If there is a demand in the market, it means customers need that product. But sometimes, you have to instill the need in the customers’ minds. This is referred as demand generation. It aims to create awareness among the potential customers, that a specific product could make their life easy.
The process involves the “shout-out” informing the potential customers that brand is offering specialized services to fulfill the customers’ needs. Gradually the potential customer is attracted to the brand.
The different demand generation methodologies are AIDA (Attract attention, maintaining the interest level, creating the desire and getting the action).
The entire process aims to increase the lead number and improve lead quality.
According to a finding:
61% of the marketers think generating high-quality leads is one of the top challenges.
When more than half of the marketers fall into that bracket, it is understandable this is a real and complex challenge that should be looked into.
As per MLM lead generation:
” By far the most efficient approach to deal with your leads is always to use a process that automatically brands you, supplies worth to your prospects, follows up with them and sorts out the uninterested people. “
In the process, you can also track the anomalies that your busy eyes miss out onto leverage them for demand generation activities.
The entire demand generation program relies on the relevant and successful lead generation activities. For this process, first you need to create awareness. This is because only if a lead is aware, they need the solution for their challenge, can you effortlessly sell the product or service to them. It leads to a seamless communication process, building up the right rapport and further resulting in conversions.
We’d step-by-step discuss about everything in detail, the strategies that help the entire process and the trends and tactics that every marketer should be aware of in the present scenario.
What is a demand generation strategy?
A demand generation strategy involves 3 steps. The first step is building awareness of the existing products and services, capturing the existing demand and turning into revenue.
Table of Contents
The Top Demand Generation Trends Every Marketer Needs to Know are:
1. Ensuring Both Marketing and Sales Work in Tandem:
The most common challenge a business faces – sales and marketing team don’t work in tandem.
One should know that both are essential for the growth of the organization. So, if their priorities are different, it might not give the business results you’re looking for.
The marketing team can increase the demand in the market, later the sales team can take over to convert these leads into customers.
Source: wpengine.netdna-ssl.com
As you can see in this image, only 54.7% of the senior management level stated they are generally aligned with the sales. It shows that business processes in many organizations face the dilemma where the sales and marketing department can’t see eye to eye, resulting in dismal results in most cases.
For the right demand generation, sales and marketing should work in alignment to generate the right results.
2. Social Platform:
Social media offer a broader platform to the marketers for showcasing their product or service. You can showcase bright visuals and pictures of your product on this channel, and eventually customers get attracted to the product.
Include the right keywords related to the pain points of your customers. It would obviously help you grab many eye-balls within a short span.
This video received much attention with more than 35 million views and around 1.6 million shares on Facebook. It shows an interesting content can motivate the audience to view it and further create a demand for the product.
The lesson learned here- If there is no demand, create it!!!
3. Taking the Help of Chatbots:
These automated bots could make your process seamless and effective as it takes over the manual tasks. And how does it help the demand generation process?
We all know customers need the best service at the right time; when you provide them the same, they tend to trust your brand more than the other. These bots collect the relevant information about every customer and accurately work to answer their queries. Now, this can happen, when you have rightly integrated the CRM with the chatbot. With this process, you can track every part of the customer journey. The entire process becomes streamlined and you become aware of your customers’ needs precisely.
4. Marketing Automation to the Rescue:
This technology is known to accelerate the business process in an organization. And so, does it hasten the demand generation activities in an organization. Most marketers are unaware, how the technology could lead to the demand generation. But it can, and in many ways…
Do you want to know the list of activities, where marketing automation helps in demand generation?
Then watch out the same:
- The solution helps in the content distribution
- The email marketing automation helps in shooting out of the emails at the right time
5. Offering the Quality User Experience on the Website:
User experience is what matters in the present scenario.
No customer would like to stay on your website if you don’t offer a quality experience. For example, if they find it challenging to navigate through the website pages, they would immediately move on to another site.
So, you should ensure that the website pages are easily loaded and the user could easily visit every page. They should find the information they are looking for.
A famous quote by the marketer Kate Zabriskie, perfectly fits the context here:
” Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will “
So, website user experience is one of the priority demand generation trends in the year 2021.
6. Converting Your Customers into Brand Advocates:
The word-of-mouth publicity still works.
Almost 93% of marketers agree, consumers trust content created by customers more than the ones created by brands. Also, 75% of marketers agreed that UGC makes their brand content more authentic.
Now, how is it done in the business world?
Many customers develop user-generated content to showcase how a specific product or service made their life easier. In most cases, they do it, to get the spotlight, but as a business, you can subtly take the help of the audience to promote your brand via UGC.
Find the below Example:
Source: toprankblog.com
Just as you can see here, Hootsuite is using the UGC content on the social media channel.
The “#IWorkFromHere” campaign encouraged downloads and significantly increased the social engagement. The more you get exposure, the more it leads to the demand generation.
7. Adding Videos:
Adding videos is a great marketing tactic. So, does it help in demand generation leading to sales?
According to statistics, yes!!
Adding videos on the landing page could boost your conversion rate by almost 80%. In the current world, where the audience have a shorter attention span, an engaging and exciting video could make all difference. They would actually spend their crucial time watching the content.
Salesforce includes the videos on its landing pages to showcase its product demos. The visitors who don’t have the time to go through the entire content on the page would also be motivated to view the content at least once. Thus, it improves the demand generation process.
Conclusion:
2021 is the year of great changes. Marketers need to adopt techniques that could shoot the sales number. There are different demand generation techniques you could integrate in your process, and this blog helps you in the same.
It clearly explains some of the best demand generation strategies that put your brand at the forefront of the competition in a short span.
