Demand generation is an umbrella term describing all the marketing strategies that drive customer awareness about your services and nurture a lasting interest in your products. Take four crucial ingredients – social media outreach, content marketing techniques, personalized email marketing, and real-world marketing – and you have the recipe for demand generation. Throw in customer retention strategies and you’ll ensure that customers stay loyal to you and identify with your unique brand. As SEO experts at Miromind notice, driving customer interest and awareness in your products and services is of utmost concern if you want to grow and prosper.

Demand Generation Marketing: How to Hook a Customer Who Stays Hooked

Advertising and PR are no doubt very effective, but they involve expensive makeovers that we can avoid. Let’s focus on the strategies that yield near-instantaneous results if we implement them correctly:

Social Media Engagement

With social media, you have the luxury of executing a well measured, meticulously crafted strategy that’ll yield results without your paying for the exposure your company gets. By results, we mean creating an awareness of your brand and expanding the organic reach of your product.

• Focus on a few platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest without attempting to do all things at once. It’s a long-term plan so conserve your time, energy and output.
• Cultivate and grow your fan base using social media promotions that are incentivized. Target the demography that will increase the footfalls for specific products.
• Use social media management tools to measure the business value of your social media engagement.

Content Management Strategy

You’ll be merely whispering to a crowd if you don’t leverage the power and potential of content management. Content amplifies your voice, creating product awareness, and generating demand, besides building a better page ranking with Google.

Content is best when it is SEO optimized. Unless you figure high in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), customers won’t see you. Strategically, this means that when somebody types a keyword relating to your product, your page should figure in the search results. This is what you do:

• Identify and use keywords and phrases that are associated with your brand so customer traffic gets diverted to your page.
• If there’s too much competition for a particular keyword, try using medium or long-tailed keywords.
• Position such keywords in URLs or spread them sparingly in the content.
• Post lengthy highly informative and high-quality articles tailored to the traffic you’re targeting.

Promotional Content Marketing

One way of getting noticed is to become active in communities like Reddit discussion forums, GrowthHackers which drives viral traffic, and Inbound which is great at accelerating inbound marketing initiatives.

Content Lead generation

Do this by studying the demographic that uses your product and by posting content that is relevant to their most intimate search queries.

Real-World Marketing

With all the emphasis on digital marketing strategies, you can’t ignore real-world marketing. You need to do those business conferences, local dealer meet-ups, and conduct expositions and presentations so that you can showcase the business to the people that matter. If you’re a new company finding it difficult to break into the local market, use powerful growth hacking strategies to ignite a larger audience within a limited budget.

Demand Generation Marketing: Driving Customers to Engage and Buy Your Products

Generating the demand for your services or creating a brand awareness is but a third of the battle won. Your success hinges on convincing the customer to dwell on what you offer and stay long enough to encourage the first buy. To convince the customer that you are worth the investment, this is the way forward:

Content Marketing Strategy

Assuming you’ve initiated the exercise of SEO optimization, content promotion, and lead generation, you need to bring more visibility to your content. Prepare how-to guides, discuss case studies, and showcase interactive platform walkthroughs. Present informative podcasts and vibrant videos. Remember to address the intent of the traffic you are targeting and ensure they’ll find answers to the queries they post.

Email Marketing Strategy

First, let’s crunch some hard facts. Three-quarters of all customers ever surveyed preferred email as the best means of business communication. Customer spending on email offers is 138% more than people not receiving email offers. No other strategy maximizes returns on minimal investment.  Follow these best practices to get your emails roaring:

• Personalizing the email makes it more attractive to a customer. Use merge tags to name the customer and dynamic content that shifts according to the unique preferences of the visitor. A very good example is Amazon’s recommendation engine that prompts a purchase decision.
• If you automate the email campaigning process, you stand a better chance of converting prospects into solid business leads.
• Try segmenting your emails. Instead of posting an article on a webpage without having a clear idea of how people will respond, target content which is relevant to specific customers to elicit a better response.

Demand Generation Marketing: Strategies for Retaining the Customer

Crossing all the hurdles, people have finally started engaging you, but how do you retain these customers? To keep customers happy and returning for more, you need foolproof strategies:

Onboarding the Customer

When you are new to the market, the first weeks or months are very crucial when you’ll be going all out to woo the customer.

• What you provide has to be clear, relevant, and informative to fulfill the customer’s intent.
• Your product should generate value for the customer.
• What you do should be aimed at eliciting a positive response.

Retaining the Customer

Customer retention, which we mentioned in our opening para, happens only when a customer truly enjoys interacting with you. The personal experience of the product, the first buy or the way you handle the trial period should be fulfilling for the visitor. Customer retention revolves around three crucial factors:

• Unassailable Product Quality: An unusable product or an unsatisfactory trial offer won’t retain customers.
• Super Awesome Branding: An identifiable logo, appealing color palettes, beautiful typefaces, and outstanding images are a few essentials for promoting brand recall, and making a visitor feel proud of being your customer.
• Breathtaking Customer Service: You are as weak or as strong as your backup team. Their knowledge, skill, communication, and competence has to be of a very high order to deliver satisfaction on time, every time.

Demand Generation Marketing: Maintaining the Killer Tempo

Follow these simple actionable steps to keep the tempo of demand generation high and result-oriented:

Create a Website That’ll Make Customers Proud

Make sure every person you meet, every social interaction you have is backed up with the website URL that makes you happy and makes customers happier. Pride and a personal bonding with your product offer the greatest motivation for customer conversions.

Blog With a Vengeance

Even if customers take time to queue up for your product, ensure you’re blogging high-quality SEO optimized content on a regular basis if only to strengthen your digital footprint.

Engage Online Communities to Create a Lasting Impression

Build a fan base through social media postings, and make a solid beginning by selectively engaging virtual communities catering more than 1 million users (see Wikipedia).

Use List Building Plugins to Boost Conversions

Do this in your blog. This is the ideal way of reaching your best offers and finest content to the hyper-targeted demographic that lands on your page.

Pack Gated Content in Your Emails

Gated content is the strategy where you offer something of value to a customer in return for information such as the name, contact number, employment industry or contact details. In return, you offer white papers, videos, an eBrochure, free reviews, and live demos.

Get Emails Automated and Validated

Maintaining a subscriber base and soliciting new subscribers can be a herculean task if done manually. Use professional email automation and validation tools to reduce bounce rates and boost conversions.

Optimize Your Web and Mail Content

The end result of demand generation techniques should be a successful sales funnel. When that stage is reached come back to onsite optimization. Do an A/B testing for your web page to analyze how it performs under changing parameters.

Demand Generation Marketing Holds Huge Promise for Boosting Businesses

Do remember that what strikes an emotional chord with a customer drives demand. Move away from the herd by presenting yourself as unique and something worth aspiring for. Do whatever you can to ensure the customer gets a delightful experience at every stage of the sales funnel. Analyze the metrics of demand generation very closely to ensure your strategic changes are boosting business revenues.

• Management