There are many objectives that marketers work toward in a holistic marketing strategy, including brand awareness, customer retention, lead generation, and increasing sales, just to name a few. However, demand generation stands out as a method to boost growth and enhance consumers’ awareness of your brand.
What Is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is a marketing objective encompassing various techniques to increase brand awareness and authority among consumers. When you deploy a demand-generation strategy, you aim to make your business known to customers and enhance qualified leads.
With a demand gen strategy, you showcase how your products or services can help customers solve the problems they have.
For instance, if your organization sells skincare creams, you could create a series of advertisements that illustrate how your products can reduce wrinkles and even skin tone.
You’d display your advertisements to people interested in skincare and anti-aging treatments, helping generate awareness of your company.
Determine Your Target Audience
Before investing in demand generation, you’ll want to thoroughly understand the customers you hope to reach and their behavioral characteristics.
Demand-generation strategies differ depending on your business sector. If you’re marketing to business customers (B2B), you’ll want to take a different approach than you would if you were selling to individual consumers (B2C).
B2B demand-generation strategies require building awareness among multiple organizational decision-makers. A single person probably won’t make the buying decision. Instead, you’ll need to win the approval of several people.
In the B2C market, you’ll have more creative freedom to generate awareness among your target audience, and you’ll only need to gain the approval of one person to make a sale.
You should develop buyer personas for your target audience. A buyer persona is a standardized set of characteristics or demographics your clients share.
Once you understand the traits of your typical customer, you can determine which demand-generation techniques are likely to be effective.
Demand-Generation Techniques
There are many ways to increase brand awareness and enhance leads through demand generation. Here are a few to consider.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers have large followings on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Influencers partner with brands to promote products to their audiences through social media.
A successful influencer marketing partnership occurs when brands and influencers have overlapping audiences.
Influencer marketing helps companies reach sizable groups of people who share similar characteristics at once, something that’s difficult to accomplish if your brand doesn’t have a massive social media following.
The influencer’s promotion of your products can spark interest in your products, which is key to increasing brand awareness.
Connected TV Advertising
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is one of the newer forms of digital marketing, but it delivers results.
CTV allows you to display short commercials to individuals streaming content on devices with an internet connection.
You can select your desired audience according to their demographics and behavioral characteristics or use first-party data to reach your current clients.
According to connected TV statistics, nearly 81% of retailers use connected TV ads to generate brand awareness. If you’re not currently using CTV ads, try them out to see how they can improve demand generation for your brand.
Provide Free Trials or Products
Providing free products or limited-time subscriptions is a great way to build awareness of your brand.
You can offer samples of your product to your target audience, which they can test to decide whether the item benefits them. For instance, if you have a makeup brand, you might consider offering consumers a sample of your newest eyeshadow or foundation.
Free products help you establish a relationship with your customers. If they like your products, they’ll return to buy other items you sell. They may also share their positive experience with your brand with their friends.
Generate Credibility with Content
Both B2C and B2B organizations can benefit from helpful content that enhances the brand’s authority and credibility within its market sector.
For instance, articles and whitepapers can explain a company’s products and services and provide additional support on topics relevant to their audience’s interests.
Other content, like videos, case studies, and webinars, help establish your organization as a leader in its space.
Successful Demand Generation Results in Qualified Leads
When you successfully incorporate demand-generation strategies, you’ll see more traffic to your website, in-person stores, and social media accounts.
People will naturally gravitate toward your company, wanting to learn more about your products and services and what they stand to gain by buying them.
Consider these demand-generation techniques as you scale your company and build brand awareness.
