How B2B Marketers Can Increase Demand Generation

As a business-to-business marketer, you can’t rely on the same tools that other marketers use. Your clients are more knowledgeable about those practices, and they have higher stakes for the use of your products or services.

The importance of adaptive Demand Generation

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the engine of the current economic recovery in the U.S. As a segment they are growing faster than large enterprises, which means we are seeing commensurate growth in the number of computerized solutions for that segment. Despite that trend, most marketing solution vendors aspire to be purveyors to big (or relatively big) enterprises. Deal sizes, profitability, street credibility and industry prestige drive that behaviour.

Demand Generation: Why Today’s Leading Marketers Care About It

Companies have begun to see a major change in the way marketing departments operate. Why is this? Because analytics are continually improving and have provided a way for companies to dissect and quantify the effect marketing is having on their bottom line. This also means that marketers are now being held accountable for their actions. It is important for companies, especially marketers, to recognize the role that demand generation is playing in this change.

What Is B2B Demand Generation Marketing?

In the B2B world, the lines between sales and marketing often blur. The challenge? Teams are often distinct and each facing their own pressures, making collaboration tough. That’s why the field of B2B demandgeneration has sprung up. The function is designed, specifically, to bridge the gap between sales and marketing operations. Content marketing, lead generation, and top-of-funnel marketing programs often live in this space.

A Winning Demand Generation Strategy for Sales Qualified Leads

Demand Generation in Evolution

Demand generation involves all processes right from initial prospecting to delivery of sales qualified leads to the sales team. The entire gamut of lead qualification activities fall in the marketer's court. Marketers need to employ a variety of demand generation tactics to generate leads and make them sales-ready.

Why Sales Should Care About Demand Generation

With marketing now playing a more strategic role in organizations as they seek to align closer to their buyers, there seems to be this notion that sales has now become less important and that marketing is now poised to unseat sales as the preeminent department.

Importance of Demand Generation

The significance of demand generation as a vital function within B2B companies has increased substantially over a period of time. Typically we have seen that sales and marketing departments within any business setup operate separately with each team blaming the other when faced with unsatisfactory business results.  But ideally demand generation service should be the outcome of the combined sales and marketing efforts.

Content Marketing for Lead Generation vs Demand Generation

Since social media is driven by content, the types of content you share will influence not only your success on social networks, but how social media helps your business. Different types of content serve different purposes and different audiences, and every business should be choosing the right content for their specific business goals. It is this principle that makes the distinction between demand generation and lead generation, two widely confused marketing concepts, so important.

Why Change Management Is Crucial to Demand Generation Success

There are now more people in the world with cell phones than people with access to electricity or clean drinking water. Consumers send over 500 million tweets and watch over 200 million hours of video each day just via YouTube. Many businesses have started to think about these changes in very small ways, such as the adoption of a “social” strategy or a tool like marketing automation to help manage all of their efforts. This is why we’ve seen adoption rates of marketing automation rise from 25% to 53% within 12 months among the 32 B2B Fortune 500 companies (Found in the State Of Demand report) — and yet less than half of those companies are using marketing automation
correctly.

3 Common B2B Demand Generation Mishaps

It’s no secret that it is easy for today’s marketers to obtain data, however, finding relevant data is what really matters. Gathering data just for the sake of having data won’t help you better understand your customers or uncover why a certain program is under-performing. But relevant data is what tells the whole story and is worth its weight in gold.

ANNUITAS recently conducted our second annual B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study for marketers in organizations with revenues of $250 million and above.

Why? We wanted a more granular understanding of what drives enterprise B2B marketers, how they think about demand generation, what they use to run their programs, how they develop content and connect with their buyers.

4 Components of Successful Demand Generation Marketing

Today’s B2B marketplace is a fishpond filled with opportunities. Of all the potential buyers swarming in the water, it takes time and creativity to grow a minnow of an opportunity into one heavy enough to tow the line, while avoiding tales of “the one that got away.”

Today B2B marketers have to take a leadership role in leadgeneration – it’s not good enough to provide names on a list, you’ve got to create a conversation and hopefully, a relationship for success. In other words, you’ve got to generate and manage demand.