The Demand Generation Game Plan For B2B Tech Brands
In the first half of 2023, my agency has been noticing a decline in search volumes across various tech categories. This paints the picture that inbound demand for B2B tech products is dwindling. Add to that the current economic landscape, and you’ll see why there’s some concern.
Here’s what this likely means for the B2B market:
• Noncritical issues will be set aside, resulting in reduced inbound demand for tech companies in 2023.
• In challenging times, companies tend to buy from either a top vendor or the most known cheap vendor. If you are neither of these, a company will most probably not take the risk of switching to your solution.
• The decision-making process has become even longer than usual, and the decision-making committee is only expanding in a turbulent economy, so you need to persuade more people to buy.
At the same time, the B2B buyer’s journey is evolving to look beyond the norms we are used to. There’s enough reason to believe that awareness-level traffic is migrating from Google to ChatGPT, Bard and even TikTok. And research shows that 75% of B2B buyers use social media to research products and services before making a purchase.
However, amid this challenging scenario, some brands stand out as leaders in their respective categories. How can businesses achieve growth when organic demand is on the decline? The answer lies in the game-changing strategy of demand generation, a marketing strategy that my agency helps clients with.
Demand Generation: The Growth Imperative
Demand generation isn’t just another marketing approach; it’s a powerful tool that helps businesses uncover latent demand by empathizing with the problems faced by their target audience. By understanding these pain points, businesses can effectively position their products or services as the ultimate solution.
When is it right to choose demand generation?
• Low inbound demand: Your category is either niche or not mature enough to generate inbound demand.
• Foggy inbound demand: There’s unclear intent behind keywords. This regularly happens when a category is very broad.
• Low brand awareness compared to the competition.
• High-priced products.
• Decision to buy your product involves lots of stakeholders.
Build Your Demand Generation Strategy To Feed Your Pipeline
To create an effective channel mix, developing a strong ICP (ideal customer profile) and buyer persona will guide your content strategies and messaging, as well as help you choose the most efficient channels to reach your target audience.
For instance, while LinkedIn remains a top choice for B2B advertising, younger audiences may be better reached through platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and tech enthusiasts may engage more on Reddit and YouTube. By defining and researching your ICP and buyer persona, you can develop a tailored strategy that resonates with your audience, ensuring your demand-generation efforts are a resounding success.
5-Stage Demand Generation Framework
When you’re ready to start, I’m happy to share an easy-to-follow approach to build a demand generation strategy of your own:
1. Build Awareness: The first step is to create awareness among the relevant audience. A successful strategy involves efficient media buying and a well-planned content distribution approach. The core metrics to monitor here are brand requests—instances where potential customers or users actively seek out more information about your brand or company (i.e., direct inquiries, website brand searches, referrals and other requests that come specifically for a brand, not a service) and overall traffic growth (organic, not just paid). Key channels include paid social, B2B programmatic ads, video ads and partnerships with opinion leaders and relevant communities.
2. Connect and Engage the Audience:Â Building meaningful connections and fostering brand loyalty is vital. This can be achieved through valuable content and relevant partnerships. Emphasize quality and regularity over quantity. Core metrics to track include returning visitors and subscribers across social media, newsletters, webinars, podcasts and blogs. Channels utilized are organic social, podcasts, webinars and events, email marketing and community building.
3. Catch the Demand:Â Amplify the pain points of your target audience and establish a strong link between their explicit needs and your product solutions. Imprint the value of your products in your content strategy and reinforce it across multiple channels with remarketing campaigns. The core metric to monitor here is marketing-qualified leads (MQL). Key channels include omnichannel remarketing, high-intent pages on your website, reviews platforms, email marketing, organic social and chatbots.
4. Convert Demand Into Opportunity:Â Make sure that when a potential customer is ready to buy, you capture the demand regardless of its source. Facilitate easy conversations and emphasize the value of your products in your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. Core metrics to focus on are sales-qualified leads (SQL) and opportunities. Utilize omnichannel remarketing, account-based marketing (ABM) advertising platforms, high-intent forms on your website and email marketing to optimize conversions.
5. Close Opportunities and Develop Relations:Â The final stage is to ensure seamless alignment between sales and marketing to close the deal successfully and nurture the customer further. The core metric to measure success is the number of won deals. Key channels for this stage include referral programs, brand advocacy programs, email marketing, webinars and ABM advertising programs.
Next Steps
The best way to build a demand generation strategy for your B2B business is by starting with research into ICPs and developing a value proposition canvas for each of the ICPs and buyer personas.
It’s crucial to identify business and product pains and gains that can be used to build a sustainable link between business challenges, product solutions and your brand.
A successful demand generation strategy ensures all stakeholders understand the problem your brand solves and, more importantly, recognize that this problem is crucial for their business.
Once you have crafted the message for each ICP, it’s time to think about content, formats and channels to deliver it in the most cost-efficient, up-to-date and relevant manner to your potential customers.
In these times of change and uncertainty, innovation could be your key to a breakthrough. In an ever-evolving market, the future belongs to those who innovate. Will you be among the trailblazers?
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This article was written by Forbes and originally published here.
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