Elements of a Successful Demand Generation Campaign
Every brand’s demand generation campaign will look a little bit different. But there are certain steps that every campaign should incorporate to give you the best chance at generating interest in your product or service. The strategies that you use should be relevant to your business and to the stage of demand generation, you’re in.
Generating a need for your product or service
In most demand generation campaigns, your audience will initially be unaware of the pain points that your product or service addresses. Before you can start generating demand, you need to explain why the challenges your customers are facing are worth investing money in solving. At a very high level, this could include demonstrating how your product can make an aspect of your prospects’ work or lives easier, more efficient or more successful.
Create informational content
Start by creating content whose sole purpose is to educate and introduce people to a problem they’re facing.
Before finding mainstream success, the founders of Squatty Potty invested their initial content efforts in educating people about how they’ve been using the toilet wrong their entire lives. In a video that’s since gone viral, they use humor and education to demonstrate the right and wrong ways to use the toilet.
This highly shared Youtube video went viral and garnered over 35 million views and 1.6 million shares on facebook. If you don’t have enough organic reach to generate awareness at this level, you can run paid ads to your content on Facebook, Instagram or even Twitter and specifically target your ideal market.
Share a free report
When introducing your audience to the problem you want to solve, it helps to have concrete and quantitative data to back up your claims. Sharing free reports or statistics about your industry can help your audience understand the problem you’re trying to bring light to. The report won’t just create visibility for your brand. It will provide valuable information to your audience that they can use to make future purchasing decisions.
At Sprout Social, we share the annual sprout social that includes analysis of dozens of social media statistics and valuable takeaways that brands can use to shape their social media strategies. A report like this adds value as readers can refer to it over time and share it throughout their organization–in the case of our Index, for example, it can help social marketers educate others throughout their organization about top challenges a social team is facing. Even if a given prospect has a longer decision cycle, a free report that they return to as an authoritative source helps build brand awareness and trust.
Identifying a product-market fit
Once you’ve introduced prospective audiences to a problem, then it’s time to narrow down your ideal target market by creating resources that help you learn more about your audience. You want to be able to confirm that the content you’re creating will generate interest among the right people. Putting effort into targeting allows you to analyze who is interacting with your content the most, and how successful that content is in moving them towards conversion.
Create a free tool
Offering a free tool can help your audience understand your solution. It will also help you understand more about what your audience needs and is looking for in a solution. You can learn more about which segment of your audience is most interested and better define the pain point that your audience is using your tool to solve.
Ahref created a free backlink checker that gives users a taste of what its premium tool can do. Users will use this tool to check the number of backlinks they receive, and in the process they are exposed to additional valuable features and insights. This data includes information that users might not have known they could access, which generates more demand for the premium tool.
Use a lead magnet
If a free tool feels too complex, then creating a more simplified lead magnet can help you achieve a similar goal. A lead magnet can be anything from a free checklist, e-book, quiz or access to exclusive content. Anytime you create something that your audience needs to opt in to receive, it gives you valuable information about them. This information can help you better understand who they are. All of this information will solidify your product-market-fit and help you better tailor your solution to meet your audience’s needs.
Neil patel uses a quiz lead magnet that helps capture information about his audience’s business and website. He uses this information to create targeted campaigns for each audience segment to increase demand for his online courses.
Increasing brand awareness
Once your audience is aware that the problem exists, they need to trust your brand enough to choose your product or service. By getting in front of a targeted, informed audience you increase the likelihood of someone remembering your product when they decide it’s time to purchase.
Develop a strategy for social media
Social media provides a huge opportunity to increase awareness of your brand among your target audience. Using a proper social media marketing strategy, you can build trust and increase exposure to your brand as a whole. Building a relationship with your audience on social media will increase awareness of your brand and create even more demand for your product or service.
GoPro sells cameras, but instead of targeting photographers, it’s targeting people who seek adventure and love telling stories. It uses social media to create demand for its product. But it doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media convincing people that the GoPro camera is superior in terms of technical features. Instead, it capitalizes on the emotions behind the stories its customers tell. By sharing user-generated content to social media, it shows new audiences just how easy it is to share their experience using a GoPro without ever doing a hard sell of the product. Its audience may not be in the market for a new camera, but the ads pique the interest of anyone craving an outlet for storytelling.
Invest in blogging and guest posts
Your blog should be one of the main channels you use to generate demand among your audience. Creating content that informs and adds value will build trust and establish you as an authority on the problem you’re aiming to solve. To increase traffic and engagement on your posts, you can partner with other brands in your industry. Partnering with brands to create guest posts or collaborative content can help you reach larger audiences.
Guest posting on industry websites can also raise awareness of a problem you’re trying to solve and increase the exposure of your brand. Positioning yourself as a thought leader within your industry creates opportunities to pitch your idea to more established publications. Having a presence in big industry publications will increase your reach and brand awareness even more.