Business-to-business (B2B) marketing can be exceptionally tricky, as many of your prospects are mixed in with wide swathes of consumers in crowded, expensive marketing channels. It can feel impossible to reach high-value prospects without draining your budget.
For those businesses facing these challenges, B2B demand generation is an essential marketing discipline. B2B demand generation builds long-term brand authority through trusted relationships, nurturing prospects as they move through the marketing funnel to eventually become customers.
With a strong B2B demand generation strategy, businesses can increase the number of high-quality leads they receive through multiple marketing channels while creating a strong sense of brand identity in their industry. We’ll break down one case study where a business was able to triple their monthly leads in just nine months!
In this article, we’ll go over what you need to know about B2B demand generation, including key definitions and popular tactics, so you can apply this powerful marketing strategy to your business and achieve your goals.
What Is B2B Demand Generation?
B2B demand generation is the process of building awareness of and demand for your brand and services from other businesses. B2B demand generation leverages marketing, advertising, PR, product features, word of mouth, and other strategies to inspire businesses to come to you for your service or product, as opposed to you having to seek them out.
Demand generation puts your brand in front of potential customers, beginning to build their relationship with your company and its services. B2B demand generation occurs through a demand generation funnel, from when the prospect is first introduced to your brand until they convert into a lead and then a customer.
In essence, B2B demand generation is when you put in place the marketing strategies that create high-intent leads for your product or service. Importantly, B2B demand generation appeals to businesses rather than individual consumers.
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation
A subset of demand generation is lead generation, which focuses specifically on lead conversions, while demand generation has a broader approach. Demand generation is often used interchangeably with lead generation, but demand generation is a long-term approach to filling your prospect funnel while lead generation focuses on short-term conversion goals.
The term “inbound” refers to those strategies that are meant to bring traffic and prospects into your website, demand generation funnel, or other environment through the creation of well-curated content. Demand generation and lead generation can both utilize inbound marketing strategies.
Conversely, HubSpot defines outbound marketing as, “a traditional method of marketing seeking to push messaging out to potential customers,” such as trade shows and cold calling.
Leads that arrive from your demand generation strategy are typically the highest-value leads, because they’ve been nurtured through their buyer journey more than a new prospect that you are cold calling or emailing for a first-time demo. They’ve learned enough about you to want to engage without any additional coaxing.
Types of B2B Demand Generation
One common B2B demand generation activity is the creation of informative thought leadership videos for publication across video and social media platforms, with the videos exploring industry-specific problems you can solve or benefits your service can provide.
Demand generation content will also typically give a lot of value so that your audience and potential prospects develop trust with you, initiating or strengthening a relationship with your brand.
Other areas of typical demand generation strategies include:
- Informative social media content
- Public relations
- Collaborations
- Webinars
- Online courses
- How-to guides
- SEO-focused blog posts
- Customer testimonials and reviews
- Newsletters
Each inbound demand generation strategy is aimed at increasing the perceived value of your product or service over time. The more quickly you can achieve this, the better.
Why?
Because demand generation takes time.
How B2B Demand Generation Works
The key performance metrics (KPIs) we look for to measure the effectiveness of our inbound demand gen strategies vary by channel, but typically speaking we look at customer acquisition cost (CAC) per channel, understanding that it’s only realistic to use last touch attribution in most cases, which credits the last touchpoint a prospect had immediately before conversion.
A prospect may read a blog and see five social media posts across multiple platforms one week. The next week, they may revisit your website, join your newsletter, and download a guide that was shared in the newsletter. The prospect could further attend a webinar before finally booking a demo with you and making a purchase.
Which asset should get the attribution? This is an age-old question that doesn’t really matter. Instead, we suggest a flexible demand generation marketing plan that can adapt to your goals.
Our typical recommendation on where to invest first is based around a few questions:
- What type of demand gen activities are you most comfortable with?
- Are there any competitive advantages in channels that would allow you to get a foothold on the competition?
- What budgets do you have available for demand generation content?
All else being equal, we like to start with the widest part of the funnel first, identifying where discoverability and distribution are the best.
We determine this by identifying where the largest number of your prospects and current customers are hanging out on a regular basis. Is it LinkedIn? Is it Instagram? Is it at industry conferences? Is it searching for solutions like yours on Google?
Then, based on the platform or channel, you craft a strategy around that channel by answering the question: What type of content performs the best on this platform and are there any opportunities to differentiate ourselves from the competition?
Platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have massive amounts of discoverability built in, whereas newsletters have almost zero discoverability. They’re both important in a comprehensive plan, as email addresses are often the most easily secured contact information and thus can be tied to newsletters.
A sample B2B demand generation journey may go like this:
Linkedin Post > Blog > Conversion > Webinar > Newsletter > Webinar > Conversion > 1-on-1 Demo > Sale
There are countless permutations that a prospect may follow in order to ultimately sign up for a sales meeting or to buy your product. The core idea of B2B demand generation is to build your marketing touchpoints in alignment with your revenue and available budgets.
Let’s look at an example of a simple demand generation strategy that a dental lab used to generate leads.
Case Study: Chameleon Digital Dental
By working with Rhymes with Timpani, Chameleon Digital Dental tripled their business in 3 months through a B2B demand generation strategy that leveraged social media and short form videos. Let's break down how they did it.
The Problem
Chameleon Digital Dental is a family-owned dental lab that creates custom dentures as a service for dentists. They initially acquired customers via an outbound lead generation strategy: they went door-to-door, visiting dental practices to pitch them on utilizing their service. This was very inefficient and emotionally taxing; they were often blocked by receptionists and other gatekeepers who would turn them away or only give them a brief minute to pitch their services.
One of the co-founders thought that there must be a better way to generate sales opportunities. With the right B2B demand generation strategy, they could also expand their range from a few hundred miles to the whole country and save themselves from the emotionally-draining, time-consuming activity of going door-to-door.
The Idea
Through research and reflection, she knew she discovered most new products through Instagram and figured that many of the decision makers within the dental offices they were targeting might also find products the same way. Digging deeper, she found that most of the dental labs on social media had boring, unengaging social media presences.
There was a greenfield opportunity here to create a simple strategy that stood out from the rest of the noise in her industry.
She contacted a local videographer who worked with her to come up with content ideas based on what her customers wanted to learn about their service. However, the most important part of their recipe was to stand out by introducing humor into all of their videos: no one in their industry was doing this.
After engaging Aaron Lympany of Rhymes with Timpani, to help with video ideas and creation, they started a monthly process that involved regular idea generation and monthly filming. Each session they created four informational and humorous videos, and released one each week.
The Results
After just nine months of consistently posting organic content and running a paid social ad, they tripled their customer volume. Prospects were calling in having seen the commercial and social media content. If they got the founder on the phone, they would exclaim: “Are you the guy in the videos?! I love your videos—they’re hilarious!”
Chameleon Digital Dental found a way to stand out on social media and appeal to their clientele in a way that no one else in their industry was doing. There is an incredible amount of opportunity for you to do this as well.
Accelerating Inbound Demand Generation
In this scenario, the demand generation strategy was simple: regularly produce social media content and post weekly in order to drive inbound leads. The benefit of this B2B demand generation strategy is that the whole office has a lot of fun creating the content together, and the feedback they get from their friends, colleagues, and prospects is overwhelmingly positive. They post the content, and the phone rings.
To expand on this inbound strategy and make it even more effective, they will want to capture contact information by employing other demand generation tactics. They can offer guides, demos, webinars, and more so that their passive viewers who aren’t quite ready to buy remain in their marketing funnel. To find inspiration for these pieces of content, we recommend reviewing what key competitors are doing and also identifying what they might not be doing, looking for clear areas to be a leader in the field.
In order to achieve this kind of successful demand generation, you must create effective marketing strategies and inbound content that will first build customer loyalty and trust, eventually resulting in them sharing their contact information and starting a conversation with you. It may take time to build a great demand generation program, but it is well worth it.
Additionally, they’ll want to explore other B2B demand generation channels like:
- Speaking at conferences
- Contributing articles for industry publications
- Building informative webinar content
- Writing ebooks on trending topics
- Creating helpful how-to guides and checklists for download
These marketing tactics will start to supercharge their inbound demand generation strategy and accelerate their customer acquisition process.
Discover How Inbound Demand Generation Can Work for Your Business
Inbound demand generation can serve as a long-term aspect of your marketing strategy, continually nurturing high-value prospects and providing you a consistent stream of leads. With a great demand generation strategy, you can create brand awareness and industry authority that supports all aspects of your business.
At Leithe Labs, we’re always researching new inbound demand generation strategies to help advise our clients on building lead acquisition strategies, which can help them hit their revenue growth goals. We have partnered with Rhymes with Timpani and full-service marketing agency Vaulted to help implement an end-to-end customer acquisition experience that will ensure a quick and efficient sales flow, helping you implement and improve your inbound lead generation.