The growth and survival of your B2B operation often depend upon introducing new clients to your product and upselling to existing clients. While SEO strategies contribute to the elements to an extent, they can only get you so far. At some point, you’ll need to employ new approaches to reach new prospects that aren’t in your sales funnel.
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What Is Demand generation
Demand generation is a marketing strategy employed to increase brand awareness, visibility, and introduce new leads to the sales funnel.
B2B companies use new content, webinars, influencer marketing, and PR campaigns as a strategy to attract individuals who are interested in buying the product.
The strategies may seem similar to SEO and lead generation approaches, but they have a significant difference.
Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation
While lead generation are businesses leaving their contact number and email, demand generation goes a level higher to make businesses interested in their content and services to facilitate lead generation.
And since they’re quite different in fundamentals, it’s only natural that the strategies will also differ. Hence, let’s discuss the B2B demand generation strategies that are most effective in 2022.
Focus on Industry Leaders
If your business isn’t organizing webinars and inviting industry leaders to those events, you’re missing out. Webinars offer a great opportunity to share your new products and insights from leaders with interested prospects. They also are quite effective to introduce buyers to the sales funnel who still aren’t confident about starting a business with you.
However, a great deal of appointment scheduling and planning goes behind arranging a successful webinar. If your webinar is a success, you would also require lead generation and sales outsourcing services. Therefore, for B2B businesses like yours, to plan, acquire, present, engage, and repurpose your awareness campaigns, you may need to involve a demand generation service for a successful implication of these strategies.
Content Marketing
Different types of content have different effectiveness throughout a buyer’s journey. For instance, in the early stages, blog posts prove to be very effective, but they fail to influence a buyer’s decision in the late stages when it comes to purchasing.
In contrast, case studies have zero to minimal effect on the awareness stage but influence the purchase decision more than any other content type.
Industry/Case Studies
Industry studies are one of the most effective content types because of the backlinking potential. If you’ve done authoritative industry research that is comprehensive and dives deep into the nooks and crannies of the industry, you can get significant attention from interested prospects from the backlinks and an increased ranking.
Long-Form Guides
The more knowledge you share, the more authority you will gain in your industry, The most effective strategy is through long form content. Although you may need to distribute the content for free, those articles and ebooks can be gated to generate new leads.
Video Content
The digital marketing world has started pivoting towards video content in recent years. Although the shift was evident for some years, it has gained significant traction throughout the pandemic. Additionally, video content is widely consumed by almost everyone, making it a powerful B2B demand generation method.
Commercial Intent Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases that your new prospects may search for in Google or any other mass platform. Assuming that you already have maximized on some keywords as you’re looking for demand generation strategies, you may need to get back to the board to find new keywords that have the potential to engage new leads.
Keywords with commercial intent work best for B2B demand generation. For instance, if your business offers web development services to small businesses, you must target keywords that show buying intent like:
- Best web development company to hire
- Affordable web development
- Review of XYZ web development
- Top AWS development service
Generate Fresh Topics
The thirst for consuming web content grows significantly when they get close to making the purchase. However, it generally plummets to a minimal level after the purchase has been made and they lose interest in the research. You need to keep these contents updated to stay relevant in the business. Moreover, you need to generate fresh topics ahead of your competitors and provide a new perspective to your prospects.
Social Media Engagement
Social media is great for introducing new prospects to your sales funnel through demand generation. While social media traffic is extremely effective for B2C conversion, it can also be used for B2B brand awareness campaigns.
As a B2B marketer, you can use social media platforms to promote your new content, products, and visions. You may also use it as a communication medium between you, your existing customers, and new prospects. It is easier to send emails and make phone calls through social media than through email or telephone.
Building rapport is the most critical contribution of social media platforms. You can leverage the power of graphics and social media video content to build authority and trust.
Consider Email Marketing
Sitting on top of thousands of emails and not doing anything to pursue the prospects is a wasted effort. Source emails either through content marketing or from third-party providers, and make them work for your demand generation campaign. Send relevant email newsletters about industry news, case studies, and articles, and let them know how you can help grow their business.
Moreover, as businesses focus on emails and call the most, newsletters should be the most effective strategy for demand generation.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, now you’ll be able to successfully build your demand generation strategies through content marketing, social media engagement, and webinars. You should also employ email marketing and newsletters to approach new customers. As for content marketing, long-form content, case studies, and videos are the most effective, followed by effective keyword strategies. Webinars let you showcase your development by involving industry experts for their insights about your product or service.