If you asked 5 different B2B marketers, “What is demand generation?”, you could get 5 different answers.
Whether it’s your first-time hearing this marketing term, or you’re just confused about demand generation as a whole, we’re here to set the record straight and get you on the right track.
You don’t have to be a full-time marketer at a large company or enterprise organization to get started with demand generation. We are going to give you actionable tips and strategies to generate demand–even if you’re on a shoestring budget or working with minimal support.
Time to turn you into a demand generating rockstar.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- The definition of demand generation
- The different types of demand generation
- The difference between demand generation and lead generation
- A 5-step framework to doing demand generation from scratch
- Examples of successful demand generation, in real life
Ready to generate demand? Let’s dive in.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation is a marketing strategy that’s all about creating, capturing, and converting demand for your product or service to a new audience or potential customers that haven’t seen the product or service before.
It’s a strategy that helps you map out what you need to do to create demand from your target customers to want to buy your product.
The key to demand generation is to make sure your brand comes to a customer’s mind even when they’re not in the buying process, so that when they are ready to buy, your product will be top-of-mind.
Think of a product that resonates with you or you think of when you recall a certain need or have an interest in something. For example, when you want to search for something, where do you go or who do most folks think of first: Google.
According to Brighttail, 70% of marketers say their demand gen budgets will increase–with about a third of their spending growing over 20%.
Demand generation in B2B marketing isn’t going anywhere and will continue to be one of the most beneficial and lucrative opportunities for businesses to acquire new customers.
People are learning that marketing isn’t just about organic content and search; there’s so much more to demand generation that actually works. Channels like social media, emails, video, slideshows, webinars, and more create demand from new audiences.
Still not sure if demand generation is right for you to invest in a campaign to generate demand?
Here’s what you need to know about the importance of demand generation.👇
Why is demand generation important?
Demand generation for marketing is like butter for bread; they compliment each other so well and bring the best out of each other.
Companies and brands, whether in the B2C or B2B space, should invest in demand generation because it keeps customers in the loop about your brand and products at the right times.
Demand generation is a key ingredient to a successful go-to-market strategy overall for any business.
Here are a few other reasons why demand generation is important:
- Lowers PPC costs - more direct customers
- Boosts better search engine rankings
- Builds more brand awareness
- Builds credibility and trust with prospects or new leads
- Educates customers on your products
Consider this..
There are hundreds or thousands of other brands or competitors trying to get the attention of the same customers as you.
The only way to cut through the noise and shine through is to have a strong demand generation strategy that keeps your brand name in customers’ minds.
It’s also important because demand generation campaigns help marketers nudge prospects or new leads down the demand generation funnel.
It all boils down to the 95:5 rule of demand generation: Only 5% of businesses are in the market to buy your products or services at any one time, meaning 95% of businesses aren’t currently in a buying cycle.
“If buyers don’t know your brand when they are ready to make a purchase, it’s too late. Eighty percent to 90% of B2B buyers already have a set list of potential vendors in mind before starting any research, and 90% of the time they end up choosing a provider from that list.”
– Veronica Kido, President of Kido Communications
Demand generation is key to capturing the attention of both the 95% of future buyers who aren’t buying yet but will in the future, and the 5% of buyers who are ready to buy now.
The demand generation journey funnel
- Awareness
- Research
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Renewal
You can generally think of the demand generation funnel in 3 main stages: Create demand, capture demand, and convert demand.
Let’s start with ground zero: creating demand.
Creating demand
When you’re in the stage of creating demand, there are many customers who don’t know who you are or what your product is yet. Y
our job is to find these potential customers, or leads, who simply need a little nudge to reach the “awareness” stage of the demand generation funnel.
How do people get brand awareness these days?
Let’s dive into different types of creating demand generation.
Ways to create demand generation
Here are some of the most common types of demand gen, to name a few:
- Account-based marketing (ABM) demand generation
- Lead scoring
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Inbound marketing
Once you’ve at least established your brand as a player in your market, potential customers might know you on a level of something like: “Oh yeah I’ve heard of that product. I think it’s for [XYZ] industry/problem/niche.”
Now here’s where most marketers make a mistake.
Just because you have a wealth of brand awareness doesn’t mean that you’ve already won the race.
Demand generation is all about nudging leads or prospects down the demand generation funnel, when they’re ready to purchase.
Key phrase: when they’re ready.
Not everyone is ready to buy from you regardless of how much they’ve heard about your product.
The key to successfully funneling a new prospect down to the “purchasing” stage of the demand generation funnel is to know the buying signals of a customer ready to buy.
📘 Related: Learn about each stage of the B2B sales process in “What is B2B Sales?”
Demand generation vs lead generation
While demand generation focuses on creating interest and demand for a product or service, lead generation involves capturing new potential customers who you have no prior relationship with.
Demand generation helps nurture those new leads to become prospects (and eventually customers) through targeted marketing campaigns to drive conversions.
The 6 C’s of demand generation
There’s a lot to learn about demand generation. It’s a never ending cycle of researching, implementing, improving, and learning.
To simplify things for you, we’ve condensed demand generation into a 5-step framework that we like to call “The 6 C’s of demand generation”:
- Captivate your audience
- Create content
- Capture support and leadership buy-in
- Connect with community
- Call to action
- Calculate your success
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Here’s your step-by-step checklist to doing demand generation, with best practices and tips. We’ll break down each “C” of the framework for you.
1. Captivate your audience.
Start with market segmentation. Who is your target audience?
What do they care about?
In order to captivate your audience, you need to do your due diligence to understand what really motivates them, or what captures their attention for even a few microseconds through a quick scroll on the web.
We’re talking about ads, online brand presence, social media presence, etc.
In this phase of demand generation, tune into what’s trending, what your target audience cares about, and most important of all–the value of your product.
While you might find it easy to hop on social media trends on TikTok or LinkedIn to boost your brand awareness, the value of your product speaks more volumes than a fleeting trend that lasts a few days.
Here’s how you execute the “captivation” phase:
- Know your product’s ins and outs: What is the unique selling point? What is the value you’re delivering?
- Research your audience: What do they care about?
- Explore current trends: What types of content do well on each demand generation platform? Which trends resonate with your product niche or your audience?
After you’ve done your research on those three components, you’re ready to move onto the next phase: creating the content.
📗 Related: Mastering Social Media as a Powerful Sales Channel
2. Create content.
Content is king, but what does that mean for demand generation?
It’s all about storytelling.
Not storytelling in the sense that you’re just listing off your product features. We’re talking about storytelling that really gets your audience's brain cells fired up.
Share stories, not boring explanations.
A great example of storytelling for demand generation is using case studies.
People love to hear real success stories and testimonials from other customers. They want to know how someone else’s experience was using your product and they want to hear about their story of how your solution or product has changed their lives.
Although demand generation is more marketing-focused strategy, there are a few tips from sales you can borrow to use here when creating demand gen content:
- Always be empathetic: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand their needs, challenges, and desires
- Be persistent: If you create a batch of ads on Google that aren’t performing so well, do some A/B testing and try again. There’s never a right or wrong answer to this.
📗 Related: The Power of Empathy and Persistence in Sales
In demand generation, you have the option to create content on a multitude of platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, blogs, podcasts, and so much more.
Choose your strongest platforms where you can find most of your audience and start there.
📗 Related: Exploring the Benefits of Various Sales Channels
3. Capture support and buy-in.
By now you’ve put out all your shiny new ads, trending TikTok videos, and informative thought-leadership posts on your blog or LinkedIn.
Now it’s time to actually capture these new leads.
When there are so many competitors in the market space, how do you stand out and capture new leads?
Having killer content, ads, and marketing in general is an obvious answer.
The not-so-obvious answer is to have the right support and leadership buy-in for your demand generation strategies.
Having leadership buy-in can look like having a real budget dedicated to marketing ad spend, plus understanding that the success of demand generation can’t all be reduced down to a dollar value or a percentage.
Having the right buy-in and support from the rest of your team is the key to helping you capture those precious new leads.
Imagine working with a shoestring budget, or virtually no budget at all for demand generation ad spend and relying on organic content 100%.
While that’s the reality for some demand gen marketers out there, relying on organic content won’t help you reach your KPIs faster than investing some money into it.
If you’re working with team members who don’t believe in marketing budgets and expect Gary V level virality and fame overnight with organic content, there’s still hope.
Use real-life examples of increased ad spend or marketing budget for real demand generation campaigns to illustrate why demand generation is important to capture new leads.
4. Connect with the community.
Craft your messaging carefully.
We all know that content is king, but how do we craft content that engages the right people?
You need to write messaging that resonates, not just content that ranks on Google.
While it’s so easy to get caught up in a numbers game tracking all of your impressions, CTR, events, and other demand generation content metrics, try letting all of that go and focus on creating content that resonates with your audience.
Maybe your demand gen campaign content won’t go viral right away, but it will eventually show value in numbers if it resonates.
Content that resonates will always trump content that goes viral for a day and then dies off.
A good example of this is Robert Smith, actor, writer, and producer (American Injustice, Undersize Me, and Exercise Me to name a few films).
In a Sales Secrets conversation with Brandon Bornancin, Robert says:
“If you can learn how to tell a story and combine it with your sales goals,you can help others develop their story…Stand on the shoulders of giants. Look at how other successful companies or brands already did it and base your story from there. “
Listen to the full podcast episode on “How Storytelling Multiplied my Conversion Rate by 12X | Robert Smith” below.
The TLDR; summary is: Write content that resonates, not just to rank on Google.
5. Call to action.
The whole point of demand generation campaigns is to get new or old prospects through the demand generation funnel to the buying stage.
Every piece of content, ad, or glimpse of your brand in a demand gen campaign helps nudge the customer down the funnel just a little bit more.
That’s why you need to craft the right CTAs, or call to actions, at every stage of the demand generation funnel.
With customers at the top of the funnel, you can’t ask much from them because they probably only heard of your brand here and there. You haven’t built up enough rapport with these customers yet.
Related: How to use push notifications to convert sales
Some CTAs you might experiment with this group of people: do a free trial of your product or you might ask for their email addresses to stay in contact with them.
In comparison, the CTAs you would use for a BOFU customer (bottom of the funnel) would be more direct and bold, like buy this subscription, upgrade to premium, or renew your subscription.
You can be more bold with your BOFU CTAs because you’ve built enough rapport, awareness, evidence, and content for your bottom-funnel customers. They know who you are and what your product is, they just need the right nudge at the right time to get them over the purchasing hill.
The key here is to push CTAs and messaging at the right time.
When you’re pushing customers down the demand generation funnel when they’re not even ready to buy, there’s no amount of ad spend or virality that will make them change their minds.
Customers are ready to purchase when they feel like it.
Your job is to capture that period of demand from a customer at the right time to offer them exactly what they’re looking for at that moment.
Call your customers to a specific action—but only at the right time when it makes sense.
6. Calculate your success.
In other words, this stage of demand generation means to measure your demand generation metrics for further optimization.
How many articles, social media posts, emails, and other types of content do you want to put out each week?
Figure out how much outreach you need to do to reach your demand gen goals. Your input determines your output.
Here’s an example schedule of demand generation in a week:
- 5 LinkedIn posts
- 3 SEO-optimized blog articles
- 2 Emails
- 2 A/B paid ad tests
Once you have an idea of how much outreach you want to do, block out time on your calendar for each task.
Related: 17 email outreach templates
Writing of any kind takes time, even if you’re using AI writer tools to help you.
Demand generation outreach requires more brainpower and a state of deep work. Deep work is work that involves creativity, reflection, and strategic thinking.
It’s not something that you can just turn on and off in your brain at 3:00pm on the dot.
Give yourself enough time to gear up for a deep flow state of thinking.
On the other hand, other tasks like scheduling out articles, publishing copy in a CMS, or even updating your calendar doesn’t require a lot of deep flow thinking.
You can do these things on autopilot without draining your mental energy. Or use AI tools to help you automate the tasks that don’t need your unique POV, creativity, or human voice.
Plan to spend more time in your week on deep flow work, and less time on busy work that doesn’t require your creativity.
Successful demand generation examples, IRL
A successful demand generation strategy involves understanding the target audience, creating compelling content, leveraging various marketing channels, and optimizing conversion rates.
By implementing a well-thought-out plan, businesses can create a sustainable flow of leads and drive growth.
Here are a few examples of successful demand generation campaigns and strategies for your inspiration.
Proof-based messaging
Whether you’re writing a new blog post or creating new content for your demand generation, the proof is in the pudding.
In other words, people always want proof.
And in our world where attention and interest is fleeting for only a few seconds, proof is an easy way to catch people’s attention right off the bat.
💼 Case in point: This Medium article written by Maddie Wang outlines examples of other Medium posts where she grabs the readers’ attention by providing proof off the jump.
Why does this work? Proof-based messaging like the example above combines the best of both worlds: evidence and storytelling.
Potential leads might have heard about how great your brand or product is, but they want to hear real experiences from real people.
It’s the same with trying to convince your boss at work that you want to add a new software to the team’s budget–you should always start with providing proof and evidence that it works.
In terms of demand generation, proof-based messaging helps create a memorable narrative about your product that sticks in your leads’ heads.
So when it’s time for them to purchase a product similar to yours, they’ll remember that one story or blog article with proof-based content and be more inclined to go to your brand as a customer.
Educational content by Hubspot
According to a report, educational content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy.
This type of educational content does well for early-stage demand generation leads or prospects.
A great example of educational content for demand generation is Hubspot.
When you do a quick Google search for any marketing or sales-related keyword, Hubspot is a cornerstone of each search inquiry for their huge library of educational content, resources, and other learning materials for readers.
Hubspot offers ebooks, templates, checklists and even certification courses—all for free, and available for anyone to access.
The reason why this works is because even if someone isn’t considered a Hubspot prospect or lead, they will still know Hubspot because of how prominent they are with their educational and SEO content.
Here are a few ways you can recreate Hubspot’s secret to demand generation success:
- Blog posts
- Ebooks
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Simple how-to tutorials
In other words, provide value in your content.
Everyone can create informative content, but if you’re able to write and present information in a way that both resonates and engages your target customers, you’ve cracked the code to demand generation.
Interactive content
Another great example of demand generation tactics is creating fun and engaging content like quizzes or interactive content for your audience.
This type of content acts as lead magnets, providing an easy way to capture leads and contact information.
Some popular ways that a lot of B2B companies like to create fun and engaging lead magnets are through free tools or fun quizzes.
Whether it’s some kind of free ROI calculator tool or a quiz about your salesperson personality type, the point of this interactive content is to capture new leads’ attention through either novelty or usefulness.
Feeling-based ads by Coca Cola
Other than being one of the most successful soda brands in the world, Coca-Cola also has some of the most successful demand gen marketers out there.
Regardless of whether you like soda or not, everyone knows the brand Coca-Cola. This is the result of their massive success in creating targeted ad campaigns and marketing strategies to create insurmountable brand recognition.
While Coca Cola has had many successful ad campaigns from the late 70's until now, we'll focus on their present one: "Share a Coke."
The premise of their entire campaign is based on selling a feeling to leads rather than the actual product.
Why does this work? Because content, whether it's for demand generation or for pure entertainment, works most effectively by invoking feelings for the audience.
Don't focus too much on selling your product for demand generation. Your audience already knows you're trying to sell that.
Instead, be like Coca-Cola and focus on selling a feeling, an experience, or a sense of belonging.
How to measure demand generation
There’s a lot of testing to be done in demand generation.
You can test different elements like landing pages, calls-to-action, email sequences and more.
Here are a few metrics you should know as a demand generation marketer:
- Lead quality: A measure of the value of the leads you’re generating, AKA how likely are they to convert from you?
- Conversion rates: The measure of how effective your marketing campaigns are in terms of converting leads into new customers.
- Cost per lead: How much money you spend on digital marketing for leads to get them to convert.
- Return on investment (ROI): A measure of the overall value you get back from spending money to nurture and convert leads into customers. This could be a net positive or a negative.
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): A measure of how interested a lead is in buying from you based on their interactions with your marketing touchpoints.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): How much money is spent on each new customer over a given period of time.
- Attribution rate: The percentage of sales or conversions directly attributed to a specific marketing campaign or channel. These metrics help you know which specific campaign or channel helped you nurture or convert specific leads.
There are a lot more metrics we could cover that are related to demand generation, but these are the top metrics you should start getting familiar with.
FAQs about demand generation
What is the difference between demand generation vs lead generation?
Lead generation is focused on finding new potential customers, or leads, who you don’t have a prior relationship with yet, but they’re relevant to your ideal customer profile.
Demand generation is focused on nurturing those new leads through targeted marketing campaigns with the goal of converting them into customers.
What is the difference between demand generation vs inbound marketing?
While demand generation focuses on creating and nurturing demand for a product or service, inbound marketing is about attracting prospects through valuable content and building relationships with them.
Inbound marketing is a subset of demand generation that focuses on engaging customers through personalized experiences.
Incorporating inbound marketing techniques such as SEO, content marketing, and social media engagement can enhance the effectiveness of demand generation efforts.
By providing valuable content at each stage of the buyer's journey, businesses can attract, engage, and convert leads.
How do you combine sales and marketing for demand generation?
By aligning messaging, coordinating activities, and sharing insights, businesses can create a cohesive approach that drives demand, accelerates sales cycles, and maximizes ROI.
What are some tools for managing a demand generation campaign?
Here are a few tools you can use to help you manage, automate, measure, or improve a demand generation campaign:
- Lead management software
- Marketing automation tools
- CRM systems
- Analytics platforms
📗 Related: Top 10 Best Sales Intelligence Company Software Tools
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