Key Steps to Take for Effective B2B Demand Generation

For a B2B business to be successful, it must offer a product or service that helps its audience. But even if your business has a helpful solution, you’ll still need to understand how to be effective at B2B demand generation.

Lead Generation vs Demand Generation

While lead generation and demand generation sound like they may be similar, there is a distinction between the two. Primarily, this difference is where they are in a customer’s journey.

• Demand generation: Demand generation emphasizes building an audience and positioning your brand as an expert in the industry by offering free, valuable information; most often in the form of blogs and articles, webinars, podcasts, videos, and social media content.
• Lead generation: Lead generation relies on demand generation to be successful. Lead generation is closer to the bottom of your sales funnel, and aims to turn audience members into qualified leads who are ready to take action on your products.

Both lead generation and demand generation are important for building your audience, establishing trust between your business and customers, and then converting audience members into buyers.

Understanding Your Niche

Defining your niche is the best step you can take to ensure your demand generation efforts are successful. Taking the time to identify commonalities between your current customers, and the problems your products solve for them ensures that your demand generation marketing reaches the right people and speaks to their situation.

If your business hasn’t already, try creating a buyer persona to help solidify your ideal customer. Because the better you understand your customer, the more you can speak their language.

Creating Consistent Messaging

Once you’ve identified your target audience and you understand the type of content and messaging that connects with them, align your current messaging with what you’ve learned.

Content you create on your website and throughout your other demand generation pieces should stay within a defined brand voice. That way, you have consistent, recognizable messaging that continues to build trust and nurture audience members into qualified leads.

Content and Marketing Strategies to Prioritize

After you have a clear idea of both your ideal customer, as well as your niche and unique selling proposition, it’s time to implement content creation and other marketing strategies to generate demand for your B2B products.

Blogs & Articles

Blog posts offer free, informational content that aims to help build trust between your B2B brand and audience. Blogs should address customer pain points, answer questions they have about your industry, and include a clear call-to-action that encourages your customers to move through your funnel.

Blogs bring in traffic to your website and are best utilized at the top of your marketing funnel.

Webinars

Webinars are a great way to offer clear value to your customers while also building trust and authority in your niche. Webinars are live-streamed events that offer you the unique opportunity to engage directly with prospects for thirty minutes or more.

Additionally, you can host a webinar to highlight products, talk about industry problems and present your solutions, and invite other industry leaders to participate to offer as much value as possible.

What to know about B2B SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the mechanism behind Google’s search results. Blog articles and other pieces of content you produce on your website should optimize for SEO keywords to ensure your brand is reaching the right people.

SEO helps you learn what your audience is thinking, and what problems they’re talking about, and then build content that directly relates to someone’s Google search. Thus, bringing you more traffic and building demand for your products.

KPI Network: Connecting Your B2B Business with Vendors Who Can Help Generate Demand

At KPI Network, our mission is to help businesses find demand generation solutions by connecting them with industry experts. Contact us today to learn more.