The B2B business world equips itself with numerous strategies for nurturing existing customers and acquiring new clients. Indeed, most of these theories look like the ideal solution for your business’s growth. However, in real-world situations, almost all of these strategies offer mediocre results at best.
Simply put, these B2B marketing strategies are the same at the very core. But what sets them apart from each other is the method of execution. Now and then, a new marketing word crops up and thanks to getting hyped-up, it becomes a buzzword or a perceived successful marketing strategy. However, not all of these strategies deliver in tandem with the rising expectations of marketing executives.
Before I go in-depth explaining what Demand Generation is, we recommend that you read through BizProspex’s previous guides, links to which are present at the footer of this page. These will give you an overview of generic marketing tactics that can hugely improve your understanding of B2B Marketing strategies. These will help you understand our tech append email list services.
Once you have a firm grip on these generic strategies, it will be easier to understand Demand Generation as a marketing strategy that has been assimilated on a priority basis by top marketing executives.
What is Demand Generation?
What Does Demand Generation Include?
Demand Generation includes various strategies, policies and rules implemented by your organization. These aim at creating awareness about your products or services. You can accomplish this through a gradual, comprehensive, and holistic process that spans entire marketing departments. Essentially, demand generation strategies are like eco-systems which are like funnels.
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The multi-step process starts by identifying audiences that are most likely interested in the marketing message of your brand. As a B2B business, defining your target group is extremely important for all your marketing efforts. Once this ends, prospects will pass through a conduit that takes care of the multi-step lead conversion process. However, this conduit is unlike any inbound marketing or general conversion process. Both of these play a part in this process. Nonetheless, demand generation aligns marketing efforts very closely with sales to accomplish business goals.
It is best to think of demand generation as a long-term relationship between a brand’s marketing and sales teams, and prospective customers. The process starts by identifying and qualifying potential clients via content promotion, inbound marketing efforts, direct response, email campaigns, and events. These leads then transfer to a specialized team to be ‘nurtured’. This nurturing essentially qualifies prospects through a scoring system. The process depends on the stage at which the prospective client is in the conversion funnel. Eventually, this highly qualified, nurtured lead information goes to the sales team.
Now, coming on to the big old question of what you should be doing in your B2B business. Since each business’s needs are different, the strategies they employ will be different as well. However, basic knowledge about general demand generation strategies will help you. They enable you to craft a specific marketing strategy that perfectly suits your business needs.
The HOW-TO Guide to Demand Generation
Two necessary steps are essential in building an effective demand generation program for your B2B business. I will guide you through these steps so that you can implement them in your upcoming marketing programs.
1. Building Awareness
Building brand awareness may be the most basic way to bring attention. It is also the most effective way to garner more attention to your organization and the products or services you offer. Awareness does not merely include word-of-mouth publicity either. Being aggressive is necessary when it comes to brand recognition. Just as building Rome took more than a day, your brand’s awareness won’t be created overnight either. It is necessary that you put in efforts across the board. Some easy ways to do so include –
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Give Away Great Stuff – Within Limits
It is so tempting to offer freebies and giveaways continually. After all, who doesn’t love receiving free stuff, right? While it may seem that you’re going to help your brand by lavishing your audiences with free downloads, offers, or other promotions, this may not be accurate. Make sure only to give away the best stuff you have. It may seem counterintuitive, but always giving away free stuff causes your audiences to undervalue it.
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Partner with Industry Leaders
Webinars and free courses are a great way to rope in eyeballs for your organization. Webinars are especially useful because they are easy to access. They offer an excellent opportunity to showcase what your brand can offer. However, similar courses are abundant. So many free seminars and webinars are vying for the attention of a standard customer base. So how will you set yourself apart from the competition? A straightforward way of making your webinar or seminar a step above the rest is to partner up with industry leaders. This step helps you forge essential connections within the industry. Moreover, it also gives you the opportunity to boost brand awareness by roping in key influencers.
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Invest in Quality Content
If you do get the attention you want from your target group, your messaging should have value. Unless they think what you’re communicating has value, you won’t be able to get the desired response. An equally well-thought content strategy must supplement a solid strategy for demand generation. Everything from social media, blogs, emails to other channels is essential. Your content’s quality reflects your business’s capabilities. If you already run a blog, try adding value to your posts in ways that appeal to your consumer. The inclusion of statistics, original observations, trends, and insights are a significant step. They ensure that you have something unique to communicate with your target group.
All in all, it is necessary to build a sense of interest among existing and prospective clients regarding your services. Possessing a more interested and aware audience is beneficial. With such an audience the chances that they will beneficially engage with your brand are higher. Without being sought-after by your audience, your business is in trouble. In such a scenario, your marketing efforts are going to yield results that are not at par with your expectations.
2. Brand Discoverability
Another crucial element to consider while designing your demand generation program is your brand’s discoverability. Whenever your clients are in need of help, you should help them. Are your content, promotions, and marketing messages appropriate enough to satisfy their requirements?
If you can solve a customer’s problem, they will remember you and come back to you to solve that problem when it arises again. Whoever solves a client’s problem becomes their favorite. Such a client-vendor relationship continues to grow, given the vendor serves the client’s needs and demands satisfactorily.
In such a scenario, you have to make sure that your B2B business is in clear visibility to your audiences and probable clients. The best, most efficient way of doing so is by employing the right mix of various modern marketing techniques that work for your industry.
Apart from the two steps I spoke about above, there are numerous other strategies you must follow to make demand generation the best plan for capturing new leads for your organization.
The Basics
No matter what marketing strategies you prefer for your B2B business’s marketing efforts, they all require you to have a firm hold on existing customers and probable clients (leads). The quality of leads that your marketing teams contact is a crucial factor in determining whether your B2B business is going to rise or fall. However, if you’re looking for the crème de la crème of leads through conventional methods, you’re going to be very disappointed.
In the case of conventional channels, data vendors supply B2B businesses with databases. Such databases contain information about leads to facilitate B2B marketing campaigns. However, the bitter truth is that email marketing campaigns or even generic marketing efforts bring in low ROIs. Campaigns that work by contacting leads from such databases have a meager return on investment. The main reason for this is that the data supplied through conventional data vendors lacks relevance and is usually not up-to-date.
Highly relevant and freshly mined data is capable of altering the complete image of your B2B business. Such data enables you to reach out to your perfect leads at a time of prime opportunity. But, it is challenging to obtain such relevant data. Primarily, most data vendors supply outdated and irrelevant data to their clients. You can’t blame them either. Since they employ automated data scraping techniques, they can do only a limited amount of research.
Alternatively, there is a much more sophisticated data mining & lead generation technique. Utilized by a select group of data vending firms, this data mining technique is promising. The manual version of automated data mining and lead generation, manual data cleaning is a revolutionary technique that is proving to be a competent and highly trustworthy data service.
Automated vs Manual Data Mining/Lead Generation
1. Automated Data Mining and Lead Generation
A considerable majority of data vendors use automated data mining techniques to scrub data based on pre-set attributes. This data is then stored or stacked for vending. Whenever a B2B business reaches out to such a vendor with a demand for leads, they get this data. The fact of the matter is that this data is virtually useless. B2B companies purchase without any verification for the relevancy, accuracy, completeness, and value of these databases. Such information is primarily affected due to the passage of time as data gets out-dated with time.
The typical dataset loses its significance to a high degree within just six months of accumulation. Apart from this original data decay, vendors supply the same datasets to multiple clients. Given the fact that these clients are usually offering similar services, this reduces the outcome of your efforts to a significant degree. Just imagine the result when ten B2B suppliers contact the same leads for related services!
Leads who are contacted repeatedly for the same product or service will have a negative view of all these solicitors. This fact is true even if they are leaders in their industries. Your brand’s reputation as a B2B vendor will be hit adversely in such a case. You may find yourself in such a situation thanks to databases generated using automated data mining techniques.
2. Manual Data Mining/Lead Generation Service
With manual data mining and lead generation services, you can easily counter the phenomenon of natural data aging. With Manual Data Cleansing, every entry and record is verified manually through various sources and channels. After this verification process, they cross-check relevant information again across all trustworthy data sources. Once the desired data and information is substantiated and appended for each record, the entire database will be sorted and organized as per the client’s unique requirements on time. Additionally, the data is correctly formatted for your B2B marketing campaigns to use.
The accuracy achieved by using Manual Data Cleaning as opposed to the automated counterpart goes as high as 98%-99%! Now, that’s something to think about, isn’t it? As a part of the B2B marketing world, you will agree to the fact that running a marketing campaign with accurate, relevant prospect details is a sure shot way to gaining a higher rate of conversion.
In short, this high rate of conversion will become a reality for your B2B organization if you practice regular data hygiene. However, such practices are expensive, time-consuming, tedious, and counter-productive for a B2B firm to undertake in-house.
The Bottom Line
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of data cleansing firms that provide cleaning services for B2B companies. However, a majority of these firms use automated processes to clean or enrich your data.
BizProspex is the only manual data cleaning company operating from within the USA that provides manual data cleaning services. Right from data cleaning, CRM cleaning, Data Mining, Lead Generation, and a host of other data-related tasks, we employ manual techniques to assure the highest level of accuracy and quality.
Moreover, BizProspex has served over 300+ clients in the last five years. Most of our clients are returning customers, just attesting to the exceptional service we provide. We help B2B companies maintain data hygiene using the best possible manual methods to cleanse, append, enrich and scrub their data.
Relevant Data at your fingertips!
We are in the business of Data for 6+ years now, and we’re well aware of the hardships B2B businesses face. We’ve learned that having the best leads is an integral part of assuring successful marketing campaigns for B2B companies. Keeping this in mind, we at BizProspex recently launched a new online venture ‘BizProspex’, for secure lead generation.
At BizProspex B2B clients get guaranteed access to qualified marketing leads from across various sectors of the B2B industry. Right from Automobile, Biomedical, Hospitality, or any other B2B sector that you’re targeting, we at BizProspex are well-equipped to bring you the data that you’re looking for. Also try our pre-scraped datasets such as the AML sanctions list, PEP List, and Global sanctions database to prevent financial crime and avoid regulatory penalties. Manually cleansed, relevant, and up-to-date leads are awaiting you. Visit our site now!