Building leads is an ongoing challenge for brands and organizations today.
New tactics abound, some successful, some not. At times, it can seem like a hit or miss activity, proving that your strategies need to be constantly evolving.
Yet, while developing leads is crucial to a sales and marketing strategy, brands need to think beyond simply capturing contact information and focus on demand generation on a larger scale.
Demand generation marketing focuses on identifying higher-quality leads and leading them through the sales funnel more smoothly and efficiently.
It’s about creating and engaging these high-quality leads with your particular brand and giving them reasons to convert.
To be successful, though, you need to start with a well-defined marketing strategy, followed by identifying the right demand generation tools for your organization’s particular needs.
Here is what you need to know:
What is the concept of Demand Generation?
Demand generation differs from lead generation in a number of ways.
Its main goal is to create awareness and demand for your products or services.
Where lead generation focuses on the volume of leads, demand generation seeks more high-quality leads, that is, those more likely to purchase what you have to offer.
What are the tactics tied to Demand Generation?
Demand generation employs various tactics to generate high-quality leads and eventually result in sales. These tactics include the following.
Inbound marketing and Website Behavior
Your website is key to a successful demand generation strategy.
Utilize inbound marketing methods to increase the value of your website content and resources, and observe visitor behavior once on your site.
Start by identifying your targeted audience’s pain points, interests, and content preferences.
Content Marketing
Relevant content is what will drive your demand generation strategy.
Buyers are looking for this beneficial type of content to help in the decision-making process, and it will better position you as a trustworthy resource.
Essentially, content plays a crucial role in whether a lead, customer, or prospect makes the decision to buy your product or service.
It can pull them further along your sales funnel or repel them to go elsewhere.
Social media engagement
Social media networks can be a powerful channel to focus your demand generation strategy.
The increasing and expanding use of social media for finding content by both consumers and businesses make these platforms an impactful place for generating high-quality leads to nurture.
You can utilize the power of social networks by building rapport and relationships with the targeted audience and creating trust along the way.
Lead nurturing
Once a lead interacts or engages with your relevant content, begin nurturing that lead right away. Glide along with them through the entire buyer’s journey.
While it’s true that not all nurtured high-quality leads will be ready to hit the buy button right away, they may do so in the future.
Sales teams can send them back to the marketing pros for additional nurturing as needed.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a method of using a point system to assign values based on a prospect’s online behavior.
Higher points are given to certain activities, indicating a more sales-ready position.
For example, if your prospect clicks on a certain link or reads a blog, you might allot them two to five points. Once that lead reaches a designated number of points, the marketing team can then pass them on to the sales team.
How your organization scores each lead and their activities will depend on how you define what a high-quality lead is for your particular product or service.
Interactive Content
Another advancing tactic for demand generation is to diversify the type of content you offer.
Interactive content, in particular, attracts customers and prospects and allows you to identify their interests along with the potential for capturing contact information.
Create free tools, such as calculators, or include polls and surveys to draw prospects in and help create demand.
The higher the engagement, the more chances of increasing the demand for your product or service.
Sales and Marketing Collaboration
Successful demand generation needs to be a collaborative effort between your sales and marketing teams.
Working together and aligning strategies and goals, these two teams can build demand and seamlessly find, nurture, and convert more leads.
Essential Demand Generation Tools
So, what tools are out there to help you in your demand generation strategy?
Several can be beneficial, including those designed to help automate, strategize, nurture leads, and provide valuable reporting for your efforts.
All of these tools offer something unique and can help in different ways. Check them out:
1. Autopilot
Utilizing a marketing automation tool is a beneficial way to keep your strategy on track. One such automation tool is Autopilot.
Autopilot is a reasonably priced tool that can help you automate your demand generation strategy.
Use it to manage your website tracking, action-based triggers, drip campaigns, lead nurturing, Salesforce integration, and much more, depending upon your needs.
2. Pardot
Another complete marketing automation tool, Pardot (now a part of Salesforce), provides you with a one-stop solution for a variety of tasks, including A/B testing, landing page creation, lead capturing, email campaign creation, and email automation.
Check out their demo and determine if a paid plan is right for you.
3. Wishpond
To more efficiently manage campaigns, including contests and promotions, Wishpond is a good solution.
With several contest styles to choose from, and the ability to publish and promote them on various channels such as blogs, mobile apps, websites, and Facebook, you can lure in new prospects and build demand for your product or service.
4. Ahrefs
For a demand generation tool for strategizing your SEO, Ahrefs is at the top of the list.
This comprehensive tool spies on competitors’ SEO strategies and provides you with valuable insight into the most successful keyword structuring while also identifying the amount of traffic they receive.
Ahrefs can also help you determine what is trending content, all in an effort to help you plan your own demand generation strategy.
5. RiteKit
To add more punch to your social media strategy and attract more leads, add RiteKit to your box of digital tools.
Start with its RiteBoot or RiteForge to develop compelling posts for the various social media platforms on a consistent basis.
Use RiteTag to create the best hashtags for your images and Rite.ly for relevant and convincing Calls-to-Action (CTAs).
With RiteKit, you’ll also be able to measure your efforts and conduct a full analysis of your results.
6. Integrate/Akkroo
Events and webinars are key to a digital marketing strategy these days.
From meetings to trade shows, Integrate/Akkroo helps you compile and save attendees’ and prospects’ conversations and information right away before anything is forgotten.
This tool also provides a way to clean up and analyze the collected information, prioritize leads, and transfer the data to your CRM.
7. Ion
Engaging your audience with interactive content provides them with opportunities to join in on the conversation, making prospects feel as if they are valued in some special way.
Ion has templates to get you started building the type of interactive experiences you want to include in your demand generation strategy.
Once launched, you can then capture insights into your audience participation through reporting options and even A/B campaigns.
With these insights, you can then modify your strategy to better meet the needs of your targeted audience.
8. BuzzStream
To create additional buzz these days about your product or service, partnering in some way with influencers can be beneficial in increasing brand awareness and even authority.
BuzzStream can help by providing an all-inclusive research and outreach platform to identify and converse with influencers relevant to your industry.
This tool can also help you keep track of your influencer relationships and provide reports on what is working best to build demand for your product or service.
9. Hotjar
With its heat mapping software, Hotjar analyzes website visitors’ real-time behavior, examining how they go about navigating your site.
As a result, you can determine the best ways to alter link placement or your calls-to-action (CTAs) to decipher what will work best for your website visitors.
This tool points out where you can make improvements to your landing pages and potentially lead to higher conversion rates.
10. Unbounce
The Unbounce tool provides you with a platform based in real-time where you can create several versions of your particular landing page and test each one to determine which of them attracts more high-qualified leads.
Unbounce is also easy to use, with a drag and drop functionality allowing you to make quick changes or tweaks to your page before testing again.
This feature saves your team time and also encourages more testing to find the features that your visitors will be drawn to more often.
11. Leedfeeder
The Leedfeeder tool benefits the demand generation tactic of lead nurturing.
To begin, Leedfeeder provides you with leads as to who or what businesses are visiting your website or reading your blogs. It then reaches out and identifies employees of that business and finds their contact information.
From there, you can follow up with these new leads who have already shown an interest in you, even though they have yet to fully interact.
You’ll also begin to nurture the relationship, depending upon your own marketing and sales timeline, and go at your own pace.
12. ABM Demandbase
ABM Demandbase is an account-based marketing (ABM) demand generation tool that utilizes beneficial hyper-personalization techniques.
To start, the engagement level of each of your accounts is identified, and, from there, customized, measurable initiatives are deployed.
ABM Demandbase uses a lead scoring method, assigning various scores to leads depending on the actions they take, such as reading a blog or downloading an eBook.
This tool also provides full tracking and reporting capabilities for all of your ABM campaigns.
13. ZipMessage
Keeping your entire team (including both sales and marketing) connected is another valuable way to ensure your demand generation strategy stays on track.
Communication is crucial, and needs to be a focus regardless of whether your team shares the same building or is spread out across the globe.
One way to help with this is with ZipMessage.
It is a demand generation operational tool that keeps communication flowing without overwhelming team members with excessive threads and daunting schedules.
14. Panguin
Panguin is a free reporting tool that works with your Google Analytics data, ensuring your demand generation strategy continues to be effective over the long term.
The tool can help identify when website traffic drop-offs are a result of changing or updated Google algorithms, so you can adjust accordingly.
It also helps by reporting on the negative effects of your SEO strategy, allowing you to quickly become proactive in making corrections.
15. SEO Testing
The SEO Testing platform allows you to test various features and create reports of the results of your SEO efforts for demand generation.
These tested features may include internal link changes, title changes, and more.
You can start out with a free trial then choose a paid plan based on the number of websites you have to test, with plans available for one, five, and 20 websites per month.
Wrap Up: Utilizing Demand Generation Tools is Beneficial to Your Marketing Strategy
With the help of these demand generation tools, your organization can streamline processes, save money and resources, and see positive results for your overall marketing efforts.
By building brand awareness and providing relevant content for your targeted audience through demand generation marketing, your brand will be able to identify the higher-quality leads you need and want.
The right demand generation tools can also help you create and maintain your marketing strategy to find these leads and also drive your conversion rates higher in less time.
You can find out more ways to increase conversions with interactive content in this exclusive material!
