B2B Demand Generation: 10 Strategies That Drive Pipeline and Revenue

If you’re looking for ways to boost sales, then a demand generation strategy may just be your key to success. By educating customers about your business and products, you’ll create more demand for your product. Plus, this is an excellent way to strengthen relationships with clients and separate your business from your competitors.

Keep reading to discover 10 effective ways to generate B2B demand for your product. We’ll describe how you can shift your sales and marketing practices to expand your reach and close more sales.

What is B2B Demand Generation? And How it Works

B2B demand generation is a marketing and advertising strategy designed to drive business growth by generating demand for your product/service.

B2B demand generation requires a strategic, multi-step process. Your marketing and sales team will collaborate on building relationships with prospective customers. Basically, it’s all about guiding customers through the pipeline with content and sales tactics.

Here are the steps involved:

• Identify Your Target Market Profile: Conduct research and determine the key businesses and stakeholders that would most benefit from your product/service.

• Creating Awareness: Use marketing tactics to expand your reach to diverse audiences. The goal is to strengthen your brand identity and exposure.

• Driving Interest and Engagement: Offer product education to your prospective customers. Be informative and explain why they should purchase your product.

• Lead Generation and Qualification: Collect data about interested parties and assess their potential of becoming a customer. Think of ways that you can guide them into making a final purchase.

• Nurturing and Conversion: Offer your ongoing support, educate them, be present—answer their questions and reassure them. All of these behaviours will elicit their trust and drive your chances of converting them.

Benefits of B2B Demand Generation

• Enhanced Brand Awareness: Demand generation will elevate your business’s reputation and visibility in the eyes of your target market.

• Improved Lead Quality: Narrows down leads who have a genuine interest in your offerings, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

• Increased Sales Pipeline: Develops a strong pipeline of prospects and opportunities, easing the sales process and increasing conversion rates.

• Better Customer Insights: By gathering more customer data you’ll better understand your customers’ needs and behaviours.

• Higher ROI: Enacting these marketing strategies will help you reach high-quality leads, which leads to a better return on investment.

Measuring Demand Generation

After adopting any new strategy you must use measurement tools to determine how successful it is. These demand generation metrics and KPI’s should give you an idea of what to look out for:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA): The cost of gaining a new customer. It’s calculated by dividing the total marketing and sales expenses by the number of new customer acquired.

• Cost Per Lead (CPL): The average expense incurred to generate a single lead. It’s determined by dividing the total marketing expenditure by the number of leads acquired.

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Prospects categorized by marketing as having a high potential to become customers. Mostly based on their engagement and interest levels.

• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Leads that the sales team labels as ready for direct sales engagement, indicating a higher probability of conversion.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The forecasted revenue a business can expect from an individual customer throughout the course of their engagement.

• Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the profitability of marketing efforts. It’s calculated by subtracting the cost of the campaign from the revenue generated, then dividing by the campaign cost.

• Demand Generation Cycle Length: Calculating the average time from the point of identifying a lead and turning them into a customer.

10 Demand Generation Strategies:

1. Improve Your Demand Funnel Framework

To implement this strategy, your main goal should be to generate demand at each step of the sales funnel. Create marketing and advertising campaigns that capture people at various points in the pipeline, from initial discovery to conversion.

Here’s an overview of the different stages and examples of how you can reach your target audience:

Top of the Funnel: Tactics that will build brand awareness and attract new audiences.

• Educate your audiences with various types of content

• Create campaigns that generate awareness of your product/service

Mid-Funnel: Focuses on prospects who are interested but not yet ready to convert

• Leverage your CRM data

• Retargeting ads

• Free trials or demos

Bottom of the Funnel: Efforts to retain customer loyalty and re-engagement

• Send personalized emails or a regular newsletter

• Respond to feedback

2. Optimize Your Lead Nurturing

Your marketing team should always be in action. Basically, they should work in harmony with your sales team. So, as your sales team is moving individual leads through the buying process, your marketing team should be offering support along the way.

Their job is to create and distribute content that addresses an individual customer’s needs, hesitations, and questions. For example, people who're in the exploratory or browsing phase should not receive identical content. After all, marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach, different groups of people resonate with different messages.

Keep in mind, your marketing content may be the final push that converts a lead into a customer.

3. Develop a Content Strategy

Content marketing can help your B2B in so many ways. Of course, it often generates leads and drives higher rates of traffic and engagement, but it can also:

• Build trust and establish authority in the industry

• Give you a chance to educate your target audience and address their pain points

• Improve search engine optimization (SEO)

• Establish brand identity

With content marketing there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, instead, you can use it as an opportunity to be creative and post a variety of content. You’ll just want to make sure that regardless of the form or outlet, you should address FAQ’s and aim to create a need for your product/service.

Here’s some examples of types of content you may want to try:

• Blogs: Articles you post on your website to educate your audience and improve your SEO.

• Short videos: Content that can be uploaded on your website or social media.

• Audiobooks/eBooks: Become an industry leader by publishing your own book. Offering it online will improve your SEO and expand your reach. To launch an audiobook, consider hiring an audiobook production company to take care of everything for you.

• Podcasts: Podcasts are one of the most efficient ways to create high-impact content consistently. One recorded conversation can turn into a blog post, video clips, a newsletter email, social content, and more, all while building trust with your audience. Partnering with a B2B podcast agency means you get a done-for-you system that turns expert conversations into a steady stream of marketing assets, without adding to your team’s workload.

4. Account-Based Marketing

Account based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. Rather than placing a focus on increasing the overall sales volume, the goal with ABM is to concentrate on engaging specific groups of clients that have high purchasing power.

By tailoring marketing campaigns to certain audience members, you will address how you can solve their unique needs and challenges. This will strengthen client relationships and build trust, leading you to increased rates of conversion and ROI.

When you’re creating an ABM campaign, ask yourself these questions:

• Have we spoken with the client before? If yes, why did we not close on any deals?

• Are there trends with their online activity? What kinds of ads or posts do they engage with most?

Your answers will identify how you should introduce or reintroduce yourself, the client’s pain points, and their current needs. From that point, you’ll have enough information to create a personal sales pitch that targets their unique situation.

There are many ways that you can enact this strategy. An excellent example (that we’ll delve into in the next section) is email lists.

5. Marketing Through Newsletters and Emails

Newsletters and emails are an excellent way to communicate with your audience. You can automate opt-in emails (where you send a weekly/monthly newsletter) and send follow-up emails (to convert browsers into customers).

Here’s some things you’ll want to cover in your memos:

• Campaigns or product launches

• New content (e.g. podcasts, blogs, videos, social media)

• Product knowledge and FAQ’s

• Upcoming promotions

Shifts in the company (e.g. new team members, supporting causes)To create deeper and more trusting connections with your target audience, you can also send personalized messages to prospective customers. Use this as an opportunity to educate them on your product and its value.

6. Event Marketing

To create loyal customers you need a combination of things, though most importantly, friendly sales people who foster positive experiences. And unfortunately, it can be tricky to connect with people through a screen. So, to take your audience connections a step further, you’ll want to meet people face-to-face.

Attending industry-related events and networking will not go unnoticed. In fact, it will create more buzz around your brand. Basically, once people can put a face to the name, they’re more likely to remember you.

So, look out for upcoming conferences, sales conventions, trade shows, or even remote events (like webinars). You can also consider hosting your own event where your target audience can learn more about you. When you’re speaking at these events, make sure you clearly emphasize how your product can solve your client’s problems.

7. Leverage Social Media

Don’t overlook the power of social media and its ability to generate leads. If you’ve already developed a social media marketing strategy, you may want to revise it to improve your demand generation tactics.

Start by reviewing your engagement data. Look through your popular posts and identify the underlying themes. For example, are there specific topics that generate interest? Or whether the type of content impacts engagement.

Once you’ve distinguished what’s working best, you’ll want to respond with appropriate content. Also, when you notice people engaging with your content, you should reply with personalized content (e.g. product education, reassurance).

As a general rule, make sure each post will create interest towards your product/service.

8. Paid Advertising

Paying for ad space can be costly, though it’s an effective way of reaching your target audience. Be smart with it, learn how your ideal customers spend their time online and what kinds of platforms and content they frequently engage with.

By investing in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you will appear at the top of Google when someone searches for your chosen keywords. This will help you boost your brand visibility and generate leads.

Another way to achieve this is by promoting your content on your target audience’s social media feeds. Popular platforms you can use are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These sites offer you comprehensive analytics so that you know exactly what works and what doesn’t.

9. CRM and Marketing Automation

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to how a company collects and organizes information about its customers, ranging from leads to previous customers.

By tracking customer interactions, your sales team can optimize their sales pitches and follow-up meetings based on this data. For example, if a prospective client frequently views one of your products, you can assume that they’re showing interest in it. Although, it's your job to figure out what their pain points are and how you can educate them into making the purchase.

Marketing automation involves sending targeted messages to your prospective clients. The message will be tailored towards their previous engagement with your brand. In other words, knowing what stage of the sales funnel they are in and how you can guide them into making their final purchase.

For example, you can offer additional information to viewers who are still in the exploratory phase of the funnel, or send a reminder email to those who have yet to make their purchase.

10. Refine Your Lead Scoring

There are many ways to find leads, website interactions and analytics, social media activity, or email engagement.

Once you find out where your leads primarily come from (basically how your customers found you and why they chose you), you’ll have a better understanding of how you can better qualify future leads. You can talk to your sales team or directly to your existing customer base.

You should reflect on things like your marketing, campaigns, website quality, sales techniques, customer service, and your brand identity as a whole.

Tips for Better Demand Generation Campaigns

• Create a target market profile: identify what makes your customer base unique. Determine underlying trends in demographics, engagement, and online activity.

• Track everything: measure and reflect on your results. Any time you launch a new practice, campaign, product, or piece of content, make note of what the responses were.

• Optimize your website quality: your website is the first place that customers will turn to after consuming your content. Ensure that it's functional and aligns with your brand identity.

As a final note, when you adopt a new demand generation strategy, make sure your whole team is on board. Communication is key, especially when big changes are being made! So, you’ll want to schedule regular check-ins with your sales and marketing teams.

Written by Emily Nyikos

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Jony Studios is a content marketing agency specializing in B2B podcasting and audiobook services. They have worked with many clients, from startups to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio, and many others.

What is B2B Marketing?

We’ve all heard of marketing before, right? Most commonly we think of the ways that companies advertise their products to customers. However, the term marketing is actually very broad and can look quite different from company-to-company. Today, we’re going to look at a whole different side of marketing, business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

After reviewing the sections below, you should have a thorough understanding of:

• What B2B Marketing is

• The Differences between B2B and B2C Marketing

• How to Create a Successful B2B Marketing Strategy

• B2B Marketing Content Formats

• Tips that Help you Stand Out from your Competition

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing involves one business marketing its products/services to other businesses. Instead of selling to individual consumers (like in business-to-customer B2C), you are selling to a team of people. With more people involved in the purchasing decision, your marketing tactics must be concise and informative. So make sure you offer product education, explain the product’s value, and how you’ll solve their problems. It’s not that simple though, you’ll want to keep reading to learn how to be strategic in your marketing and how you can stand out from your competition.

To better understand how B2B might look, let’s consider a real life example:

Let’s say that you own a company that creates curriculum for online learning platforms. In this case you would be selling (and marketing) your products to a remote education organization–not directly to each student.

Like any smart business owner, you want to gain more brand exposure and have the chance to personally connect with potential clients. So, you decide to work with a B2B Podcast Partner. In this case, you would accomplish all your goals without worrying about any of the planning. You would network with ideal clients as a podcast guest on your show while building an audience that targets your customer niche.

B2C Versus B2B

B2C (Business-to-Customer) marketing individually targets consumers who are purchasing products/services for themselves (rather than an organization). B2C companies consider a customer's everyday individual needs, interests, and challenges. Customer buying patterns can often be spontaneous, rather than fact-based and waiting on an expected ROI (return on investment).

Just like B2C, B2B marketing aims to attract and convert leads into customers. Of course, the clientele is quite different, as they are selling to people who are making decisions on behalf of their company. The purchasing process is much more calculated, generally involving more people and time, as these stakeholders are considering their ROI. As a result, to target their audience, B2B marketing content is generally straightforward and informative.

Creating a Successful B2B Marketing Strategy:

It is important that you stand out from your competitors. Of course, technology has connectivity benefits, yet it opens customers up to a variety of buying options. So, if you want to attract customers, you need to be strategic and thoughtful in your approach.

We’ve compiled a few crucial steps that B2B companies should follow:

1. Create your Vision and Set your Goals.

You must forecast into the future. Think about what direction you want your company to take? What steps do you need to implement to get there?

Before you start posting content, you must outline your marketing goals. Once you determine what effect you want your marketing to have, it will become clear how to achieve this vision. This planning will ensure that all content aligns with the company’s direction.

2. Distinguish your Market and Customer Profile

Now you must do some research. You need to figure out which businesses could benefit from or may need your product. Consider things from their perspective–what do they value, what would they be thinking or feeling when they see your brand/product pitch?

3. Outline your Value Proposition Research your competition.

Compare your company to them. What makes you different? Focus on these differences in your messaging, give your customers a reason why they should value your products over others.

4. Identify B2B Marketing Tactics

So, you’ve identified your target audience; what comes next? Well, now you must determine how you’ll reach and engage with them. Consider their online patterns (e.g. social media networks), how their competitors communicate with them, and what types of industry events they attend.

- Make sure you check out the section below. We’ve identified popular and powerful platforms where you can market your product.

5. Put your Plan into Motion

Now that you have a vision and a targeted audience, you’re ready to put your plan into action. Be creative and thoughtful with your content! Offer relevant education about your brand and individual products.

Remember that everything you put out is a direct reflection of your company. Potential clients will judge you based on what they see, so keep it clean, sincere, and not too flashy.

6. Reflect and Improve

Practice makes perfect. Or it at least makes things better. Keep in mind–some content will receive more attention than others, not everything will be an immediate success. Do celebrate the wins, but also take the time to determine why they were successful. Don’t be pessimistic about your low-performing content. Instead, use this data as a learning curve, note what could be improved in the future.

Make sure you keep a close eye on the analytics. Take the time to understand and reflect on the engagement and conversion data.

Popular B2B Marketing Content Formats

Podcasts: Over the past decade, podcasting has grown significantly in popularity. Topics related to B2B marketing are regularly consumed by business owners and founders. If you’re looking to start your own profitable podcast but don’t know where to begin, you should consult with a B2B Podcast Agency (they’ll handle everything with the right strategy combining almost all the content formats for business growth).

Social Media: At this point, social media is used by nearly everyone. While some of us are merely scrolling through entertaining videos, business owners are using social media to conduct research. They are analyzing their buying options, determining which supplier fits their needs, and comparing between similar products. As a B2B marketer, you must create content that educates your audience. You should post a variety of content–videos and pictures, a combination of paid sponsorships and free posts.

Blogs: Regularly posting blogs will increase your website traffic–which is never a bad thing! Make sure that you are discussing topics that are related to your products/services and will be interesting for your target audience.

Videos: A picture may be worth 1000 words, but a video is worth even more. Watching a video often feels more personable and informative. Sometimes videos can be easier to watch, rather than reading something extensive. It’s smart to create various forms of content, you want to cater to everyone!

Emails: Email is a free way to gain exposure. Make sure that your message is sincere and personalized to your audience. But keep it to a minimum, no one loves receiving spam–less is more.

Customer Testimonials: When reputable companies have something positive to say about your company, you’ll gain the trust of others. Don’t underestimate the impact that word of mouth can have on your target audience. Post these testimonials on your website or social media, make sure your audience sees them!

B2B Marketing Tips

Before you go off and implement your own marketing strategy, we should set you up with a few tips.

1. Always Use Visuals

Engage your audience with some sort of visual (a photo, video, graph, etc.). B2B marketing depends on educating your audience, so why not use various mediums to get your point across. And seriously, no one loves reading endless paragraphs of writing, so break it up with a few photos, videos, audio tracks, or GIFs.

2. Build a Consistent Brand Image

The way you manage your brand image will impact how consumers perceive your company. In general, people trust and remain loyal to brands that are consistent and transparent.

Decide how you want consumers to perceive your brand, and continuously act in ways that will achieve that.

3. Solve your Customers’ Problems

Consider this an ongoing process. You must constantly prove your worth to customers. They must know what you are capable of and what value you can offer them. Express how your product will ease their operations and will remove all their frustrations.

4. Be Human

Be personable and sincere. Remember, you are communicating with real people. Though business purchases tend to be more rational, people are still driven and moved by personal statements. Your messages should speak to the individuals within a company, rather than the organization itself.

With AI on the rise, it's safe to say that you should avoid sounding overly robotic. Instead, pair logic with emotion.

Well, that’s it. That’s everything you need to know about B2B marketing.

Whether you’re planning to start your own B2B company, or if you are already working in the industry and are looking for inspiration and tips–this article outlines everything you need to be successful in your marketing.

Just as a final reminder:

• Have a clear vision and strategy before you start releasing content

• When you do start posting, don’t stick to one platform, you must use everything that

  your audience uses.

- Make sure you offer product education in a way that expresses sincerity and aligns with your brand identity.

Let me know what you think. Which of these marketing tactics will you start using in your future content?

Written by: Emily Nyikos

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Jony Studios is a content marketing agency specializing in B2B podcasting and audiobook services. They have worked with many clients, from startups to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio, and many others.