Demand generation focuses on first creating a need for your product or service, and then selling them. Unlike other marketing tactics, demand generation addresses every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey even before they enter your sales funnel.
While demand generation marketing includes a host of marketing tactics like inbound, content and more, it too has evolved over time.
In this article, we’re discussing the 10 emerging demand generation trends for 2020 that will help you convert more from each campaign.
Making Demand Generation Work in 2020
1. Prioritize LinkedIn marketing
In the past few years, LinkedIn has evolved from just a professional networking site to a lead generation, content sharing platform. More B2B marketers are investing their advertising budgets on LinkedIn. 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and marketers are successfully earning revenue from their organic and paid efforts on this platform.
Start creating marketing campaigns for LinkedIn, digging into the user data that the platform provides.
LinkedIn even provides a free trial of their premium plan, allowing you to test out its extensive features like its sponsored messaging.
2. Give video marketing a shot
With fewer people engaging with text posts on social media, many marketers are using video to inform and entertain people online.
What’s more, information on video is easy to process, allowing you to drive your point across to your potential users. In fact, marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.
3. Create content for every stage of the customer journey
Users at every stage of their customer journey need to learn more about the product they are interacting with. For users who are just considering a solution for their product, they need content that lists down the advantages of a specific solution.
For users that are already considering a solution, they need reading material comparing the different brands that offer the solution. People who are already using the brand’s solution need articles that explain more use cases and the results they deliver.
HubSpot put together a concise guide on how to use content across the buyer’s journey. Read about it here.
4. Use consumer intent for smarter decision making
Generate a higher demand for your solution by targeting users who are already looking for solutions to your problems. This is where intent data helps. Intent data is behavioural information collected about an individual’s online activities, from the keywords they search with to their gender to the kind of content they are reading.
Once you’ve collected and understood this data, you can successfully target this set of audiences who will convert better than a generic audience.
Read more about the different types of intent data and how you can use it to drive more revenue.
5. Implement ABM for highly personalized acquisition strategies
As a B2B company, you’re sure to have a lot of large clients. For them, a generic marketing plan just won’t do. Instead, companies need to set up account-based marketing strategies to smartly target these large accounts.
With account-based marketing services, you can personalize your marketing to the account you are targeting, customize your solutions to the account’s specific problems, and convert them quickly.
Host webinars, send highly personalized emails, attend enterprise events, and build custom landing pages to successfully convert these large accounts.
Getting started with account-based marketing? Here are some tips you need to keep in mind.
6. Leverage marketing automation and chatbots
6. Leverage marketing automation and chatbotsWith automation, you can delegate processes to an error-free and accurate system. B2B marketers can gather intelligent data about people and their activity on your website and use this data to send highly personalized emails and marketing messages.
B2B marketers can use automation to send action-triggered notifications, track sales, send onboarding messages to their new customers, retain customers with timely offers and promotions, and most importantly, set up a live chat.
With live chat, you can answer customer queries and provide help instantly. Such a quality customer experience will make customers come back to your website and want to interact with you and your product. But, live chat isn’t a feasible option. Chatbots are your best option to provide an accurate and satisfying live chat experience to your customers. Set up a chatbot on your website and see how easily you can nudge these site visitors to interact with your brand.
7. Ensure marketing and sales integration
One problem that many companies face when acquiring new users is the large communication and strategy gap between marketing and sales. Usually, both departments have their own processes, with little sync in how they approach acquisition.
By streamlining your marketing and sales processes, you can ensure better strategy and earn more revenue smartly, even shortening your sales cycles.
Marketing and sales teams must sync their processes, and ensure their strategy aligns in a structured manner, allowing a user to flow through the marketing and sales process with ease. Top B2B companies use apps like Hubspot to keep all their user data in one place. This way, marketing can hand over a qualified lead to sales to convert the lead successfully and sales can quickly find marketing content to send over to a lead.
8. Use multi-channel strategies for effective reach
You can’t expect your customers to only be on one platform. By only targeting one channel, you limit the audience set and after a while, you’ll end up running out of potential users. Marketers must use a variety of marketing channels, especially channels where your customers spend time on.
To ensure you are successful in even reaching your audience, your marketing team has to be adaptive to newer channels.
Get started with multi-channel communication with apps like Buffer, which lets you schedule posts on different channels in one place. Ensure your copy and design are adapted for the channel you are on but don’t focus to ensure that the core message is consistent across all channels.
Monitor the performance of each channel on Google Analytics to pinpoint the ones that are delivering results. This way, you can focus more on the high-converting channels and reap greater results.
9. Always A/B test buyer personas
Your first version of any marketing campaign, design, or content is not going to be the best one. This is where A/B testing can help. A/B testing allows you to test out two versions of a page, copy, or design created for a specific goal. For one company, Lumineers A/B testing helped them increase their conversion rate by 120%.
Simply put, testing allows you to understand what can be improved within your strategy, allowing you to make better decisions based on proven data. Marketers are focusing more on driving more success to their campaigns with metrics and if you aren’t testing your work — whether it’s a landing page, newsletter or an ad— you’re missing out on getting ahead of your competitors and maximizing your conversions.
10. Provide a quality user experience on your website
Your website is usually the user’s first touchpoint with you. This means that you must provide a positive experience to the site visitor through your website. Your website is the best opportunity for you to convince visitors about your product/service. If your website isn’t constantly optimized for the user’s changing needs, you are missing out on large opportunities for your business.
You need to keep a tab on important statistics and routinely test out new copy and designs so that you can optimize your website and increase conversions.
For instance, companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. Such statistics allow you to understand what’s working and what isn’t for successful businesses and focus on ensuring your website is creating an impact.
We hope these demand generation trends allow you to optimize your marketing strategy in 2020.
