B2B Demand Generation: 10 Proven Strategies for Winning

Avoid sales plateaus for your B2B business by employing these demand generation tips

by Isabel Greenfield

B2B Demand Generation: 10 Proven Strategies for Winning

8 Min Read

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, there can be a lot of competition for a B2B audience within traditional ad channels. Fortunately, you can supplement time-tested sales techniques with marketing strategies designed to educate customers about your business and create the demand you need to stand out from the crowd.

B2B demand generation is essential to avoid a sales plateau and to capture a larger audience.

Here are 10 ways you can generate B2B demand for your product or service using various B2B performance marketing strategies and advertising channels.

What Is B2B Demand Generation?

B2B demand generation is a marketing and advertising tactic aimed at accelerating business growth by creating demand for your product or service.

Demand generation helps you stand out in crowded markets, educating potential customers on how your business can benefit them. B2B demand generation tactics are a way to build brand awareness while illuminating needs that potential customers may not have even considered.

How Does B2B Demand Generation Work?

B2B Demand Generation operates through a strategic, multi-step process:

First, it involves identifying and understanding the target audience, including their needs, challenges, and behaviors.
Next, companies develop and distribute valuable, targeted content via a variety of channels – such as email, social media, and industry events – to attract and engage this audience. This content is usually educational and helps solve problems that potential customers might be facing.
Lastly, B2B demand generation leverages lead nurturing strategies, like personalized follow-up communications and offers, to convert engaged prospects into customers.

By aligning marketing and sales efforts and focusing on building relationships with potential customers, demand generation can create a steady pipeline of marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads for a business.

How Do You Measure Demand Generation?

After you’ve deployed your B2B demand generation campaigns, you need key performance indicators to see whether they’re hitting the mark. Here are some marketing metrics and KPIs that can help you determine whether your campaigns have been successful:

Percentage of closed sales
Conversion rates throughout the sales funnel
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Volume of qualified leads
Average dollar value per deal
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

If your demand generation tactics are working, you should see positive shifts in the metrics most important to your business goals. Your cost per acquisition and cost per lead should go down, while other metrics on this list will likely improve.

So how do you create demand for your products or services? Here are 10 ideas to get you started.

1. Improve Your Demand Funnel Framework

While this tactic will vary slightly based on your business and its customers, you should aim to generate demand at each step of the sales funnel. Your marketing and advertising campaigns should capture people at various stages of the pipeline, from discovery to conversion.

To reach the top of the funnel, create prospecting campaigns targeted to your key audiences to create awareness of your product or service. You can use your CRM data to run mid-funnel ABM campaigns. Plus, utilize your pixel data to retarget those potential customers who explored your site, but have yet to convert.

2. Integrate CRM and Marketing Automation

Customer relationship management (CRM) is how a company collects and organizes information on their customers, from leads to existing customers. CRM software is commonly used throughout the sales process to track every interaction a customer has with your company, from email to social media. The sales team can optimize their sales pitches and follow-up meetings based on what they already know about who they are talking to.

Marketing automation involves sending targeted messages to qualified leads based on where they are in your pipeline. By adding marketing automation to your CRM data, you can make sure you’re consistently engaging interested leads and guiding them through the funnel. You can send supplemental information to those who are still within the exploratory phase of the funnel, or push a reminder to those who have yet to make the final conversion.

3. Optimize Your Lead Nurturing

If your marketing team is done with a potential customer once they’ve visited your website and become a potential lead, you should revise your lead nurturing process. Your marketing team should be assisting your sales team throughout the process, creating content that answers customer questions.

While the sales team moves individual leads through the sales pipeline, your marketing team should create different types of content and determine how to distribute the right content to everyone who may be at the same stage. If a customer is thinking about buying your product but hasn’t scheduled a meeting with a sales representative, your demand generation content could be the nudge that gets them to schedule a demo.

4. Refine Your Lead Scoring

Using website interactions to score leads is only one method of qualifying leads. You should also consider social media engagement, email engagement, and website analytics. Ask your team for feedback to see how it qualifies interested leads during phone calls and on-site visits. Interact with your existing customers to see how they found you and why they chose you.

Compile the information and come up with a matrix that helps you better qualify leads based on their interactions with you online and offline. Then you can develop B2B demand generation tactics that speak to each specific prospect.

5. Use Account-Based Marketing

This type of B2B marketing strategy allows you to personalize campaigns based on each account’s specific needs and characteristics. Using the CRM data that you’ve been collecting, you can hone in on specific messaging for a lead or group of leads. Don’t assume that general prospecting messaging will work with someone further down the purchase funnel. Instead, use this as an opportunity to have a conversation with your potential customer to help make the sale.

6. Develop a Content Strategy

Content is a core component of B2B demand generation. Content is what you use to provide details about your product or service and how potential customers can use it to improve their business. When developing your content strategy, prioritize content based on the lead score.

Create a variety of content, from general prospecting to answering specific commonly asked questions. All content should be aimed at creating a need for your product or service, but it will differ for people who are already familiar with you and have some follow-up questions versus a potential customer who hasn’t heard of your company.

More than half of marketers specializing in B2B strategies have generated leads from their social media feeds, and that number is expected to rise. If you already have a social media strategy, you can refine it to improve your demand generation tactics.

Look through your most popular posts to see which topics generate interest and engagement. When you see someone engaging with you on social media, reply with personalized content that helps create demand for your products or services.

8. Enhance Your Email Marketing Efforts

You should automate opt-in emails and follow-up emails for interested leads as part of your B2B demand generation strategy. But you can take email marketing further, creating white papers, infographics, and other types of content to send out to highly interested leads.

Send personalized messages to leads who interact with your email newsletters and other content. Help them understand why they need your product.

9. Build Authority With Event Marketing

Attending trade shows, hosting webinars, and throwing special events for your best customers are all great ways to generate leads. Demand generation events are all about demonstrating why there is a need for your product or service.

Host sessions that go into detail on various problems your company can solve for potential clients. You don’t have to sell your product overtly; just show why it’s in demand.

10. Break Out the Big Gun: Performance TV

While you may not consider TV ads in the B2B realm, Connected TV has changed the landscape. With a wealth of content at your fingertips, you’re not limited to a linear TV lineup with a couple of shows and time slots that align with your brand. Connected TV advertising offers the precision targeting and real-time measurement that is essential to advertising your B2B business.

You can look to your paid search and social campaigns to create a strong foundation for your campaigns on CTV. Use the same account structure, targeting top-performing keywords for general prospecting campaigns, and retargeting website visitors to reach the lower funnel prospects.

Performance TV makes it easy to launch a CTV campaign, even for first time advertisers. Select your target audience, upload video creative, and set campaign parameters–then you’re ready for launch. Performance TV offers a fully customizable dashboard to track results; or import your data into your existing Google Analytics account to track alongside your other performance channels.

Learn more about B2B Retargeting and B2B Programmatic Advertising

B2B Demand Generation: Final Thoughts

Demand generation is quickly emerging as a key component of B2B marketing. B2B demand generation helps you educate potential customers about your business and all you can do for them. This marketing and sales strategy helps you stand out from the competition by developing personalized content and targeting people at their specific stage of the sales pipeline.

You have plenty of B2B marketing tools at your disposal to implement your demand generation strategy. Use them to create a new, untapped market for your products and services and rise above your competition.