There’s a difference between capturing leads and creating demand for leads. In this post-COVID market, b2b organizations need to focus on generating demand as much as they want to focus on capturing new leads. Demand generation will help marketers sustain competition and create long term relationships with the clients for more sales.
One of the biggest mistakes that b2b marketers commit is to focus on the market that has active buyers alone. The other curious lot is the actual target audience that needs to be focused upon. This target audience will give them the opportunity to generate demand and offer prospects with solutions and services that will solve their business challenges.
You can establish your brand or brand reputation and also win loyal customers. This is precisely the target that marketers should reach out to, communicate, develop trust and build long term relationships that are critical for sustaining business in today’s b2b market.
Let us look at some of the primary goals that marketers need to focus upon if they want to grow their business-
- Create strong brand awareness and rapport
- Work on creating brand affinity and familiarity to capture the attention of leads
- Enhance your reach amid the target audience that isn’t exactly buying but looking for services that match their needs
- Drive product or service differentiation to stand out in the crowd and sustain competition
- Consider influencing buying decisions or engaging audience with offers that would be difficult to resist
- Communicate business value through a problem solving approach and being a solution provider for their business challenges
- Last but not the least, generate demand by understanding the exact needs of the prospect
These goals could prove to be some of the best and sure shot ways to generate demand and to help recalibrate sales and marketing strategies to be in-line with your demand gen goals.
Help, instead of sell-
This can be the foundation of all your demand generation initiatives. The change in your sales approach will make the prospect see you in a different light. As they see you as someone who wants to help them more than someone who wants to sell to them, they will then show interest in communicating or engaging further with you.
Empathy and willingness to listen are the key characteristics in establishing relationships today. Communication is extremely crucial and so are the content and content marketing initiatives. Insightful content is one of the best ways to offer them with valuable advice or facts that can actually accelerate their decision making process.
Content syndication:
If you are serious about demand generation, content syndication has to be an important part of your demand gen strategy. But remember, that it’s not just content syndication, but it is the quality of content that you end up distributing. Before you focus on the means to distribute content, focus and have dedicated resources churn out insightful, helpful, relevant and meaningful content that can influence the prospect and motivate them to contact you.
Conclusion-
B2B marketers have been investing their valuable time, efforts and money in generating leads through various different techniques. However, today’s trends are all about generating demand with the help of various innovative initiatives with bigger returns in terms of sales.
For any b2b marketer, there’s nothing more delightful than having a constant flow of quality leads that convert easily. Demand generation is one of the most potent and lucrative activities that can shorten your sales cycle, help get good leads that convert easily and enhance sales and ROI.