10 Demand Generation Campaign Strategies That Work

by Frankie Karrer

8 Min Read

Creating a genuine interest in your product or service is a must if you want consumers to convert. A solid demand generation strategy will give you more qualified leads to hand out to your sales team.

Read on to learn the demand generation tactics that will put you on the fast lane to growing your business.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand generation is a holistic marketing approach focused on creating long-term customer interest and engagement through strategic, multi-channel marketing campaigns. It not only aims to drive immediate sales but also to build brand awareness, positioning a brand as a trusted leader in its market.

By combining tactics like content marketing, email campaigns, events, and digital advertising, demand generation helps businesses attract new prospects, nurture relationships, and ultimately convert interest into revenue.

Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

To add more clarity, demand generation encompasses the entire spectrum of marketing activities aimed at building long-term market enthusiasm and educating potential customers about a brand’s products or services.

In contrast, lead generation is a subset of demand generation, focused specifically on capturing information from potential customers through targeted activities like sign-ups or downloads, to create a database of prospects for direct sales efforts.

Learn More: Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

1. Improve Demand Funnel Framework

Think of your demand generation funnel as a map to help you better visualize the various stages of the customer journey that your audience experiences. It will keep you aware of what they go through—from the moment they first notice your brand to when they make a purchase decision.

Conducting intensive market research is critical to gaining a clearer perspective of what type of model you need to adopt for your specific industry and goals. It will enable you to tailor your demand generation campaign to your exact needs and improve your definition of a qualified lead.

To optimize your framework, you could divide it into four main phases—discovery, engagement, conversion, and reward—and go from there. However, keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for demand generation tactics. The approach you take should be unique to your brand, your audience, and your offering. You can assess your demand generation needs as you go and add stages to your map accordingly.

2. Integrate CRM & Marketing Automation

With the many actions involved in a good demand generation strategy, it can get rather challenging to manage things on your own. Luckily, you can always lean on automation tools to get things running smoothly and do more in less time. Marketing automation can help optimize:

Lead generation and nurturing
Social media posts scheduling
Analytics and reporting
Drip email campaigns
Search Engine Optimization
Digital advertising
Reputation management

In addition, marketing automation and CRM allow all parties involved in the demand generation funnel to perform their duties more efficiently. Implementing the right automated demand generation tools will take repetitive activities out of the way so that they can spend more time nurturing those prospects that are more likely to make a purchase.

3. Optimize Lead Nurturing

To attract prospects and turn them into leads, you need to develop and reinforce your relationship with them at every stage in the funnel. If you listen closely to their wants and needs, you can deliver a more attractive response through your marketing and communication efforts. Giving your target audience relevant and useful information throughout the sales pipeline will help you gain their trust and build a stronger bond with them.

Now more than ever it’s important to indulge your prospects with a smooth cross-channel experience. This will make it easier for them to navigate the purchasing process and make them more likely to buy. Creating a seamless, non-invasive, and personalized advertising experience for your customers will make them feel valued and heard.

Most marketing automation platforms will allow your organization to create a solid lead nurturing program that enables lasting relationships with potential clients through meaningful interactions. Testing these exchanges will keep them effective and healthy, and will give you valuable insights into what type of messages your leads find the most useful along with how often they want to receive them.

4. Refine Your Lead Scoring

Nobody wants to waste time and resources on leads that will never take the leap and make a purchase. Lead scoring will help you ensure that the leads you’re working with are more likely to buy from you and enable you to prioritize them.

Assigning a score to your leads based on relevant data is the backbone of a solid lead nurturing methodology. It helps you define when it’s best to reach out to each buyer, what to tell them, and how. Your lead scoring efforts should consider:

Lead demographics and firmographics
Budget authority, need, and time (BANT)
Lead interest and engagement
Lead behavior
Social media activity

5. Use Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Focusing on an account rather than an individual lead is an excellent strategy for scalable business development and revenue growth. It allows you to combine your resources and efforts and build tailored marketing and sales tactics to drive engagement among high-value accounts.

ABM marketing uses data to pinpoint which accounts you should target. This approach gets you closer to finding the right contacts within an organization so that you can provide them with personalized communications that offer them more value.

6. Develop a Content Strategy

Demand generation relies heavily on the content you craft to educate your audience and create brand awareness. That’s why developing a robust content strategy is so important. When you design a solid plan for content creation and publishing based on your target audience’s interests and behavior, you become more likely to get better leads and increase your sales.

Nowadays, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing to get their message across. Crafting a blueprint to map out your content plan will let you ensure all the resulting materials are relevant and goal-driven. To prepare a winning content strategy, you must define:

Your audience
Your voice and style
The purpose of your content
The reaction you want to convey
The types of content you want to create
When and where you’ll publish it
How you’ll promote it

Demand generation is all about capturing your target audience’s interest. Social media is a potent tool to achieve this goal if you know how to take advantage of its reach and versatility. This demand generation channel will give you an audience and the possibility to push your content to them organically through valuable posts. Using diverse social media platforms will help you connect and interact with your prospects, providing you with interesting insights that can be utilized to make your content more relatable.

Also, social listening will give you an endless source of relevant data on your audience’s behavior, preferences, needs, and more. This information will help you masterfully shape your demand gen campaigns to make them much more effective.

8. Enhance Email Marketing Efforts

Email marketing is a valuable data source that will help you optimize your demand generation efforts. Evaluating your email marketing campaign performance based on your open rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates will lead you to improve your efforts. Some actions you can take to enhance your email marketing actions are:

Scrubbing and verifying your email list regularly
Making your messages more relatable
Personalizing your content to each recipient
Segmenting your email list
Having a clear call to action (CTA) every time
Using responsive templates
Testing various deployment times

9. Build Authority with Event Marketing

Event marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness and authority. It gives you the opportunity for real-time buying engagement and allows you to present your prospects with solutions quickly and dynamically. In addition, hosting an event opens the door for direct interaction with your audience. Leveraging this marketing tool will enable you to develop trust and build brand loyalty.

10. Break Out the Big Gun: Performance TV

Connected TV advertising campaigns allow you to reach a larger pool of prospects to generate the demand you need successfully. And with Performance TV, you can reach those segments of your audience that aren’t actively looking for your offering.

We’ve transformed the television screen from a brand marketing channel to one that functions a lot like paid search and social. Just upload your creative, target your audience, and set your budget and goal, and your CTV campaigns will be ready to launch. Performance TV is a solid complement to your paid search efforts as well and can be fully integrated into Google Analytics—allowing you to access precise, actionable data that can be analyzed in real-time.

Connected TV is a game changer, even for B2B operations. Trust us, we use it ourselves! We have more details in the articles we’ve written on B2B demand generation, B2B programmatic advertising, and B2B retargeting.

Need inspiration? Check out these demand generation examples.

Demand Generation Strategy: Final Thoughts

Optimizing your demand generation strategy is not an easy task. However, the tactics above are proven to help reach a wider audience and convince not only that they want what you offer, but that they genuinely need it. If you’re looking to enhance your demand generation on a channel like Connected TV, sign up for our report below to get started!