In this online digital era, with considerable innovations in the field of technology, customers are smartly evolving, and generic marketing strategies are no longer successful. Customers have access to so much information about different products and services, and with the competitors in play, they can easily make comparisons before deciding to purchase.
Hence, businesses invest a lot of their resources and efforts in building better brand-customer relationships. Especially in the B2B space, user acquisition can be a complex process, and demand marketing aims to simplify it efficiently. But what exactly is demand marketing, and how does it align with your sales and marketing ventures?
We will be discussing it all in this blog guide. From demand marketing and its importance to its pillars and tips, let’s dive deeper into this crucial marketing tactic.
Here’s a list of things you will learn in this article:
- What Is Demand Marketing?
- What Are the Different Types of Demand in Marketing?
- Where Does Demand Marketing Sit in the Sales & Marketing Process?
- How Demand Generation Differs from Demand Marketing?
- 6 Pillars of Demand Marketing
- 5 Hacks for Efficient Demand Marketing
What Is Demand Marketing?
Demand marketing is an engaging strategy marketers adopt to get people excited and informed about a new brand, product, and/or service to generate demand. The process prioritizes intent and helps to boost customer engagement. The customers must know that there is a product or service available for their product or service to be sold.
The primary aim of demand marketing is to reach relevant and new markets while building relationships with existing customers and creating demand for new products and services by making the customers aware of them. Also, the results are measured based on the revenue instead of the leads generated.
The process mainly involves tapping into the wants and interests of the target audience and then developing the demand marketing campaign to make them interested in your brand and products/services. It is generally an organic approach to market across different channels, which eventually helps to increase brand awareness.
The whole demand marketing tactic is more than just a branding concept and aims at building long-term relationships with prospects and customers.
What Are the Different Types of Demand in Marketing?
A business has to encounter various states of demand in marketing for their product and services. You must understand which state the demand is in for their product, and determine the suitable marketing mix to apply for each state.
There is a marketing task and technique for each demand state. So, a marketer must understand the perception of each state of marketing demand and find the best strategy to overcome the demand. The following are the 8 states of demand:
- Negative Demand
- No Demand
- Latent Demand
- Falling Demand
- Irregular Demand
- Overfull Demand
- Unwholesome Demand
Where Does Demand Marketing Sit in the Sales & Marketing Process?
As we mentioned above, demand marketing is a long-term process. This process starts at the root level before the prospects enter the funnel and continue throughout their relationship with your brand.
Demand marketing is crucial in optimizing your website and creating thoughtful and valuable content to share on different platforms. It doesn’t end when your prospects enter the sales/conversion funnel. The sales and marketing teams then work on lead nurturing and converting the prospects into customers.
And once they become customers, the demand marketing process continues to build better relationships with them because they are likely to contribute to word-of-mouth referrals.
How Demand Generation differs from Demand Marketing?
The terms demand generation and demand marketing are more or less the same. Both processes function with the primary objective of building brand awareness about your business among the general public. Though both terms refer to the process of demand generation, demand marketing slightly differs from the former as it also involves the process of marketing the demand generated. It also talks about the way of informing people about the huge demand for your product or service.
For example: Consider you are running apparel services that are more specific to women’s clothing. You have designed your ideal customer profile after analyzing who is your right target audience. Let’s say your ICP are women of various age groups, who belong to a specific region, and have the need and potential to make a purchase.
As the next step, you might start contacting them through various channels and use various demand generation tools as well. This might help you to get their attention, but what if they didn’t find anything appealing about your service when they started exploring? Will it work? Perhaps, your website is not user-friendly, and there aren’t any eye-catching social media activities or webinars. When users don’t have any standing proof of your brand’s worthiness, you can fall behind in their scale of interest.
Instead, when some of your target audience comes across your brand for the first time, they can get enough of an idea about your service through social media campaigns or some popular webinars. This can develop trust in your brand among the audience.
What Are the Different Types of Demand in Marketing?
A business has to encounter various states of demand in marketing for their product and services. You must understand which state the demand is in for their product, and determine the suitable marketing mix to apply for each state.
There is a marketing task and technique for each demand state. So, a marketer must understand the perception of each state of marketing demand and find the best demand generation strategies to overcome the demand. The following are the 8 states of demand:
- Negative Demand
- No Demand
- Latent Demand
- Falling Demand
- Irregular Demand
- Overfull Demand
- Unwholesome Demand
The Pillars of Demand Marketing
Sales are all about getting the leads to choose you over your competitor. Demand generation is the only thing that can reposition your product or service as the only available solution to your customer’s problems and eliminates the competition quickly.
For demand marketing to deliver results and to establish a strong foundation for demand marketing or overall marketing efforts, a successful marketer should take steps to ensure that all these pillars of demand marketing practices work well together.
1. Customer Research & Success
The better the customer experience you deliver, the chances of you getting a referral from them indeed gets better. That is why you need to ensure that your marketing and sales representatives, as well as your post-sales executives, communicate well with prospects and customers. You must thoroughly research your customers to understand their needs and deliver them the value they want.
2. Content Distribution
You should not just wait for your target audience to find you. Instead, you should share your content effectively on the channels and platforms where your target audience is active. This increases customer engagement and opens the door for more conversions. Moreover, distributing content and being active on different platforms builds your brand reputation and increases brand authority.
3. Focus on Value
The content you share on your website and social platforms should be valuable to your prospects. Even if you host events and webinars, they should deliver value by informing and educating the customers. This ensures that you stand out from your competitors and provide an excellent experience to your target audience. So, ensure that the content you are developing and sharing is curated, keeping its value in mind.
4. Reward Loyalty
Identifying your top customers and rewarding them is an excellent way to build loyalty. You can provide them with some premium tags or give them some freebies or discount deals to show them that you value their relationship with the brand. This eventually encourages referrals. You can even ask for their feedback, and by implementing it in your products/services, you can later build a solid relationship with them.
5. Develop a Community
All top brands in different industries have active communities and spaces where prospects and customers can connect. This helps you to be a part of the buyer’s world and allows you to deliver a great experience to them. You can create dedicated spaces or start conversations around the brand on community platforms like Quora, Reddit, etc. Also, reaching out to influencers to distribute your content is a good idea to gain your audience’s trust.
6. Optimize & Focus on Building Your Brand
Each brand is unique and has a set of values. Decide your goals and values and stick to them to move in the right direction. Representing your brand differently on different channels is not a good idea. Make sure to be consistent across all channels and keep on optimizing your content on and off the website for all users. You can also create baselines and guidelines for your brand to deliver a consistent brand experience.
Hacks for Efficient Demand Marketing
Demand marketing can reap outstanding results in the long run, and if you stay around the pillars while following some hacks, you can benefit a lot. Let’s have a look at some tips.
1. Create Multiple Buyer Personas
The most fundamental thing about demand marketing is understanding your target audience. To do so, you need to create multiple buyer personas. You can begin with a buyer persona by looking at your existing customers. For each persona, you have different strategies as different audiences have different needs and preferences. Consider demographics, likes/dislikes, and other data to create your ideal buyer personas.
2. Align Your Teams
Communication is key to ensuring that all teams are on the same page. To deliver a seamless and consistent brand experience, everyone needs to sync so that customers enjoy their interactions with your brand. Hold regular meetings and keep everyone updated about the strategies and results. Design a framework so everyone can track the interactions with prospects to understand their position in the sales pipeline.
3. Create & Share Personalized Content
You will know exactly which content format to choose for your buyer personas. By looking at the personas, you can also see the best channels to reach out to. With this, you can personalize the content specifically for them. If someone prefers videos over blogs, or podcasts over social media posts, you can refine their customer journey per their interests and preferences. This allows you to market your brand and engage with prospects where they are more comfortable.
4. Invest in Paid Ads
While demand marketing is primarily organic, paid advertisements have their role as well. Both work hand in hand to increase the chances of success of your campaigns. Paid ads mainly include search ads and display remarketing to reach large audiences. As paid advertising offers better profile targeting options, you can put your brand in front of the right people quickly and accurately.
5. Collaborate with Influencers/Industry Celebrities
Building relationships with industry experts, celebrities, and influencers can help your demand marketing ventures. By sending them free products or trials, you can get featured in their social media posts/stories, or even better; you can get blog mentions that link back to your landing page. This helps to increase trust and general awareness. Just make sure that you are choosing the right influencers with a base of followers that matches your buyer personas, which can increase the chances of success.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Why is demand marketing important for B2B?
The main goal of B2B demand marketing is to increase brand awareness. Marketing teams use demand marketing strategies to educate and build trust between the company and its target audience.
2. What does demand marketing mean?
Demand marketing is a comprehensive marketing technique focusing on generating interest in your product or service and has tactics that bring leads to your businesses and nurture prospects until they become your customers.. Demand marketing is different from product marketing.
3. What are the benefits of using demand marketing for your businesses?
Utilizing demand marketing can make your marketing messages more authoritative, carry more weight with prospective clients, and help increase revenue by farming qualified leads.
4. Is it necessary to have a demand generation strategy?
Of course. Some marketers begin executing their sales strategies immediately and complain about the low conversion rates. Before kickstarting any lead generation campaign, you must understand whether your brand has enough demand from the public. If not, it is highly crucial to work on generating demand for your brand in the first place.
5. Is demand marketing a part of the sales cycle?
Yes, Demand Marketing is a part of the sales cycle. More specifically, it is the first step of the sales cycle. Lead generation, lead nurturing, prospecting, and closing deals subsequently follow the demand marketing phase.
Utilize the Demand Market
Demand marketing is the need of the hour, and most businesses are investing in demand generation for effective growth. Demand marketing can always take you to new heights, whether you are just starting out in the industry or have already established your name. Sticking to the pillars and focusing on proven hacks makes it possible to achieve excellent results.
However, the process requires lots of brainstorming sessions, patience, and dedicated resources to strategize, implement, track, and optimize your campaigns. This is why many brands prefer to outsource the demand marketing process. You can reach out to Appointments.co where our experts can help you learn more about demand generation services. With the help of our team, you can take your ROI growth to the next level.
Related Posts
- Demand Generation – The Ultimate Guide with 9 Proven Strategies
- How to Generate Sales Leads without Cold Calling
Illustrations by Storyset
