Generating awareness and igniting customers’ interest in your offers is a starting point for businesses entering a new market segment. But what differentiates an offhandedly planned demand generation strategy from a well-laid-out one is data-driven prospecting and focusing on reliable engagement metrics.
Read on, and you’ll find out why a productive B2B demand generation strategy relies on a solid Ideal Customer Profile, leveraging rich data and to-the-point metrics.
6 Essentials for Efficient Demand Generation Strategy
1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An Ideal Customer Profile is a generalized vision of a customer that drives the most value when buying from you and obtains the highest customer lifetime value. To solidify a company-wide ICP, you should pull together attributes of the highest Annual Contract Value customers. Utilize your historical records on close-won deals and post-sale surveys to build the initial, raw ICP.
Later on, you can leverage B2B data enrichment martech that will merge your ICP-relevant CRM records with third-party firmographic and intent data. Thus, you’ll get an extended profile you can harness to build lookalike audiences based on external data sources.
Audience builders like Primer allow marketers to merge disparate data points into ICP-like audiences and enrich them with personal emails and mobile numbers. Therefore, your custom audiences will better match Facebook and LinkedIn users and yield higher coverage.
2. Maintain Brand Voice Consistency
Remember that prospects will proceed with their journey as long as you sustain compelling messaging and a unique brand voice throughout your content. It must be the cornerstone of your content strategy to deliver a smooth and consistent impression.
For instance, if your demand-gen content articulates an expert opinion and shares insights for knowledgeable audiences, you better express the same expertise and substantial point of view further on. On top of that, don’t forget to create effective conversion paths that direct customers in their buyer journey.
3. Promote Your Offers Through Multiple Channels
Don’t miss out on leveraging both organic and paid promotion. The whole idea is to keep your hands on as many customer touchpoints as possible. Later, you can identify which channels form the viable and scalable pipelines so that you can distribute your budgets in favor of the main contributors.
Note that Instagram and TikTok are now gaining traction as B2B promotion channels, although they’ve been considered B2C for a while. They have become sustainably rooted in B2B marketing as they deliver immersive marketing experiences, allowing B2B brands to build trust through engaging storytelling. Today, many brands use Instagram and TikTok to show audiences behind the scenes and build a brand image associated with personalities.
4. Collect Feedback in Different Forms to Gauge Sentiment
Ratings, comments, reviews, and other types of feedback provide ample quantitative and qualitative data about user sentiment. Such sentiment measurement provides a far more informative representation of how people engage with your content than gauging social likes or shares. More importantly, it can separate a genuinely interested audience from the tire kickers.
There are many ways to encourage users to share their thoughts or tell a bit more about themselves:
- Gamification. Offer users the opportunity to take part in quizzes to test their knowledge.
- Cover controversial topics. Try the role of devil’s advocate or simply question the popular opinion, and discussions in comments will come along.
- Engage in social media communication. Don’t pass by the interesting comments below your social posts and their reposts, especially if you can clarify some essential points.
5. Don’t Abandon Free Trial Users
If a customer leaves without purchasing after the free trial ends, you must find out what warded them off and why. They likely struggled through onboarding and lacked interactive onboarding tours or playbooks related to their use case. Or maybe they don’t deem the benefits worth their money.
Anyway, you shouldn’t let bounced users go. Collect data on their experiences with your products and reach them with personalized offers. Represent the product strength and benefits that will make them reconsider the initial experience.
6. Offer Free Webinars and Interactive Events
Free webinars and online events effectively complement the early demand-gen content and ensure a smooth and natural transition from Awareness to Consideration state. Apart from high-level production, a considerable part of your online event success will depend on harnessing the broad spectrum of promotion tactics:
- Build social hype around the upcoming even Constantly drop speaker spotlights, essential takeaways, and behind-the-shot photos to grab the attention of feed scrollers.
- Leverage lead magnet emails.Rich customer data allows you to create compelling, personalized emails directly addressing your customers’ interests and concerns. Build a sequence of emails from the announcement, reminder, and post-event nurturing letters to maximize the impact.
- Launch targeted ad sequences. You can double the value of your event by retargeting site visitors with ads promoting VIP access to supplemental materials or guest testimonials.
- Promote through influencers.The power of influencer marketing goes beyond event promotion. In fact, you can double the benefit by establishing an “always-on” influencer partnership for lasting engagement with your blogs and vlogs.
Ensure you keep track of the core performance metrics whenever you implement some of these demand-gen practices. Also, remember that demand generation fosters long-term engagement, not immediate outcomes. But it will come to fruition if you put it strategically and use demand-gen insights to identify promising lead-gen audiences.
