The Essential Guide to B2B Demand Generation Marketing
Our top demand gen strategies, tactics, tips & best practices for 2023
Demand generation is an essential part of any business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy—it builds brand awareness, feeds the pipeline, and opens the door for future conversations with your sales team.
What Is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is how marketers generate leads and get them ready to convert.
It typically includes four parts—Attract, Engage, Sell, and Wow—and encompasses many areas of marketing: from inbound marketing strategies—how you generate interest and attract leads with engaging content—to account-based marketing (ABM), which relies on information provided by demand generation marketers to help identify prospective new accounts.
B2B Demand Generation
A focus on lead quality is key when it comes to creating demand and generating the leads you'd like to ultimately send over to your sales team. B2B demand generation uses an integrated approach starting with the top of the funnel to generate and move MQLs (marketing qualified leads) down the pipeline to SQLs (sales qualified leads)
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation
While demand generation focuses on attracting potential customers through brand awareness strategies, lead generation focuses on converting those now brand-aware prospects into customers who need your solutions.
Demand Generation in Sales
MQL-to-SQL conversion—or taking a prospect from a Marketing Qualified Lead to a Sales Qualified Lead—is the ultimate goal in demand generation for Sales, making sales and marketing alignment an important component for any B2B organization.
Demand Generation Strategy
One of the most important things to consider as part of any demand generation strategy is that your potential customers will be at various stages of their Awareness Journey at any given time—some will still be trying to figure out their problem and others will be already looking for ways to solve theirs. Successful demand generation strategies meet your prospects where they are on their journey and take them where they ultimately need to go... to your product or service.
Demand Generation Strategy Examples
Demand generation strategies are most successful when they provide the information a prospective customer is looking for... when they're looking for it. And inbound marketing strategies, outbound marketing strategies, and sales and marketing alignment all play important roles.
Examples of inbound marketing tactics include content marketing—using video, podcasts, and blogs designed to attract and engage with your audience, SEO optimization, customer surveys, and responding to your audience on social media. Outbound marketing tactics include paid social media ads, trade shows, email blasts, and PPC—Pay-Per-Click.
Demand Generation Strategy Template(s)
Want to improve your demand generation results? Here are some ready-to-use templates to get you started quickly.
Top Demand Generation Tactics
Whether you're starting at zero or your demand generation efforts are part of a well-oiled marketing machine, here's how to do demand generation right in any industry.
Using Content to Drive Demand
Valuable content you provide attracts new leads, nurtures potential customers on their buying journey, and should also establish trust... and move prospects along the path to becoming a customer. A lead magnet should do a number of things, including: Solve a real problem, provide a quick win, and show why you're the expert to go to when it comes to finding a solution.
Most Common Demand Generation Activities
Nurture campaigns are an important part of demand generation, and also one of the most common marketer activities when it comes to demand gen (not to mention, effective). Other common activities include SEO strategies, content creation (such as PDFs and videos), surveys, and social media campaigns.
Demand Generation Best Practices
Creating amazing content for your customers and potential customers, hosting free webinars, sharing industry-specific case studies, and providing a stellar ABM experience are all part of the best demand-generation strategies today. And although specifics may vary by industry, you're sure to find a number of these best practices at the top of every B2B marketer's list.
Demand Generation Tools
As a savvy B2B Marketer, your martech stack may already be impressive. (Maybe too impressive?) This list may help you narrow down your must-have marketing software and platforms—or even show you a couple you may not yet know about. Here are our top martech stack recommendations for B2B Marketers (plus, a couple of sites we love).
- Contact Management System (CMS), such as Salesforce
- Marketing Automation Platform, such as Hubspot or Marketo
- Lead Generation Platform, like Albacross, Discover.ly, or Zendesk Sell
- Intent Data Provider, like Bombora
- Account-based Marketing Platform, like DemandBase
- Social Media Management Platform, like Hootsuite
- For better copywriting across platforms, try Grammarly
- For SEO and research, we like SEMrush
- Email Building and Testing, try Litmus
- Marketing Data and Analytics, Funnel.io
- CRO and Testing, Optimizely and Crazy Egg
- Connecting systems and data, Zapier
- And for ongoing B2B Marketing Education for your team, head to MarketingProfs
Tailor Your Sales Funnel Content to Speak to the Buyer at Every Stag
The best sales funnels focus on making the potential buyer's decision easy. They welcome and nullify objections, keep the reward value high, support the customer journey with content at every step of their journey, and keep the momentum going post sale. Take a look at our resources below for more on how you can improve your demand generation efforts... starting today.
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