Blogs can target your audience throughout the buying journey. But they’re most useful at the top of the content marketing funnel.

2. Lead magnets

Lead magnets are incredible demand generation marketing engines — especially when paired with blogging and SEO. If your content marketing strategy includes high-value downloadable content that’s aligned with your audience’s needs, they’ll eat it up!

Original research is just one way to earn media attention, expand reach, drive online shares, and increase traffic to your site.

But, there are many other marketing tactics that will convince site visitors to hand over their email. For instance, you can produce guides, white papers, ebooks, presentations, toolkits, templates, swipe files, infographics, and checklists. From there, you can launch marketing automation sequences to maintain the touch points and engagement.

3. Live events (and virtual ones, too)

In-person events give industry insiders a place to network, learn cutting edge know-how, and hear from experts in their field. Therefore, your company can build crucial relationships by participating in industry events or even throwing your own branded events.

Conferences allow your brand to stand out by creating truly unique experiences. For example, giant gumball machines, oversized sofas, happy hours, homemade chocolate chip cookies, lotteries, interactive iPad games, dazzling videos, human-sized Connect 4 are just a few of the potential ideas you could bring to your booth to attract attention and get the conversation started.

With the COVID-19 outbreak, you can take creative approaches at virtual events, as well. Lean on what works well digitally, such as video, digital tools, and templates.

4. ABM

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns focus on a narrowly-defined audience segment and coordinate your marketing efforts across multiple channels and tactics. Although you’re still trying to drive demand with ABM, you’re precision targeted with your approach, identifying the specific industry and companies (and sometimes the individuals themselves) you want to target prior to your outreach.

An ABM campaign might include outbound activities such as email marketing, LinkedIn ads, InMail, and direct mail. You also might guide your audience to personalized landing pages with customized content or case studies.

5. Webinars

Build thought leadership in your industry and boost your pool of opt-ins with webinars. Because they accomplish many of the same goals as live events, webinars are a great substitute if your audience is still wary of social gatherings in a post-quarantine world. Plus, how else can you realistically secure 30+ minutes of your audience’s time with your marketing?

Webinar content can help your audience overcome common industry pain points or learn about a new product. If you want more impact, then interview complementary solutions providers and industry influencers. This will give everyone access to an expanded audience with little to no extra effort.

6. Podcasts

Podcasting is another effective way to capture an audience’s attention for 30+ minutes at a time, simply by being a format where audiences are already primed to spend that amount of time tuning in. Better still, the podcasting world is far from hitting its content saturation point. That makes podcasting, for many industries, a relatively low-competition way to build thought leadership, establish a cadence of repeated brand touch points, and start forging a relationship with your audience.

7. Video

Videos are a rich, immersive way to connect with and inspire your audience. It’s a great branding tool, as well as a powerful demand generation vehicle. Videos are effective in getting your audience to remember your brand, because visual content is recalled at a far higher rate than text-based content.

8. Direct mail

Direct mail is still a straightforward demand generation tactic because it’s an easy way to get your business’s name in front of the right people — especially for B2B companies. To make sure your mailers don’t get immediately recycled, identify specific targets at each business and tailor your offers or promotions to them. In this way, direct mail and ABM are a match made in demand generation heaven.

Also, never underestimate the power of a physical box. When was the last time you didn’t open a FedEx or UPS package?

9. Sweepstakes and contests

Everyone loves free stuff! Throw online sweepstakes and other contests that give your audience a chance to win a free product, service, or reward in exchange for their contact information. If you sell subscription-based software, offering a year of your product for free can also create a loyal convert. 

If you really want your contest to shine, then ask questions that your audience must answer in order to enter. Their responses can become data points in your market research, help you build customer personas, or create a rich pool of user-generated content.

10. Social campaigns

Connect with your audience on the social platforms they use and run social media campaigns that showcase your content and invite engagement. Monitor keywords related to customer pain points so your brand can jump in with helpful information whenever someone needs a solution you can provide. Take advantage of enterprise-grade monitoring tools such as Brandwatch or Keyhole to make your social strategy consistent and scalable.

Demand Generation Objectives

Understanding the purpose behind these goals and objectives and aligning them with individual employee goals will help drive the success of the campaign and the company as a whole. Creating these measurable goals will not only allow you to track progress, but also make course corrections along the way.

Know your customer
Create targeted content that speaks directly to your customer. Your customers have specific needs. Study them, understand them, and use that knowledge to your advantage. Create marketing pieces that address their needs and focus on solving their problems.

Budget
Spend wisely. Determine the best way to reach your customers and promote your content. Social media, PPC, Video ads etc. Go to where your customers are. The advertising platforms today are extremely intelligent, and with the right mix you can get your targeted content in front of your ideal customers.

Sales & Marketing
These two departments need to work closely when creating a lead scoring system and mapping out the lead qualification process. Understanding the buyer’s journey and identifying and defining what makes for a qualified lead is a necessary part of the goal setting process.  

To have success, sales and marketing must regularly communicate and provide each other with feedback throughout the campaign. Marketing must share any new programs or content, and sales must share how the customers are responding to that content.

Tracking
Tracking a lead throughout the buying process provides many marketing metrics and insights. Benchmarks can be identified, enabling marketers to set a baseline and focus on ways of improving campaign performance. Marketers can easily see when there is a break in the funnel, identify the problem, and fix it in a timely matter.

Additionally, they can recognize trends around customer actions, like when a customer typically renews or cancel services, and then develop content plans to combat these challenges.

The ultimate demand generation goal measurement is simple: leads closed and leads won. But the plan to get there, the specific goals, and the various types and amount of needed content will all vary depending on your business.

What Does a Demand Generation Marketer do?

Demand generation combines marketing tactics, strategies and programs to create awareness and drive interest in your products or services. The role of a demand generation manager (DGM) is to manage the team and the campaigns that create awareness and interest.

To achieve overall business goals, DGMs have to go beyond the product or service to appeal to the motivations of the ideal customer. 

This involves using marketing automation, sales and marketing data, and different strategies (e.g., account-based marketing and lead generation) to build processes designed to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time.

Demand generation managers are technically part of the marketing department. They typically report to a CMO, VP of Marketing, or director of demand generation and work to plan, build, and execute marketing programs.

Demand Generation Ideas

Here are 5 demand generation ideas you can try today.

1. Develop Educational Content

Audiences within the B2B community are always looking to upgrade their knowledge. This may be to self-improve or advance their professional careers. If you have expertise, then show it by sharing free educational content as a download. 

This will build interest, and it’ll entice prospects to buy. One study shows educational content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy.

2. Make Your Content Interactive

If you’re in an industry where your customers use formulas, then having a tool to calculate numbers is ideal. This will turn your website into a go-to resource. Consider making the tool a part of your site, so it continues driving traffic back. Who knows, maybe one of these visits they’ll decide to convert into a customer. 

This works for real estate, finance, home remodeling, and various other industries. Learn what problems your audience is trying to resolve and develop a tool they can use to help. 

And in doing so, it can boost your odds of getting more customers. According to one report, interactive content can increase engagement 2x better than static content. This is why 62% of B2B marketers use it.

3. Offer Free Trials and Services

There’s nothing that gains attention like the word “free.” So much so, people are willing to try just about anything once if it doesn’t cost them a dime. Consider offering a free service for your prospective customers to try. Or offer a free trial for 14 to 30 days. Then see if you can get them to provide feedback, so you understand why they did or didn’t become a paying customer. 

One report shows B2B companies that use free trials see an average of 66% in conversions. This is refreshing news if you’re worried that giving away free things is counterproductive.

4. Send Corporate Gifts

Sending gifts to prospects is a powerful way to drive demand for your product or service. When done effectively, it can potentially drive a over 200% return on investment. You can send an assortment of gifts, including wine, cookies, fruit baskets, candle kits, company swag, and more. When you send gifts to prospective customers, it entices them to reach out. So consider using this method as a way to book calls and meetings. 

It also creates a good first impression, which increases the odds of them remembering your brand. Look for clues on which gifts would appeal to a prospect. You can learn this through conversations on social media or the phone. 

There are gift-sending platforms available to track your corporate gifting campaigns. Use this to monitor who converts and who doesn’t.

5. Generate Business Opportunities

It’s not easy getting attention for content when it’s published on your own website. Especially if it isn’t well-known. To counter this, you can leverage the audience of blogs that already have a generous-sized audience. Find an influencer in your industry to write a guest blog post for. Then their audience will see it and potentially find interest in your brand. 

You’ll also get potential traffic from the influencer’s following on social media. They’ll likely share your guest post on their profile to garner attention from those who may not regularly visit the blog. 

According to reports from brands, guest posting can increase new visitors and convert them into leads. For example, Okdork.com received 73% more views from new visitors (in just two days!). And BufferApp used guest blogging to acquire 100,000 customers in only nine months.

What are Examples of Demand Generation?

Demand generation has three steps: create demand for a product, generate leads that are very qualified, and pass them off to sales to become customers. But how companies navigate this process takes many shapes depending on target audiences and products being offered.

For startups, nothing is more important than demand generation. Getting the most qualified people from unknown to customer is vital to survival. That’s why they’re the origin of some of the most clever demand generation examples marketing has ever seen.

Here are 3 creative tactics that startups use to create demand.

1. Give something away

Never underestimate how much people love free stuff—even if it has your company’s logo on it. Branded products can create demand when they’re used strategically. These low-cost, functional items are worth their weight in gold if you can get them on the right people.

New Relic and IFTTT are two companies that successfully leaned on corporate swag to generate product demand in their early days.

2. Schedule a webinar

Webinars are one of the best demand generation examples. Often used to generate product demand, these videos are normally gated, requiring an email address to reserve a spot or access the content afterwards.

Webinars can be how-tos on products or Q&As on issues facing your target audience. Either format works as long as people learn something new and you can easily repurpose the content for other campaigns and platforms.

Another pro tip? Partner with a happy customer to do a deep dive into how they use your product or co-host with a relevant company so you can tap into their marketing list, too.

3. Build a tool

Demand generation obviously begins by creating demand for a product, meaning your audience might not even know that they have the problem that your product solves.

Free tools make it easy to start relationships with these audiences so you can begin nurturing them towards a sale. These tools work best when they solve a common pain point that’s related in some way to your product.

What is Demand Generation B2B Marketing?

B2B demand generation is an integrated marketing approach with the goal to drive awareness and demand for a product or service in the B2B marketplace. Marketing teams focus on generating leads for the sales team that result in new opportunities. Many marketing channels are worked on simultaneously to achieve the best results.

Marketing teams can work on multiple channels because various departments in the marketing team will have different objectives.

Demand generation is important because it accelerates business growth. The marketplace is saturated and without demand generation, it is difficult to rise above the competition. For start-ups, the right demand generation strategy is crucial to becoming profitable fast to keep the company afloat and attract new customers and investors.

Without demand generation, companies would fully rely on their sales teams and organic methods to attract customers. This is too stagnant and will result in slow business growth.

In B2B, reference cases are crucial. Naturally, the more customers you have, the easier it is to collect reference cases. It’s one of the most impactful tools to attract customers.

Through demand generation, you are able to create awareness and interest for your company at an accelerated pace. In turn, this will result in new customers and more reference cases.

Top 5 Essential Steps to Build a Demand Strategy

Let’s take a look at five essential steps to build a successful B2B demand generation strategy.

Step 1. Build awareness

With today’s competitive sales and marketing landscape, brand awareness is critical for a consistent flow of quality leads. And while it may seem straightforward, building brand awareness isn’t simply gaining the attention of a potential buyer. 

A true and lasting brand awareness strategy leaves potential buyers with a lingering, positive impression of a company, and makes them more likely to trust that company when it offers solutions to the customer’s challenges or needs. 

One surefire way to increase visibility to and credibility with buyers? Customer reviews. Specifically: recent, authentic reviews.

Businesses should prioritize authentic customer reviews because they offer a brief, peer-provided product summary and help buyers narrow their focus. 

Individually, reviews act as candid consumer feedback related to real-world use, free from marketing hype. Collectively, customer reviews provide high-level insights that help buyers quickly filter through a massive amount of available products. 

Step 2. Develop a content strategy

Hand-in-hand with brand awareness, building industry expertise is a key element of reliable demand gen. Industry expertise means that your brand is seen as an authority in its field from the very first interaction with a potential customer. 

This kind of expertise helps build client trust, and lays the groundwork for important conversations about customer pain points and the solutions your business can offer. A solid content marketing strategy that offers timely, helpful insights at each step of the purchase journey is the best way to build expertise. 

Providing content that answers buyer questions/concerns while they move through their purchase journey builds purchase confidence and brand credibility. Those customers will remember your brand as a guide within the marketplace and look to your business as subject matter experts for future needs. 

If you have the marketing resources, develop curated or personalized content to address the needs of a specific kind of high-value lead. This could mean leads that most reliably convert or leads that are prepared to invest the most money with your company. Use segment-specific information to craft content and calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide buyers through their purchase and anticipate questions and concerns common to your group of high-value leads.

Include messaging that solves for hurdles from the very first time a lead comes across your product or service to their final questions about purchasing. When in doubt, focus on the primary reasons buyers consider a product or service provider as they are first searching.

Step 3. Nurture high-quality leads

Once you’ve made first contact with a potential customer, your marketing team hands over the lead details to the sales team and congratulates each other on a job well done, right?

Wrong. Healthy, reliable demand generation requires a full lead nurturing strategy from first contact through decision and purchase. 

Marketing teams should work alongside sales throughout the purchase journey, remaining in tune with buyer questions, concerns, and attitudes. Depending on how robust their resources are, marketing teams should continue to interact with these high-value leads all the way through purchase by providing helpful content to answer common questions.

Your marketing team should focus on the types of content prospective clients need, as well as the most appropriate channels to share that information. The goal with this kind of targeted nurture campaign is to reach customers with the right content or assets at the moment when that information is most helpful to them. 

We recommend closely monitoring lead feedback to get a sense of whether your outreach strategies are meeting customer needs. Regularly review lead nurture track performance data and take note of stages that receive greater engagement or increase unsubscribe rates. Adjust your lead nurture tracks and messaging accordingly, as often as necessary to maximize results.

Step 4. Incorporate account-based marketing

As you begin to see a reliable trickle of leads coming in from your demand gen strategies, you may want to fast-track high-value leads. This is where an account-based marketing strategy can set teams up for success.

Everything in an account-based marketing strategy depends on a deep, reliable understanding of the accounts and audiences you’re targeting. ABM requires marketing and sales teams to strategically select accounts to target and nurture through customized engagement and support. 

Marketing teams should design target company personas based on high-value clients that are most likely to convert and/or grow. Evaluate what business objectives and values these target accounts tend to share, as well as what major steps in their buying journey precede purchase. 

Use the target personas to inform how you market to these leads, providing them with personalized content that directly addresses their unique pain points and questions.

Step 5. Invest in partner marketing

The recent rapid shift from in-person to virtual business interactions mean a sharper increased focus on digital marketing. Even as businesses begin to return to safe, in-person interactions with customers and staff, it seems likely that increased digital interactions are here to stay. 

Companies need to share their message online, but pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can be difficult to manage alone. Partnering with a third-party provider can allow your business to reach a curated, prescreened audience.

Many companies choose to start on some of the broadest search or social media platforms, but then struggle to narrow their messaging. A simpler way to quickly get your message in front of the right people is to find a partner who has already carved out the online audience you want. 

For just about any product or service, a base of potential customers is waiting. Third-party partners can get your company’s products or services in front of the right buyers at the right point. 

Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

Many B2B marketers recognize the value of both and incorporate them into the same campaigns. However, in order to see results, you need to separate the two and have them work together in sequence.

The difference between demand generation and lead generation is simple. Demand generation is based on marketing campaigns to create a demand or interest in your product or service. Lead generation marketing is based on campaigns to collect information about potential customers and turn them into leads.

The purpose of demand generation is to increase excitement about your company’s product or service and make people want to buy from you. Demand generation campaigns capture leads on specific interests and are usually generated through lead generation landing page forms for free trials or for people who want more information about your product or service. This is often a long-term plan that emphasizes brand positioning and awareness. As such, you want to reach as many people as possible.

With lead generation, the opposite is true. In order to generate more of the right leads, you need to capture information about potential buyers. After that, you can use targeted marketing campaigns to nurture your leads with relevant content. Lead generation content is typically gated and consists of whitepapers, eBooks, how-to guides, survey reports, webinars, and thought leadership articles.

You must use a data-driven strategy in order to execute successful demand generation and lead generation campaigns. First, you need to understand your buyer personas. Once you’ve looked at the data and analyzed information such as the job function, company size, and industry of your best buyers, it’s much easier to hit them with relevant campaigns.

How to Build a Successful Demand Generation Campaigns

Successful demand generation campaigns aren’t made overnight. However, they are made in eight steps.

1. Lay the groundwork

To kick things off on the right foot for your demand generation efforts, you need to put in the groundwork and your research. This means:

• identifying your ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
• fleshing out customer personas
• understanding painpoints,
• defining customer language
• understanding buying behaviors
• mapping current solutions

Once you’ve done this, you should have a clearer idea of how you can approach potential customers with demand generation tactics that speak to them and where they’re at.

2. Outline your solution

Strategies informed by the best demand generation practices come from a well-rounded understanding of your solution. This is not your product. When we say solution here, we mean how your product addresses the problem that your customers have. When you refer to your product as a solution, you bring a more customer-centric approach to your efforts.

Outline your solution in a way that talks to your target audience going on what you’ve learned in the previous step. It’s a good idea to talk to your sales team here to understand better how they’re already presenting your product to qualified leads.

3. Align on the specifics

Next up, align on the specifics of your demand generation marketing campaign. What does this include? Pleased you asked:

• Publishing channels: inbound marketing
• Campaign length:
• Content types:
• Budget:
• Goals & KPIs: brand awareness, lead generation, sales team, sales funnel, qualified leads
• Other key demand generation metrics

Now you’ve planned as thoroughly as possible. It’s time to move on to the creative part of your campaign.

4. Create content

When it comes to demand or lead generation, teams often tend to jump straight into content and then wonder why their campaigns failed. “That video was killer; it just never took off.” Why? Because they hadn’t done three steps of research first.

Yes, your content is King. However, if it’s not informed, then it will undoubtedly fall flat. Only now is truly the moment to put your marketing efforts into content creation. Do this wisely. The best demand generation strategies invest in quality content and you should be doing the same for your campaign. This is where the largest part of your budget should go. No matter how much money you put into distribution and reaching potential leads, there’s no point if you’re not giving them an experience that resonates. 

5. Launch internally

Demand generation leads to lead generation. It will massively aid your inbound marketing strategies and your sales team should start to see their sales funnel flooded with qualified leads. So, let’s prepare them for it.

 Launch your DG campaign internally so your sales process and the sales cycle are prepared as can be for the influx.

This means you’ll need to inform your teams of the type of lead magnets you’re putting out there, the pain points you’re addressing, and where you’re reaching these prospective customers. 

Ensure there’s no repeat content in your sales cycle and that any team that comes into contact with incoming leads knows exactly what they should know about your product, the content they’ve seen, and any direct mail they have received.

6. Launch to potential users  

Once you’re operationally ready to handle the lead influx, it’s time to launch your demand gen campaign and start to generate leads for your business. A lot of brands tend to do this—thinking they get one shot at launching a campaign. 

Firstly, this is a myth. If you don’t get it right the first time around, that’s okay.

Secondly, if you’re unsure if everything is running smoothly, either run internal tests with a few select members of staff or release them to a smaller group of people with targeted ads. 

This method will enable you to check everything’s going to plan before you release your campaign to the masses.

7. Boost, test, and tweak

The best demand gen strategies and their campaigns keep you on your toes. If you want to increase your conversion rates and stand the best chance of reaching high-quality leads, you’ll need to remain proactive, not reactive, throughout your campaign.

How? Boost that content that’s doing well. Test new variants of content you’re unsure about, and tweak campaign copy, visuals, and more until you get optimal results: BTT. 

In doing so, you give your campaign the best opportunity to create demand without having to release an entirely new campaign.

8. Review and repeat

As you’d do with any content marketing strategy regularly, once your campaign draws to a close, it’s time to review, rinse and repeat—if it worked! Did you hit the initial goals you’d set? If you didn’t, then why didn’t you?

Gather feedback from your campaign’s qualitative results and quantitative feedback from your sales and marketing team if they came into contact with leads resulting from the campaign.

Demand Generation Books

Book #1: Driving Demand; Transforming B2B Marketing to Meet the Needs of the Modern Buyer

This isn’t just a primer on demand generation how-to’s. It’s a from-the-trenches look at organizational transformation, written by someone who’s spent a highly successful career in B2B marketing. Before author Carlos Hidalgo’s current role as Founder & CEO of VisumCx, he served as a CEO, marketing director and account manager at B2B firms.

This book offers B2B marketers insight on:

• Why a strategic mindset wins over a campaign-focused mindset.
• The value and limitations of marketing technology.
• The importance of deep buyer knowledge, including behavioral insights.
• The human side of demand gen, including team organization and alignment.
• Training and management strategies for a fast-changing B2B marketing environment.

Book #2: The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

Author Mark Roberge is currently a senior lecturer at Harvard. Prior to that role, he was Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot. This book contains many high-value insights from the lessons he learned guiding HubSpot from a tiny startup to $100 million in revenue in seven years.

If you’ve ever felt that it was challenging to scale your organization’s marketing and sales efforts, this book is definitely for you. There’s no formula for growth that works for everyone. However, Roberge breaks success down into four key categories, or formulas, that every demand and growth-focused organization must master:

• The Sales Hiring Formula
• The Sales Training Formula
• The Sales Management Formula
• The Demand Generation Formula

In addition to in-depth success secrets for each of these four formulas, Roberge shares his knowledge on where technology fits into the growth-focused B2B organization.

Book #3: Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know

Absolutely. Data-Driven Marketing has been described as “ground-breaking” and “an essential read,” and was named the best book of 2011 by the American Marketing Association. Not only is it valuable, but it’s also engaging, thanks to well-paced writing, an accessible tone and salient examples.

This book is targeted towards marketers who are struggling to make the most of their budget, and understand the relationship between marketing activities and revenue. Accordingly, it’s focused on helping B2B pros master analytics techniques and maximize ROI, even if you’re not a data whiz.

Author Mark Jeffrey, Founder and CEO at Aquimo, has a background in successful entrepreneurship and executive-level education in higher ed. In this book he demonstrates why just 20% of marketers succeed at data-driven decision-making as well as:

• 15 key marketing metrics
• Overcoming the 5 obstacles to data-driven marketing
• How to adopt consistently data-informed decision making

In addition to these insights and original research, readers gain access to free, downloadable templates for calculating return on investment (ROI) and other metrics.

Book #4: Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

Best-selling author Seth Godin has authored 17 books, and coined the idea of permission-based marketing in the mid-1990’s. His website, Seth’s Blog, is frequently named among the most influential marketing blogs online.

Purple Cow isn’t a marketing book, at least not strictly. It’s a book about succeeding against changing odds in today’s business climate through the process of innovation and remarkable product positioning. Godin’s premise is that only “purple cows” or remarkable brands can stand out against fierce competition, arguing that organizations like Google and Ikea are at the top due to this same approach.

This book has value for marketers in demonstrating techniques for customer empathy, the formula for “infectious” products and competitive analysis – all of which are detailed in Godin’s signature, straightforward style of writing. Filled with dozens of thought exercises on packaging, positioning and pushing the limits, it’s a highly transformative read.

Purple Cow is likely Godin’s best-known work. While it was originally published in 2003 and revised in 2009, it’s still in the top-fifty best-selling books for marketing and business on Amazon. Per the publisher, it’s been translated into 36 languages and influenced the careers of millions of marketers, sales professionals and other business professionals.

Book #5: Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

Most B2B marketers can find strong solidarity with author Ryan Holiday’s definition of a growth hacker:

“Someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable and scalable.”

At just 141 pages, this book is both short and an easily consumable read that could transform your demand marketing plan in a few sessions of reading while you’re at the gym.

Key topics of discussion include:

• How to build growth hacking into your product and positioning
• What hasn’t changed in great marketing (hint: the importance of customer empathy)
• How to perfect the art of “pull” in a permission-based marketing world
• The value of including customer retention activities in your marketing strategy

Demand Generation Courses

In a survey conducted by Demand Gen Report, 70% of marketers said their demand generation budgets will continue to increase in the coming year, with 34% estimating that spending will grow by at least 20%.

This increased investment has put added pressure on marketers to level up their demand generation expertise. Unfortunately, deciding what skills or technologies to focus on can be daunting.

We’ve gathered a list of the absolute must-have online certifications for demand generation professionals.

1. Adobe Marketo Certification
2. HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification
3. Google Adwords Search Certification
4. Salesforce Pardot Certification
5. Drift Conversational Marketing Certification

Demand Generation Marketing Examples

You can get some examples of demand generation campaign tactics and the brands that know how to get things right.

Share Your Knowledge (for free)

One of the simplest ways to create demand out of thin air is to offer something for nothing. From in-depth blog content to white papers, tools, trials, and tutorials, whatever it is you decide to give away needs to be valuable.

Whether it’s an ebook, industry report, or any other resource, your goal is to make it crystal clear, why someone would want your products or services. Though keep in mind, at this stage, you’ll want to subtly introduce your brand and its products, by first proving that you know what you’re talking about. Chances are, people will be more willing to pay for your products or services down the road if they were impressed by whatever you offered up.

Early in the sales funnel you might promote something like Wistia’s Brand Affinity Marketing Guide. The guide looks at the idea of moving away from content marketing as we know it, and toward what they call “brand affinity marketing.”

The concept challenges the status quo, demonstrates expertise, and brings value to anyone interested in marketing, whether they’re ready to try Wistia or not. At the bottom of the funnel, you might embrace a more direct approach.

Team Up with Industry Superstars

Partner marketing is an effective way to expose your brand to new audiences by co-creating content/experiences with other companies.

While marketing partnerships can take many different forms, common examples include things like webinars, podcasts, and joint reports that both parties can promote to their respective audiences to increase reach.

Host a Webinar

Often used to generate demand, webinars are typically gated, with an email address the usual price of admission. While webinars are often associated with lectures and poorly-designed slide slows, your approach (and your visuals) is up to you.

Host industry Q&As that discuss key issues facing your audience. Walk viewers through a few new strategies or let them see inside your product. You might also build in an interactive element by polling viewers on Instagram Stories or encouraging them to tweet questions, or for smaller sessions, passing the mic to viewers.

Embrace the Case Study

Team up with a happy customer for a deep dive into your product or service has helped them lock down a “win.” If possible, get in touch with customers that have an audience that overlaps with your target market.

Combine Data into a Joint Report

Teaming up with the right partner can allow you to take your brand’s research and turn it into something big. In this example, Backlinko and BuzzSumo teamed up to analyze 912M blog posts and shared their findings. The report offers a ton of stats, graphics, and insights into things like the relationship between content length and social shares or how word count impacts

Show Some Authenticity

Authenticity is one of those buzzwords that has cropped up over the past few years in response to the overly polished online personas we’ve come to associate with influencers and brands.

Here’s an infographic featured in a post by Classy, that offers up lessons learned on the job after creating over 1,000 blog posts. The graphic, like the post as a whole, is personal, offering little tidbits of information about the people that work there, but doesn’t veer into “overshare” territory or go off-topic.

Use Similar & Lookalike Audiences

Remarketing is hugely important when it comes to demand generation, as it helps increase awareness and gently remind past customers and visitors to return to your website.

Traditionally, you’d upload an audience list to Google Ads or your social platform of choice and target people who, say, abandoned their cart before checking out.

Demand Generation Marketing Salary

The average Demand Generation Marketing Manager in the US makes $90,000. Demand Generation Marketing Managers make the most in Los Angeles at $90,000, averaging total compensation 0% greater than the US average.

The average annual pay for a Demand Generation Manager in California for example is $84,260 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $40.51 an hour. This is the equivalent of $1,620/week or $7,021/month.

While ZipRecruiter is seeing salaries as high as $141,009 and as low as $42,700, the majority of Demand Generation Manager salaries currently range between $72,490 (25th percentile) to $112,708 (75th percentile) with top earners (90th percentile) making $129,092 annually in California.

The average pay range for a Demand Generation Manager varies greatly (as much as $40,218), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience.

Demand Generation Marketing Job Description

As a demand generation manager, you’ll work as part of a larger digital marketing team to help create interest in and excitement for a company’s products or services to attract and retain customers, as well as drive revenue.

Demand generation managers oversee all of the tactics used to develop and cultivate long-term customer relationships. They use their skills and strategic knowledge to help businesses enter and succeed in new markets, advertise and sell new products, and fine-tune their customer experience programs. All of this can give their companies a competitive edge.

Some common job responsibilities you’ll have as a demand generation manager include:

• Developing and executing short- and long-term multi-channel campaigns to drive leads and the sales pipeline
• Leading A/B testing strategies and execution across all channels
• Monitoring and optimizing campaigns and programs
• Developing customer personas and knowing their buying preferences
• Knowing the company’s brand and products inside and out
• Assisting in content development to target consumers throughout the customer lifecycle
• Working within a team of digital marketing professionals and collaborating with other departments, like sales and content, to develop and enhance strategies and build effective support programs, such as sales enablement
• Identifying new markets and advertising tactics to encourage business growth
• Assuring buy-in and budget support from senior leadership and stakeholders
• Measuring and analyzing campaign and marketing success
• Delivering performance reports to leadership and departments you partner with

Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

1. Web insights and inbound marketing

Your website is one of your most important demand generation strategies. It is where you can observe the digital fingerprints of people visiting your website, which reveal their interests, pain points, content preferences, and even urgency. Many inbound marketing tactics include content offers, blog posts, and other website resources.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing is the fuel that powers your demand gen engine. In fact, 70% of buyers ranked “relevant content that speaks directly to our company” as “very important”  in the Demand Gen 2020 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey, with  76% of respondents saying the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their buying decision.

Your content powers the inbound activities that attract and pull prospects into your sales funnel. Content can include anything from blog posts, press releases, case studies, eBooks, white papers, infographics, videos, emails, and so much more. If you can build it, they are likely to come.

The most important piece of a content marketing strategy is matching content with the prospect’s individual pain points, readiness to buy, content preferences, and where they’re at in their purchasing journey. You should start by asking yourself and your sales team a few questions like:

• Who are our ideal prospects and customers?
• How do they go about making buying decisions?
• What are their questions and their pain points?
• What are some of their common objections?

You use answers to those questions to guide the content you create, making it more relevant to your audience, which will help you attract higher quality, more suitable leads.

3. Social media marketing

Social networks today aren’t just a B2C marketing tool; they also make a great channel for demand generation. According to the 2014 Demand Gen Report content preferences survey, 75 percent of B2B executives get more of their content through social networks or peer connection now than they did a year ago.

And according to Forrester’s B2B Social Technographics, fully 100% of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes. Besides impacting lead gen activities, social networks may also influence your prospects’ vendor selection and buying decisions.

• The first is focus. Always be focused on your customers’ needs. This includes listening, joining groups, and creating conversations.
• Secondly, you’ll want to inform. This includes educating your audience on all things related to your vertical – or theirs.
• And the final pillar is trust. If you’re successful in the first two pillars, then the third one should follow suit easily.

The most important part of a social media strategy should be to build rapport with your audience so that they can look to you as a thought leader and a problem solver, and to really build trust. You should work to inspire your audience consistently. It’s easier than you think.

4. Lead scoring

Lead scoring uses a point system to assign values based on a person’s online and offline behavior. These actions can help us gauge where the buyer is on their journey and their growing sales readiness. Typically, sales and marketing teams within an organization will work together to determine how many points a prospect will get for different activities. For example, reading a blog post might get you two points and downloading a white paper might be worth five. Responding to a prospecting email might get you 10.

Once a lead has accrued enough points (based on your organization and how your organization defines that quality lead), they can be passed to sales, flagged for follow up, or dropped into a more accelerated nurture program. Lead scoring is a crucial piece of the demand generation machine. In fact, according to Marketing Sherpa, organizations that use lead scoring see a 77 percent increase lift in their lead generation ROI.

Is SEO a Demand Gen?

Content marketers, SEOs, and demand generation staff work in different ways. However, they share a common goal of attracting prospects and ultimately boosting conversion and sales. 

The content team shares the brand story that’s overlooked by the organization’s brand strategy. The SEO team optimizes the content for the search engines to grow organic rankings and traffic. Whereas, the demand gen team works closely with the sales team to understand and win over the target audience. 

Imagine what happens when these teams work together! 

The three areas put together can take the business to the next level. Content marketers and SEOs get interesting audience insights and learn what they are seeking and how they prefer to consume information. On the other hand, demand generation teams can use the value-adding content to engage prospects at every stage of the sales journey. 

Content and SEO have always been core components of go-to-market strategies. Today, modern B2B buyers have grown independent and prefer to do their research. In fact, research shows that most B2B customers have progressed more than 70% through their decision-making process even before interacting with a sales representative.

Hence, it is up to marketers to guide them through the process with thought-leadership content in the format they consume and on the channels, they frequent the most. 

Content marketing for SaaS demand generation prioritizes content and SEO. This can trigger a methodical shift in the perception of the audience, thereby capturing mindshare and driving brand affinity. Hence, content and SEO are the lifeblood of demand generation. 

Who is Responsible for Demand Generation?

1. Director of Demand Generation

A director of demand generation should ideally sit directly under the VP of marketing. This role is responsible for the development and implementation of your holistic demand generation strategy. They’re responsible for automizing flows and processes where possible, and keeping tabs on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and overall demand generation efforts. 

The director of demand generation is also expected to work closely with directors from your marketing and sales team, maintaining feedback loops to ensure everyone has a solid overview of the demand generation process, campaigns, messaging, and learnings to help generate better marketing qualified leads. 

This role will develop databases to target key roles and verticals, drive predictable pipeline activity, determine the best tactical content marketing mix, manage marketing budget allocations across multiple campaigns, head up reporting dashboards, source and implement new technology for the team to utilize. 

Soft skills: Time management, collaboration, communication, problem-solving, leadership, organization. 

Hard skills: 7+ years of digital marketing experience,lead generation & nurturing, strategic, SEO, PPC, lead scoring, marketing, a deep understand of popular CRMs.

Average salary: $130,000

2. Demand Generation Specialist 

A Demand Generation Specialist is the Director’s right hand. This role aid with the implementation and day-to-day management of the marketing strategy and marketing efforts. The specialist should be able to identify a successful demand generation campaign and repeat its success as suggestions for future campaigns. 

At times demand generation specialists will be expected to showcase thought leadership. However, their day-to-day will be ensuring all marketing automation flows are ticking over, as well as any active demand gen campaigns. They should have great knowledge of email marketing, understanding of the sales cycle, and the brand’s target audience. 

Soft skills: Adaptability, planning, prioritizing, optimism, demand gen idea exchange, questioning, dependability, critical observation 

Hard skills: 4+ Years of digital marketing experience, email marketing, CRM, marketing operations, project management, sales pipelines, lead generation, demand generation tools. 

Average salary: $57,000

What are the Six Steps in the Demand Generation Process?

When your company has a marketing funnel that is measured, you’re able to meet customers where they are in the sales and marketing process. You’ll be equipped to give customers the appropriate content and messaging that moves them closer to a sale.

The typical B2B funnel consists of six stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. Demand generation marketing addresses potential customers at the top of the funnel in the awareness stage.

For demand generation, you’re interacting with a large, broad audience that is not familiar with your brand, service, or product. You want to avoid any sales content. Instead, offer them blog posts, downloads, free ebooks, infographics, and engaging social media content.

What is a Demand Generation Funnel?

A demand generation funnel is a template that prospective customers will follow as they go through the different stages of their journey. The purpose of each stage of this funnel is to provide potential buyers with the information and experiences they need to move forward and make a purchase.

It’s important to adopt the right demand generation strategy to target the right prospective customers, achieve conversion rates for your leads, and generate revenue.

A demand gen funnel is an important tool because it helps you visualize the different stages your target audience goes through from the moment they become aware of your brand to the moment they make a purchase decision.
It also helps you identify the channels and strategies that help prospects move from one stage to the next during this process.

What is Demand Generation Content?

Demand-gen content targets audiences who aren’t familiar with your brand or your products and aren’t even sure that they need them. The goal of demand-gen content is to make people more aware that there are alternative options to what they currently use.

“To plainly define it, demand generation creates the demand for a product or service through a gradual and holistic marketing process that spans the entire company—from product creation, brand marketing, content marketing, and product marketing,”.

Simply creating content isn’t enough to appeal to today’s consumers. Not only does your content need to stand out and compete with the endless stream of viral TikTok sensations, news stories, and competing branded posts, but it also needs to be relevant to your target audiences.

According to the 2019 Meaningful Brands report by Havas, 90 percent of consumers expect brands to deliver content, but 58 percent of consumers think the content that comes from brands is irrelevant or isn’t meaningful.  

Demand Generation Marketing Manager Salary

The average Demand Generation Manager in the US makes $130,300. Demand Generation Managers make the most in Denver at $130,300, averaging total compensation 0% greater than the US average.

The salaries of Demand Generation Managers in the US range from $66,090 to $187,200 , with a median salary of $128,750 . The middle 60% of Demand Generation Managers makes $128,750, with the top 80% making $187,200.

Demand Generation Marketing Interview Questions

When interviewing a potential demand generation marketer, you’ll want to ask questions that will help you determine if they are the right fit for your company. Here are our 10 best interview questions to ask:

1. Can you describe a successful campaign that you’ve executed, what did you do, why did you do it and what were the results?
2. Are you more creative or more analytical?
3. What tactics do you use to generate demand and why?
4. How do you measure the success of your campaigns?
5. What MarTech tools do you have experience with?
6. How much revenue have you generated from your marketing campaigns?
7. How have you tackled attribution?
8. What do you do to ensure there’s good alignment with the sales team?
9. What demand generation metrics would you want to know from us to guide you where to start?
10. If you could spend an extra £200k on demand generation in your current role, what would you spend it on and why?

What is Demand Generation in Sales?

Demand generation refers to the comprehensive program of sales and marketing initiatives that aim to generate interest for your product or service, nurture high-fit prospects into customers and retain those customers for the long-term.

By executing an effective demand generation strategy, you’re not only discovering opportunities, but also creating them; from data-driven business growth to sales and marketing alignment, demand generation allows marketers to make smarter decisions for their companies.

Unlike the traditional marketer, who is measured on the number of leads they bring in, the demand generation marketer is measured on their total contribution to revenue. In other words, the leads that a demand generation marketer passes over to sales must be a truly good fit for the company and therefore have a high likelihood of becoming customers.

Demand Generation in Healthcare Business

Patient acquisition today is one of the costlier propositions for any healthcare business that’s trying to grow bigger. Finding new patients can be hard as the number of hospitals across the US continues to grow – over 6,000 by the latest count.

This growing body of healthcare organizations constantly competes with each other to add more patients to their business. Only through retaining old patients and acquiring new patients is a healthcare business able to grow.

While the cost of healthcare spending per average patient is above $10,000 in the US, that doesn’t represent the median figure of healthcare spending for most practices. The real revenue that most new patient generates is magnitudes lower and as a result, most healthcare practices are losing money when they spend money on expensive marketing campaigns.

This dynamic of acquisition cost and median revenue is why healthcare businesses have started to look to marketing practices like demand generation as an alternative.

Demand generation marketing for healthcare can be complicated but doesn’t have to be. We lists five simple, non-technical yet effective ways that healthcare businesses can start to integrate demand generation into their marketing strategy.

1. Improving Local SEO

As stated above, there are a lot of healthcare institutions that are present in the US today. For many urban areas, there can be a plethora of healthcare providers to choose from. But patients today aren’t selecting their healthcare providers in the old-fashioned methods anymore.

Individuals now look for healthcare providers based on what the internet tells them. If your healthcare business is able to optimize its SERP (search engine results page) ranking based on local searches from patients, your business stands a much higher chance of being the one that acquires a new patient.

2. Giving solutions to the problems

Nearly 70 percent of US adults look up medical information online and over one-third try to diagnose their medical conditions using information available on the internet. By providing the information that your ideal leads would be looking for, you are able to position yourself in the right place on the internet while also cementing your authority as an expert in that particular field of medicine. These customers who find you through your information will be more likely to convert to a qualified lead for your business.

3. Dial in a content strategy

In a market full of alternatives, you need to position your healthcare business as a prime authority while ensuring that all prospective customers have heard about you. You can do this by creating brand awareness and establishing domain authority (note; we are talking about the non-SEO meaning of the term).

Your business is able to achieve both goals through the use of a carefully planned content strategy. Through the publication of medical content, healthcare businesses are able to build credibility and disseminate their name to a larger audience. Blogging, social media posts, and videos are essential parts of a successful content marketing strategy for healthcare businesses.

4. Nurturing leads

So, your business takes the above three tips to heart and starts to see an increase in the number of leads. That’s the end of the story, right? But as you wait on the increased acquisitions to realize, nothing seems to happen.

That’s because demand generation isn’t just about finding and creating leads. Demand generation necessitates the creation of proper lead nurturing strategies till the time that a potential customer enters your healthcare facility to become a paying customer.

5. Partner with an expert

Demand generation strategies like account-based marketing, pay-per-click campaigns, and more can give extremely high ROI. But most healthcare businesses that aren’t the size of mega-hospitals will neither have the budget nor the time required to dedicate entire teams to the process.

That’s why partnering with experts in healthcare marketing is a value-based proposition for healthcare businesses. Healthcare businesses are able to reap the benefits of demand generation without the investment of setting an entire process for it.

What Does Demand Generation Look Like for a B2C Model?

Demand generation represents marketing tactics that highlight customers’ needs and desires, signaling your product or service as the necessary solution. 

In short, it’s the process of getting buy-in from strangers by making them both problem and solution-aware. Whereas brand awareness is about educating customers about who you are, demand generation is more about proving why people need you.

Because creating a sense of demand around your products doesn’t happen by accident. Doing so happens through not only highlighting why your product is can’t-miss but also creating a sense of urgency around buying it now.

Below are examples of demand generation tactics:

• Content creation such as blogging or how-to videos that educate your audience
• Offering free tools or resources to your customers (think: buyer’s guides, product quizzes)
• Product giveaways
• Press coverage and earned media that highlights why your brand is buzzworthy
• Strategic creator collaborations that get your brand in front of new and relevant audiences
• Social media marketing that emphasizes all of the above

Actively generating demand is key to standing out in a crowded B2C marketplace. Through engagement, education and creating valuable content for your target audience, you can quickly reach teach them how you can meet their needs.

And by collaborating with creators who understand and resemble your own ideal customers, you have a direct line to more opportunities to drive sales and build awareness.

Utilizing creators as part of your demand gen marketing efforts is a prime way to build social proof and encourage more conversions long-term. 

How to Measure the Success of Your Demand Generation Strategy

Organizations need basic tools for sales and marketing alignment in place, including a shared language for defining sales-qualified lead (SQL) and a marketing qualified-lead (MQL) to introduce automation into your processes. For organizations with the right tools and processes in place, the following metrics can create new-found transparency and a culture of continual improvement.

Closing percentages

Closing percentages is a classic sales metric that can reveal insight into more than just sales team performance – it’s an important indicator of how effectively your organization is converting, qualifying and nurturing your marketing-qualified leads. Closing percentages can also reveal insight into weaknesses in your demand generation strategy, such as a tendency for leads to drop off in the middle of the funnel.

Tara Belt of Primus is a firm believer that “honest and valuable relations lead to sales. But just because you’ve won the opportunity, doesn’t mean it’s time to close up shop.” Primus encourages organizations to pursue opportunities for continued engagement, including upsells, referrals and existing client feedback.

Funnel conversion rates

Too often, marketers aggressively focus on the initial number of marketing-qualified leads that can be generated through a campaign. While this is a critical metric, it ignores the middle-of-the-funnel touch points and metrics that determine how effectively your organization is providing content, nurturing relationships and passing qualified leads to sales.

Lindsay Mcgettigan of @R2Integrated believes that key funnel conversion metrics should include “the percentage of MQLs that convert to SQLs, percentage of SQLs that turn into meetings, the percentage of meetings that turn into customers,” and more. These insights can inform your organization of weaknesses within the funnel and areas where improvement may be needed.

Cost-per-acquisition

Cost of customer acquisition isn’t just an important metric for demand generation marketing; it’s a crucial metric that can define the success of your business. Very simply put, if the cost of customer acquisition (CoCA) exceeds average customer lifetime value, it’s impossible for an organization to achieve profitability. Measuring and tracking

Startup expert Charles Hughes defines CocA measurement as a metric that’s “calculated by simply dividing all the costs spent on acquiring more customers (marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the period the money was spent.” Tracking this metric can help your organization refine campaign goals, including marketing-qualified leads generated, and fine-tune challenges around quality and quantity in your demand generation program.

Cost-per-lead

Cost-per-lead is measured as the cost of advertising divided by conversion rate. This demand generation metric can be used to reveal the average costs per campaign, channel or by buyer persona. Growth Marketer Francois Mathieu believes cost-per-lead measurement can reveal important opportunities for tailoring messaging and content, friction that prevents conversions, and the value of new advertising and channel experiments.

The “right” cost-per-lead can vary significantly by industry, although B2B organizations marketing to accounts may find their average cost-per-lead is higher, particularly when using paid channels that translate to fine-tuned targeting.

Conversion to MQLs

A marketing qualified lead is a lead that’s qualified for nurturing and retargeting based on meeting pre-defined criteria for lead intelligence. Within a demand generation program, the standards for an MQL should be informed by closed-loop analytics based on total-funnel intelligence.

“An MQL represents a company that we have directly confirmed fits our client profile…[and] has shown engagement” writes Doug Davidoff of Imagine. Measuring the percentage of leads that become MQLs can reveal how effectively your organization is targeting the right prospects on the right channels.

Average deal size

Average deal size is the average dollar value of each new, closed customer account that completes the sales cycle. Depending on your organization’s products and services, this may or may not reflect customer lifetime value. This metric provides value in both new and mature demand marketing scenarios, allowing organizations to project revenue and closely-manage pipeline health.

Average deal size “gives an idea of the type of sales cycle a company has,” writes Digital Strategist Kerry Hew. “Fewer but larger deals take more time. Higher volume, but lower deal sizes make for a more transactional sales cycle.”

Measuring average deal size by buyer persona can also reveal directives into the types of accounts your organization should target and prioritize.

Lifetime customer value

Customer lifetime value, generally abbreviated as CLV or LTV, is the total profitability of a customer account over the total length of their relationship with your organization. While this demand generation metric reveals insight into how effectively your organization is closing deals, it also reveals insight into the quality of your account management and customer engagement practices.

Jason Compton of DMN believes the value of this metric isn’t limited to determining how much to spend on demand generation initiations “but also to optimize their spending by selecting the right acquisition channels, driving retention decisions, and refining their assumptions.”

Demand Generation Companies

1. CIENCE Technologies

You know a lead generation agency deserves your attention when its clientele features renowned brands, including Uber, Microsoft, Google, and Yamaha.

CIENCE Technologies offers more than just lead generation services. They provide robust inbound and outbound SDR solutions. What I particularly like is that they’ve curated targeted lead databases for various industries, including education, financial services, and biotechnology firms.

You even get a proprietary sales enablement platform to monitor the status of various leads.

2. Salespanel

Salespanel is a feature-packed lead generation visitor intelligence and marketing enablement software. From monitoring visitor engagement across various channels in real-time to qualifying leads based on behavioral and firmographic data – the software helps you accomplish various tasks and create an automated process for marketers to share crucial data to sales.

Sales gets fresh qualified leads directly inside their CRM with data-driven insights to turn leads into customers. Salespanel helps your team devise a personalized approach to handhold leads throughout the buying journey.

Pricing for Salespanel starts at $49 per month, and includes a 14-day free trial. Salespanel also has a free plan to get started with lead generation and real-time website tracking.

3. LeadGeneration.com

Are you looking for lead generation companies that provide a dedicated management team for your business? Do you want them to work with you and outline a personalized multi-channel lead generation strategy based on your preferences?

Wouldn’t it be great if your lead generation agency also offered integrations with industry-standard CRM software, including HubSpot and Salesforce?

Is your answer to any of the above questions a thunderous “yes”? Then LeadGeneration.com is the right fit for your needs.

What I prefer about the company is that they build custom lead generation campaigns instead of providing you with run-of-the-mill lead lists. The agency uses a combination of PPC advertising, content distribution, and search engine optimization to provide you with relevant and qualified leads.

4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Do you need a powerful B2B lead generation platform that lets you leverage LinkedIn’s professional community of more than 700 million members? Then it’s high time you get your hands on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

The feature-rich platform offers advanced search functionalities to help search professionals identify relevant leads. It also provides targeted lead recommendations based on your search history, saved leads, and preferences.

You can monitor prospects in real-time and stay abreast of the latest developments in their company. The platform even integrated with leading CRM solutions, including HubSpot, Drift, Outreach, and G2.

5. Belkins

If you’re looking for top-rated lead generation companies that’ll handle all your top-of-the-funnel needs, your search ends with Belkins.

This lead generation agency provides a wide array of services, including lead research, personalized outreach, and email deliverability optimization. However, Belkins is best known for its extensive appointment scheduling services.

Apart from finalizing appointments with qualified leads, they equip sales reps with useful information to ace every meeting.

6. Martal

Category: Agency

If your company belongs to the software and tech industry, Martal Group is the right lead generation agency. I prefer Martal Group because they’ve curated two targeted lead databases comprising 100 million qualified B2B leads.

Also, they assign a dedicated management team to develop custom lead generation campaigns based on a client’s challenges, goals, and preferences. The team even monitors real-time intent data to identify leads who are actively searching for your products/services.

7. SalesPro Leads

Are you tired of receiving low-quality prospects from sub-par lead generation companies? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find an agency that has decades of experience in B2B lead generation and appointment setting?

Then SalesPro Leads has got the perfect array of lead generation services for your business. They’re one of the most established names in the domain of lead generation companies.

SalesPro Leads specializes in developing and implementing tailor-made lead generations campaigns for businesses in the following industries:

• IT and software
• Marketing and advertising
• Telecommunication
• Healthcare

8. Intercom

Unlike other lead generation companies, Intercom provides you with a Conversational Relationship Platform to manage your interactions with existing and potential customers. It’s a great tool for engaging website visitors and converting them into leads. You can use intercom’s live chat and other tools to generate leads from your website.

You can even nurture leads using personalized messages, targeted product tours, and email marketing campaigns.

9. RocketReach

RocketReach has built a verified database of 450 million professionals from 17 million companies across the globe.

That means you can use the platform to connect with key decision-makers in your target companies. Also, they offer personalized outreach services and a wide array of CRM integrations.

10. Pearl Lemon Leads

Pearl Lemon Leads offers all the services you’d expect from industry-standard lead generation companies.

What sets them apart is their team of skilled copywriters, as well as marketing and sales professionals. From drafting personalized emails to scheduling meetings with qualified leads – they’re equipped to handle all your needs.

How to Create a Demand Generation Plan

Demand generation requires creating the need for your offerings first and then selling them to customers. Unlike other marketing strategies, demand generation addresses each customer journey touchpoint before even moving into your sales funnel. 

This may seem like a nebulous or daunting pursuit if your marketing team has not previously focused on such things. So, here are some of the most effective demand generation tactics you can start implementing today. 

So where do you start?

1) Start from the sale and map out your process by working backwards

• Sales —> Opportunities —> Lead / Target
• Make sure you map out the different types of sales teams and potential marketing teams involved in handling the leads, opportunities, and sales. It does make a difference.

2) Put numbers to each step

• We would advise you to just take a macro level snapshot for a quarter or two. You will get % conversions between each step (e.g. Lead / Target —> Opportunity).

3) Apply the numbers forward to your upcoming quarter

• Put in the upcoming sales target, then work with the % from step 2 backward to get the leads/targets you will need.

4) Determine if your new programs are going to make the cut

• Can you actually generate the number of leads/targets?
• Should you work on improving conversion rates between the steps?
• Should you work on getting bigger deals into the pipeline?

You can make this process as complicated as you want, but my recommendation is to start simple. It can easily be overwhelming if you try to get too deep too quickly. Remember, the goal of this part of the process is to see if your programs are actually going to drive sales. So keep it simple and be realistic. Determine if what you are going to do will make the right impact.

Interactive Tools for Demand Generation

1. Autopilot

Utilizing a marketing automation tool is a beneficial way to keep your strategy on track. One such automation tool is Autopilot. Autopilot is a reasonably priced tool that can help you automate your demand generation strategy. 

Use it to manage your website tracking, action-based triggers, drip campaigns, lead nurturing, Salesforce integration, and much more, depending upon your needs.

2. Pardot

Another complete marketing automation tool, Pardot (now a part of Salesforce), provides you with a one-stop solution for a variety of tasks, including A/B testing, landing page creation, lead capturing, email campaign creation, and email automation. 

Check out their demo and determine if a paid plan is right for you.

3. Wishpond

To more efficiently manage campaigns, including contests and promotions, Wishpond is a good solution.

With several contest styles to choose from, and the ability to publish and promote them on various channels such as blogs, mobile apps, websites, and Facebook, you can lure in new prospects and build demand for your product or service.

4. Ahrefs

For a demand generation tool for strategizing your SEO, Ahrefs is at the top of the list.

This comprehensive tool spies on competitors’ SEO strategies and provides you with valuable insight into the most successful keyword structuring while also identifying the amount of traffic they receive.

Ahrefs can also help you determine what is trending content, all in an effort to help you plan your own demand generation strategy.

5. RiteKit

To add more punch to your social media strategy and attract more leads, add RiteKit to your box of digital tools.

Start with its RiteBoot or RiteForge to develop compelling posts for the various social media platforms on a consistent basis.

Use RiteTag to create the best hashtags for your images and Rite.ly for relevant and convincing Calls-to-Action (CTAs).

With RiteKit, you’ll also be able to measure your efforts and conduct a full analysis of your results.

6. Integrate/Akkroo

Events and webinars are key to a digital marketing strategy these days. 

From meetings to trade shows, Integrate/Akkroo helps you compile and save attendees’ and prospects’ conversations and information right away before anything is forgotten.

This tool also provides a way to clean up and analyze the collected information, prioritize leads, and transfer the data to your CRM.

7. Ion

Engaging your audience with interactive content provides them with opportunities to join in on the conversation, making prospects feel as if they are valued in some special way.

Ion has templates to get you started building the type of interactive experiences you want to include in your demand generation strategy.

Once launched, you can then capture insights into your audience participation through reporting options and even A/B campaigns.

With these insights, you can then modify your strategy to better meet the needs of your targeted audience.

8. BuzzStream

To create additional buzz these days about your product or service, partnering in some way with influencers can be beneficial in increasing brand awareness and even authority.

BuzzStream can help by providing an all-inclusive research and outreach platform to identify and converse with influencers relevant to your industry.

This tool can also help you keep track of your influencer relationships and provide reports on what is working best to build demand for your product or service.

9. Hotjar

With its heat mapping software, Hotjar analyzes website visitors’ real-time behavior, examining how they go about navigating your site.

As a result, you can determine the best ways to alter link placement or your calls-to-action (CTAs) to decipher what will work best for your website visitors.

This tool points out where you can make improvements to your landing pages and potentially lead to higher conversion rates.

10. Unbounce

The Unbounce tool provides you with a platform based in real-time where you can create several versions of your particular landing page and test each one to determine which of them attracts more high-qualified leads.

Unbounce is also easy to use, with a drag and drop functionality allowing you to make quick changes or tweaks to your page before testing again. 

This feature saves your team time and also encourages more testing to find the features that your visitors will be drawn to more often.

Why is Demand Generation Important?

Demand generation is vital as it helps position you differently with potential customers. Rather than focusing on selling your solution, demand generation creates awareness of a need.

If you help audiences understand they have a need and how that need affects their businesses, they are more likely to be receptive to sales messaging that will come later.

If you want to grow your business, you’ll need to develop a robust pipeline of new customers. Demand generation places the focus on being attentive to their needs and creating awareness and interest before selling. If you can optimize every point of contact you have with your target audiences, you can increase the quality of the leads you’re bringing in through the funnel.

Demand generation also helps create interest and awareness so that you become a trusted source of information. It helps you create more thoughtful and cohesive marketing outreach to improve people’s experience when interacting with your company.

What are Demand Generation Campaigns?

A strong demand generation campaign produces engaging, high-quality, and authoritative content that drives your ideal customers. Let’s take a look at the top lead generation tactics you can include in your marketing strategy.

1. Content marketing

According to the 2021 B2B Buyers Survey, decision-makers, influencers, and researchers agree that “content that spoke directly to and demonstrated expertise around the needs of the organization’s specific industry” influenced their decision.

There are many types of content you could choose to generate demand for your business. For example:

• Blogs – articles on your website that educate your audience and help you get found on Google.
• Videos – YouTube content that explores your product or topics relevant to your target audience.
• eBooks – long-form textbooks or whitepapers that you can give away on your site, either gated or ungated.
• Podcasts/webinars – deep dives into specific industry themes or product features, normally with external guest speakers. 
• Industry insights – inviting industry influencers to contribute to your content and promote it to their networks. 

Whatever mediums (e.g. an email signature) you choose to create content on, make sure your content answers the questions your ideal customers are asking.

2. Account-based marketing (ABM)

Running account-based marketing campaigns is a great strategy for B2B demand generation because it focuses on a narrowly-defined audience. ITSMA Survey found that companies using ABM saw an 84% rise in reputation score and a 74% improvement in customer relationships.

This approach lets you drive demand with specific companies and individuals which delivers better results down the sales funnel. You can run ABM campaigns email marketing, LinkedIn ads, or direct email. They are cost-effective ways to get into your ideal customer’s inbox.

Here are some of the lead gen best practices you should follow while using this strategy:

• Use your content (and other demand gen strategies) to build an email list.
• Segment your list into precisely-targeted groups.
• Then use email automation software to initiate sequences of emails that keep your prospects thinking about you.

Ensure you track the responses to your emails and always look for ways to improve results. Check out top examples of demand generation with email marketing campaigns.

3. Paid advertising

Paying to be where your ideal customers are spending their time online is one of the fastest ways of generating demand.

You can promote your content with pay-per-click (PPC) ads that place you at the top of Google when someone searches for your chosen keyword. Or you can pay to show up in your ideal customers’ social media feeds.

Platforms like Google and Facebook offer comprehensive analytics on the back end, so you can easily see what’s working and what isn’t.

What are Demand Generation Activities

Whether your goal is to increase new client acquisitions or improve customer retention rates, the right demand generation activities will set you up to successfully attain those goals.

New Client Acquisition

Acquiring new customers is critical to the growth of any organization. To successfully attract your ideal client, you must target prospects accordingly and segment audiences based on their specific interests. Demand generation activities that you should consider to attract new customers:

• Lead nurturing programs

Provide prospects with valuable information that they are interested in. Create lead nurturing programs that match up with the various products or services that you offer. Communicate with them regularly, educating them, and offering insights along the way.

• Pay Per Click

Create pay per click ads for your products using keyword phrases that are relevant to your target market. Effective ads will attract more people to your website, allowing you the opportunity to share valuable information that will keep them wanting more.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Your website can only be effective if people are able to find it. By improving your website’s SEO and ranking higher on major search engines, you will undoubtedly find an increase in the amount of organic visits on your site.

• Content Creation

Create valuable content for your prospects. This includes: blog posts, white papers, ebooks, articles, press releases etc.) Clearly demonstrate that you are a leader in the field by offering a fresh new perspective.

Improve Customer Retention

Once you attain new customers, you should have a strategy in place to keep them happy and ultimately turn them into repeat customers. Superb customer service is of the utmost importance and is where you should focus your efforts. Your customer needs to feel valued. When they have a question or concern, it must be addressed fully and as quickly as possible.

In order to build brand loyalty, you must build strong relationships with your customers. Happy customers tell their friends and colleagues about your product, leading to more business. A few demand generation activities to keep in mind when working to retain customers include:

• Personalization

Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them. Be sure to ask the right questions. People visit your website for different reasons. Understanding your customer’s goals will allow you to create more personalized and targeted email campaigns that address their main concerns.

• Email Marketing

Send emails focused on engaging customers, helping them to take full advantage of your product or service. These can be automated emails based on specific behaviors or actions taken, notification emails about deals or special product features, or even updates about recent happenings in your field.

• Surveys

Conduct customer service surveys to measure customer loyalty and identify unhappy customers. Use this data to address problems and better understand what changes or improvements can be made.

• Social Campaigns

Utilize social media campaigns to engage with your audience, build awareness and gain influence in your field. The impact social media has on the buying process continues to grow. In fact, SiriusDecisions reports that 67% of the B2B buying experience is done digitally. A social presence has become imperative in our ever growing digital age.

At technology continues to advance and information always at our fingertips, prospects and customers alike are more demanding than ever before. With the right demand generation activities in place, you can ensure increased visibility, higher engagement rates, and improved communication as you work to nurture buyers through your sales funnel.

Is Demand Generation B2B or B2C?

B2B demand generation focuses on creating a reliable sales pipeline by increasing product or service awareness, effectively generating demand.

Demand generation creates excitement about your brand and grows your audience, while driving traffic and interest capable of converting visitors into customers.

B2C companies typically focus on getting buy-in from a single customer unit. B2B companies, on the other hand, work to get buy-in by executive decision-makers, teams, departments, or entire organizations.

The result is a longer B2B sales cycle than B2C. B2B purchase decisions take anywhere from six months to a year or longer, and only come after lengthy and careful discovery and due diligence.  

Demand Generation for SaaS

Demand Generation for SaaS businesses, if done correctly, elevates the awareness and demand for their products and services. Often companies consider demand generation and lead generation to be the same. However, they are different despite their significant overlaps.

Demand generation is basically about making consumers engaged in what you’ve got to sell and generating demand. The demand-generating process takes the customers to your website and improves visibility, leading to campaigns and care that will lead the sales staff.

In contrast, Lead Generations is about capturing data from web users that you can use to support your prospects and qualify them as consumers. Lead Generation is focused on converting prospective visitors to leads that the sales team can pursue.

Choosing the right channels to drive traffic and leads is crucial for a successful demand generation strategy. Depending on the target industry and segment, channels will have a different ROI.

The most popular demand generation channels in B2B are:
– Google Ads
– LinkedIn Ads
– Facebook Ads (for retargeting)
– Email marketing
– Content syndication
– Quora Ads
– Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
– Direct mail
– Tradeshows/Conferences
– Sponsored webinars

The key is to run small test programs on multiple channels, then scale those that have the highest ROI. Keep in mind that in B2B it’s important to track every marketing touch across the funnel. Certain channels will perform better as first-touch campaigns, while others will be more effective at converting leads into customers (last-touch campaigns).

Demand Generation Specialist

The Demand Generation Specialist is responsible for developing, executing and measuring all lead generation campaigns to drive qualified leads into the pipeline.  Email is an integral channel in building the Mindsight brand, nurturing target audiences, showcasing thought leadership and building brand loyalty with clients and prospective clients, and as such, the lead generation specialist will work with the Marketing and Sales team to build compelling campaigns that drive results.   

This role is involved in every step of the customer engagement cycle from ideation to implementation and analysis. The Demand Generation Specialist is expected to monitor, analyze, test and continually refine all components of campaign lifecycles as well as follow email marketing best practices in order to optimize lead generation.  

Responsibilities

• Build, manage and refine target audience contact database and develop campaigns that drive interest in Mindsight services including message creation, CTAs, template and landing page design, and campaign workflows.
• Segment audiences based on behaviors, like past email engagement, website interaction, event attendance, and develop strategies to nurture prospects into qualified leads.
• Analyze and report results from all outbound campaigns and make recommendations to continually improve metrics including open rates, CTR, leads; present recommendations to the Marketing team in a clear, logical, and compelling fashion.
• Identify new email marketing strategies to ensure that the most effective offers, copy, platforms, and creative are incorporated into campaigns and deliver a compelling message.
• Manage multiple campaigns simultaneously and make adjustments as needed to optimize results. Perform A/B testing with regularity.
• Maintain knowledge of digital marketing best practices.
• Maintain knowledge of Mindsight’s offerings, partner offerings, industry/product solutions, customer applications, competitive product differences as well as evolving strategies.
• Utilize Salesforce to create, monitor and track reporting of qualified prospects.

Demand Generation vs Demand Harvesting

When it comes to generating leads for your business, you may have heard of the terms “demand generation” and “demand harvesting.” But what’s the difference? And which one is right for your business? Let’s find out together.

So, what’s the difference between demand generation and demand harvesting? Demand generation is the process of creating interest in your product or service. This can be done through marketing campaigns, PR initiatives, content marketing, and more. Demand harvesting, on the other hand, is the process of converting that interest into actual sales leads. This can be done through lead capture forms, landing pages, and other conversion-focused activities.

Choosing between demand generation and demand harvesting depends on your business goals and where you are in the lifecycle of your business. Demand generation is the way to go if your goal is to create awareness and interest in your product or service or if you are a new brand with little brand awareness. However, demand harvesting may be recommended if your goal is to generate sales leads and you have a well-known brand or footprint.

There are pros and cons to both methods of lead generation. Demand generation can be costly and time-consuming if not implemented correctly. However, it is a great way to build brand awareness and interest in your product or service.

Demand harvesting, on the other hand, is less expensive and can provide you with results more quickly. However, it is important to note that demand harvesting can only be effective if you already have a steady stream of interested prospects.

Demand Generation vs Product Marketing

Product marketing and demand generation have long found themselves on opposing sides of marketing teams. While product marketing has traditionally favored an empathetic approach that prioritizes beautiful visuals, customer insights and storytelling, demand generation makes a case for the science side of marketing, favoring A/B testing and analytics. 

What most companies don’t realize is there’s a science and an art to both sides. Pitting the two against each other misses a critical opportunity to optimize your entire marketing strategy.

At the heart of your product marketing strategy is the foundational statement that claims your unique position in market. With this statement, you set your marketing team up for success by defining who you are and your desired impact for your product.

For example, Victor is a discovery platform that helps authentic, minority owned businesses get in front of the people who are looking for them. There is a science behind claiming a niche market position that is unique to Victor and adopting a messaging strategy that differs from their competition.

By comparison, Yelp is a discovery platform that caters to all types of businesses and users. While Yelp is serving many people, the company messages to smaller, well-defined groups with specific needs and wants to produce more, better-qualified leads.

Product marketers use quantitative methods to identify target audiences, and then take a more qualitative approach to turn these audiences into personas with pains, needs and wants. From there, they craft messages and stories that speak directly to the unique value their company can provide those personas.

Product marketing also influences what a company’s brand looks like. Visuals are subjective. You need an empathetic understanding of target audiences to develop a visual identity that appeals to them. 

On the other side of the house, the demand generation team is tasked with strategically promoting messages and visuals that will convert potential customers into paying customers. It’s a numbers game: what are the cheapest ads we can buy that will bring in the most qualified leads?

The team uses more quantitative methods to identify keywords that prospects will most likely be searching for, decide when and where to buy ads and monitor campaign success.

If demand generation is an art, it’s a Jackson Pollock: throwing a lot of different things into the universe and hoping something sticks. But with the help of product marketing, demand generation teams can turn raw data into customer insights and start to paint a clearer picture.

Demand Generation vs Demand Capture

Demand generation is a marketing effort where demand for a particular commodity is created in the market. In the demand generation, users’ interest is exploited to bring attention to the company’s products or services.

Demand creation is the first part of the marketing funnel that focuses on building awareness, positioning relevance, supporting validation, and much more.

Usually, when a brand launches a new product or service in the market, they have to first tell consumers about their products using various advertising and marketing methods. They have to generate a demand for the product among the people who are not yet ready to buy a product.

For example, you saw the Adidas shoe ad on Instagram. You don’t have any plans to buy new shoes, but you found the ad interesting, so you clicked on the ad and bought a new pair of shoes.

Demand capture is the second stage in the funnel. Once the demand is generated, the only thing left is to encourage customers to make a final purchase decision.

The demand capture focuses on the customers who are willing to purchase your products or services. You simply have to nurture them in the right manner and initiate the final purchase decision.

Let’s say you are already looking to buy new sports shoes. So, you typed “Sports shoes” in the search engine, and an Adidas shoes ad popup on your screen, so you clicked and bought the shoes.

Demand generation and demand capture are both parts of a marketing mix. For a business, it is important to target both demands in an adequate proportion to grow.

If you focus on capturing the demand, you can only reach out to a certain customer base. And if you keep on promoting your brand but do not make efforts to capture your generated leads, it is also useless.

Thus, it is essential to work on both demand generation and capture to gain maximum results. The perfect marketing funnel is first — generate demand and then capture it.

Demand Generation vs Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing aims to attract customers, or leads, through company-created content on blogs and social media that will ideally appear within searches on search engines. Inbound marketing is a method or approach that businesses can use when executing a demand-generation strategy. Companies that use this approach focus less on the sale and more on where the marketplace is moving.

Inbound marketing tactics mainly use free platforms — such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging websites — to share content and attract website visitors. This is a less-expensive approach than outbound marketing, which relies on cold-calling, direct mail or TV and radio advertisements.

The aim of inbound marketing is to drive organic traffic to content rather than rely on advertising-driven traffic. This method increases brand awareness and provides prospective customers with relevant content that can guide them through their buyer’s journey.

Inbound marketing falls under the demand generation umbrella. As a result, the quality of a company’s content — as well as how the business uses and promotes it — directly affects how many prospects show interest in the products or services and how many of those potential customers convert to loyal customers.

An inbound marketing strategy, when done right, captures the audience’s attention in a nondisruptive way, and achieves the goal of demand generation — which is to attract customers to the business and generate leads. If an organization provides its leads with helpful and informative content, it is more likely to make a sale compared to a company that does not provide that same high-quality information.

Demand Generation vs Growth Marketing

To fully appreciate the difference between growth marketing and demand generation, you’ll want to first understand what they have in common.

Growth marketing and demand generation both focus heavily on the concept of the customer acquisition funnel, or pipeline.

The “pipeline” refers to the journey a stranger takes on their path to becoming a customer. From a business’ perspective, it represents the flow of potential revenue.

The stages of the customer acquisition pipeline are:

1. Awareness: from stranger to website visitor
2. Acquisition: becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL)
3. Activation: becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL)
4. Revenue: becomes a customer
5. Retention: becomes a repeat customer
6. Referral: new customers referred by existing customers

While demand generation and growth marketing both work to improve the flow of potential customers into and through the pipeline, they don’t do it in quite the same way.

Demand generation tends to focus on fueling the pipeline. That means earlier stages like Awareness, Acquisition and Activation get most of the attention.

Growth marketing takes a holistic view of the entire pipeline. Every stage, from Awareness to Referral, plays a role in impacting revenue growth.

Growth marketing tactics and demand generation tactics are nearly identical. Both draw from the same toolbox of inbound marketing activities and channels. Both can also include outbound marketing tactics like paid advertising. 

The main difference? Because growth marketing typically spans the entire customer acquisition funnel, it relies on additional tactics to nurture leads and improve sales, retention and referral metrics.

Demand Generation Tactics Include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Blogging
• Lead magnets
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Paid ads
• Social media engagement
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Live events – trade shows, conferences, industry events
• Account Based Marketing (ABM)
• Influencer marketing
• Direct mail
• and more

Growth Marketing Tactics Include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Blogging
• Lead magnets
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Email nurture campaigns
• Sales enablement
• Customer onboarding
• Loyalty programs
• Referral programs
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Paid ads
• Social media engagement
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Live events – trade shows, conferences, industry events
• Account Based Marketing (ABM)
• Influencer marketing
• and more

In both cases, it’s an awful lot of tactics to consider. How can you plan and execute a winning strategy with so many options? For businesses not looking to try it on their own, there are options.

Demand Generation Best Practices

Now for the best practices that you should be following to drive excellent results from your demand generation campaign.

1. Talk to your ideal audience

The key to ROI-driving demand generation is customer research. Talk directly with people who align with your target audience (if you’re just starting out) or with your loyal customers (if you already have paying customers).

Ask them about their pain points, how they consume content, and which online channels they use. Also, consider asking happy customers about which of your product’s features they love and how they use them.

Use the information to create product-led content showcasing real-life examples of how other businesses are using your product to solve their problems.

Conversing with your target audience will also help you decide which content types to create (think: blog posts, webinars, videos, or podcasts), and which marketing channels to use.

2. Conduct a competitor analysis

Find out what others in your industry are doing to increase their brand awareness and generate demand.

Take a look at:

• The content they’re creating
• How they’re making it unique
• Which marketing channels they’re using
• How they’re engaging their audience 

Additionally, create a list of your competitors’ demand generation campaigns’ strengths and weaknesses. From there, identify opportunities you can double down on.

3. Create content for various stages of the funnel

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you need content that educates and engages your audience in each stage of the marketing funnel.

This means you can’t focus on one thing alone, such as producing product-led content. Instead, diversify your focus. 

Create content for people who are:

• Problem aware and looking for free, helpful solutions
• Product aware, who you can educate about your product’s features
• Product aware and ready to buy who need a little bit of convincing 

To meet the requirements of prospects in different funnel stages, create a variety of content types, such as:

• Educational pieces that answer readers’ questions and position you as an expert on the topic
• Product-led content that positions your product/service as the solution to your readers’ problems
• Product comparison content such as X tool vs Y tool to show on-the-fence prospects how your product is the one they need

4. Create case studies

Case studies share stories of successful businesses that have benefited from using your product or service.

Make sure you include them in your demand generation strategy as they offer essential social proof for convincing your audience to use your product. The good thing about case studies is you can answer different types of customer objections.

Read Also: AdTech Trends in 2023-2025

However, the key isn’t in publishing case studies and curating them in a corner on your website. Instead, pull out results and customer quotes from those case studies and add them to your product-led content.

You could also create a live show where you invite your users to explain how they use your product. 

5. Focus on 1-3 marketing channels at a time

A common demand generation mistake is to try to be everywhere your target audience is. 

The problem with this? 

You stretch yourself too thin, which reduces your chances of driving the best results from a given platform. Instead, start off with 1-3 social platforms. Or you can also consider throwing offline marketing strategies into the mix as they enhance your multichannel approach. Remember, the goal is to create content and engagement strategies for each one and be consistent with your efforts.

Demand Generation Benefits

Demand generation is important to sales and marketing for several reasons. Here are some examples of how demand generation can benefit business marketing initiatives:

Provides a specific direction to sales and marketing efforts

Because demand generation causes you to establish a target audience and key product selling points, you have the opportunity to streamline your marketing efforts. This is also important, as it provides the sales and marketing teams with common goals to achieve.

Allows businesses to expand their customer base

Demand generation helps businesses reach new audiences by creating additional marketing materials that demonstrate the benefits of a particular product or service.

Helps level businesses with competitors

By creating a demand for a product or service and expanding one’s customer base, businesses can elevate their standing within an industry. They can also help convert customers from competing businesses by having more effective demand marketing strategies.

Enhances customer retention abilities

When businesses use demand generation in their marketing and sales tactics, they reduce customer turnover. This is because they help consumers understand the value of their products or services in their lives, which ultimately leads to repeat customers.

Demand Generation Career Path

A demand generation specialist is usually a mid to senior role and requires certain qualifications. Here are some typical qualifications of a demand generation specialist we came across in our research:

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing or business or other related degree
• At least 4-7 years of marketing experience, preferably executing some of the same tasks to be managed in the role, such as content development
• Experience with CRM and marketing automation software
• Experience measuring the effectiveness of demand generation efforts at each level of the funnel

Demand generation specialists thrive when they can combine their years of experience planning, executing and measuring different techniques to generate top-of-the funnel leads who “aren’t yet looking to solve a problem.” It’s important for them to use their expertise to understand the differences in customer profiles and how certain features in a campaign might appeal to customers and draw them in.

Demand Generation Framework

The demand generation framework outlines critical dependencies for launching and optimizing demand generation efforts. You’re probably not surprised to see those dependencies start with strategy. To help determine if demand generation strategies will aid your organization’s objectives, start by outlining those objectives. As you’ll see, that is the very first piece of the demand generation subframework, below.

Demand Generation Lead Salary

The average Demand Generation Lead salary in the United States is $94,242, but the salary range typically falls between $82,410 and $105,971. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.

Demand Generation Quotes

Lead generation is the action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for your business’s products and/or services. Lead generation is related to sales and marketing, but it is not sales and marketing. Sales is the action of selling something. Marketing is making people want something.

Foundational Thoughts:

“Lead generation has been the fuel for revenue-generating activities for a long time. What used to be exclusively known as cold calling has transformed into a multi-channel, multi-touch, and hyper-personalized approach to generate high-quality leads for companies around the world.” Sarah Nelson

“The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market ‘lives’ on the web.” Wayne Davis

“Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.” Brian Tracy

“Lead generation evolves with the market. And the market is changing. Today, an effective lead generation business is mostly based on the quality of your content marketing.” Dario Villi

The Wake-Up Call:

“Without lead generation, your business will be pretty dead in a short period of time.” Marco Cirillo

“A business can move to the next level only with lead generation.” Saketh Rasakatla

“What is changing… is how consumers behave and show interest online. In order to be successful at generating leads, you must understand your target market and create marketing campaigns to target consumers at each of the steps in the buyer’s journey. With any marketing strategy, you must always be evolving; if you do not constantly growing, you will be left behind.” Jonathan Cronstedt

“The buying process has changed and marketers need to rethink and refocus their efforts in order to stay relevant.” Katerina Klimenko 

Emotional Wisdom:

“Offer your services with detached involvement. Remember this, when the waitress asks if you would like a refill on your coffee and you say no, she doesn’t go in the other room and cry.” Patti Keating

“The way you position yourself at the beginning of a relationship has a profound impact on where you end up.” Ron Karr

“Every brand isn’t for everybody, and everybody isn’t for every brand.” Liz Lange

Making It Happen:

“Part of lead generation is figuring out which method or methods work most effectively for your business. What works for a work-from-home client-getting entrepreneur can look exceptionally different than that of a CEO who owns a sales training company. It comes down to this; test, test, test. Discover what works. Know your numbers. Grow your numbers. Remember that those numbers are real, breathing people… and do all of it in an honest, authentic way.” Tasha Johnson

“With an easy to moderate level of implementation, LinkedIn still remains one of the untapped areas for lead generation.” Shivankit Arora

“LinkedIn is so underrated… there’s considerably lesser spam and lesser people who post on LinkedIn. This is a great opportunity for you to become an authority in your space.” Alon Sharon

Demand Generation Statistics

One of the best ways to get a view of the current state of demand generation is to pay close attention to data regarding trends and insights from the industry at large. Smart demand marketers rely on data to guide their strategies and focus their efforts.

Here are 5 demand generation statistics every demand marketer should know.

1. 50% of the average marketing database is useless, largely because of duplicate records (Justin Gray, CEO @ LeadMD).

Marketo Consultant Gray estimates that 50 percent of marketing database content is useless, a finding supported by Integrate’s discovery that 33 percent of contacts in marketing databases are duplicates. Records that don’t represent real opportunities can cost firms between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to support bloated database usage.

While demand generation budgets are rising at many firms, lead data validation technologies can divert these dollars away from databases to other demand generation tactics.

2. Converting leads to customers is the top marketing priority for 70 percent of organizations in 2017 (HubSpot, State of Inbound)

Success for many demand marketers is no longer defined by the quantity of leads generated. For many B2B teams, success measures are now defined by lead-to-customer conversion rates or other full-funnel metrics. Increasingly, marketers are responsible for supporting the customer’s entire journey through tighter alignment with their organization’s sales and customer success teams.

3. Only 56% of B2B organizations verify leads before they’re passed to sales (Marketing Sherpa).

Low-quality leads can be a source of conflict between B2B marketing and sales teams. Disparate leads sources at the top-of-the-funnel can also be a leading cause of “spreadsheet hell,” or time-consuming manual lead entry into the customer relationship management (CRM) database. Thank goodness, there are data quality solutions that enable marketers to verify lead data before it is injected into core marketing and sales systems.

4. B2B marketing teams often spend upwards of 40 hours a month formatting and processing leads for database upload. (Integrate, The Cost of a Bad Lead).

Time spent manually formatting leads takes away from strategic initiatives, such as optimization or helping sales close customers. It can also detract from an organization’s ability to follow-up with leads in a timely manner, leading to revenue risks. When armed with integrated demand marketing tools that enhance lead data attributes and standardize data for entry, demand marketers can gain significant efficiencies.

5. 54%of B2B marketers measure success via revenue-based quotas, while 45% measure success through lead-based quotas (NetLine).

While lead generation matters, it’s not the only success metric that matters in a demand marketing program. The latest survey from NetLine supports the fact demand generation is on its way to becoming B2B revenue marketing.

Demand Generation Tools

Marketing Automation Services – Moosend

Automating your tasks is a huge advantage for modern businesses. To do it, you can leverage marketing automation software like Moosend to create automated workflows and action-triggered campaigns to nurture your audience. On top of that, the platform will equip you with a visual workflow builder and pre-made recipes to scale your business.

You can easily register for a free account to try out marketing automation, the email builder, online forms, reporting, and more!

CRM Tools – Salesforce

Customer management platforms (CRM) are crucial to nail your lead management efforts. One of the biggest players in the field is Salesforce.

The service will offer you an intuitive interface to register lead information, keep your customers engaged, and forecast user behavior using real-time data.

SEO Platforms – Ahrefs

Targeting the right keywords is necessary to put your content in front of the right eyes. Tools like Ahrefs will give you the chance to discover what your audience is searching for through its Keyword Explorer feature.

Moreover, you can use the software to track your ranking progress, run a competitor analysis and, overall, improve your demand generation efforts in the most efficient way.

Social Media Tools – Buffer

Of course, don’t forget about your social media tools! Apart from your business accounts, you can use platforms like Buffer to take your social media marketing strategy to higher heights.

Buffer will equip you with the means to create social campaigns, monitor your performance, and build meaningful connections with your audience. All these will help you improve your process and turn social media into a powerful demand generation weapon.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Services – Terminus

Lastly, ABM software will allow you to cater content and messages for the decision-makers of specific accounts.

Platforms like Terminus can assist you in finding those accounts and personalizing your outreach efforts. In addition, the software will give you access to a variety of retargeting management tools and metrics to track your performance for better results.

Demand Generation Specialist Salary

The average annual pay for a Demand Generation Specialist in the United States is $75,628 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $36.36 an hour. This is the equivalent of $1,454/week or $6,302/month.

While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $106,000 and as low as $34,500, the majority of Demand Generation Specialist salaries currently range between $66,000 (25th percentile) to $86,500 (75th percentile) with top earners (90th percentile) making $104,500 annually across the United States.

The average pay range for a Demand Generation Specialist varies greatly (by as much as $20,500), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience.