B2B Demand Generation – The Route To Sales Growth
Putting the Buyer’s Needs First
Demand generation is a very powerful tool to help businesses achieve the most out of their potential leads and turn them into customers. Businesses today operate in a world where customers are better educated while being very time poor. A large proportion of buyers now get information online, through various sources, on their own timeframes. With educational resources readily available online, buyers can get easy access to all sorts of information at their fingertips before they have even interacted with your business. So when a buyer eventually interacts with your business you have to be ready. So how exactly do you generate demand in today’s digital world?
In response to this changing environment, marketers must focus on understanding each buyer’s needs and facilitating their decision making process, rather than merely pushing marketing messages at them. This is difficult to actually achieve but demand generation can help.
To get started with demand generation, you must understand a buyer’s interest area, interest level, and stage of the buying process. You can often accomplish this by analysing their online behaviour, or “digital body language.” This is easier to do than it sounds. There are various ways to optimise your website and marketing processes to generate demand. You should optimise your website to be able to pull invaluable data together. Online behaviour can be tracked using something as simple as the types of white papers a potential buyer downloads or which videos they watch. It is a good idea to create a wide range of white papers and videos. Create collateral ranging from very basic to much more advanced. By tracking which white paper is downloaded by which potential lead, you can get a pretty good understanding of their level of demand and where they are in the buying cycle.
Once this level of understanding of individual clients has been assessed, it is time to start tailoring messages to their particular interest and level in the buying process. To generate the right sort of demand, you have to understand and know your potential customer.
At this point in the process, it pays to have a robust lead scoring system in place. Assign a score to every action taken by a potential lead to help you understand their thought process better. For example assign a score every time someone responds to an email or downloads a brochure. You can use lead scoring software to determine which buyers are ready to engage with your sales team. After passing along these qualified leads, you can engage the rest in a lead nurturing program using lead nurturing software that helps maintain their interest level over time.
Why Demand Generation Thrives on Data Quality
Once you’ve gotten to know your buyers’ needs, you can personalize your B2B marketing campaigns based on this information. This will require a deeper level of personalisation around targeting, timing, and content than had previously been typical, and involves the use of marketing automation software to facilitate delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Demand generation will thrive if you create a variety of different marketing messages such as personalised emails and personalised offers to engage and entice people to do business with your company. A potential client will be much more likely to buy from you if they get a personalised 20% off voucher addressed specifically to them regarding a product or service they have shown interest in.
All of this means that to succeed with demand generation, you’ll need a strong focus on data quality and data management. As you interact with prospective buyers over a longer period of time, you’ll want to ensure you keep your data clean and up-to-date. And because B2B marketing campaigns are often driven by marketing automation software to get the right targeting, timing, and content for each communication, you’ll need to standardise your data so that it can conform to automated rules for personalisation, segmentation, and lead scoring. Collect the same sort of information for each individual client and stick to that rule. This is also where your sales team becomes invaluable. As they are the people directly speaking and interacting with potential clients, make sure they collect relevant and adequate levels of information. Trust us, it will make the whole demand generation programme work a lot smoother if everyone is on the same page and collecting the same sort of information.
A New View of Marketing Effectiveness
As you begin to see results with demand generation, you can adopt a whole new approach to marketing campaign analysis. This means reviewing and examining processes and the entire demand generation programme over time. Review emails, brochures, white papers and videos and see if they are still relevant to a changing client base.
When you examine the marketing funnel by buyer stage, you’ll recognize that any buying process may encompass multiple campaigns, buyers, and months. You can then begin to understand how each of those campaigns influenced buyer behaviour – and how the revenue you achieved can be attributed across the many campaigns involved. This new approach to marketing analysis provides a much clearer view into marketing effectiveness than was ever possible before.
Post Demand Generation
You don’t want your demand generation programme to stop once a potential client has turned into a sale. You have to continue to generate demand from that customer over time and turn them into repeat buyers.
Ensure customers are effectively nurtured and make sure they have various contact points over the coming months and even years after purchase to keep them engaged. As it is always easier to retain customers than generate new ones, make sure your demand generation programme keeps customers satisfied over time. They will not only come back to buy again but if they continue to receive personalised and thoughtful messages over time, they are also more likely to recommend and refer your business and your services to others.
Running an effective demand generation programme is not easy but once it is set up and running properly, the results seen will be so beneficial that you will wonder how your business ever operated without one in the first place. You will have a customer base that is engaged, enticed and eager to receive your marketing messages. All that is left to do is to convert those highly targeted and qualified leads into sales.
About Us
Sales Accelerant specialises in B2B sales lead generation, which includes B2B demand generation, B2B telemarketing (lead generation/qualification), B2B lead nurturing, business development consultancy and marketing related market research.
Using a combination of telemarketing, email marketing, social media and content we deliver multi-channel UK and global targeted lead generation campaigns to help businesses to increase sales and ensure the right strategies, activities and supporting processes are in place to deliver ambitious and sustainable sales growth.
We have the resources and experience spanning many years as a team, to plan and deliver an effective multi-channel sales lead generation campaign.
Through our seamlessly integrated services we deliver BANT qualified (decision maker has: Budget, Authority, specified Need & Timescale for need) sales leads geared towards increasing your sales, improving your processes, reducing your costs, saving you time and introducing clearly defined step change to your company in the process.
Sales Accelerant | 0845 305 8145 | info@salesaccelerant.co.uk
