5 Smart Demand Generation Strategies for 2023
As B2B marketers we talk much about nurturing and converting leads to win new clients — but there’s a step right before lead gen that should be getting more air time for companies that truly want to drive growth: demand generation.
Demand generation is the use of a variety of marketing tactics to build awareness of your brand and create a steady stream of engaged potential buyers at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that can later be nurtured and converted to actual leads.
While demand gen is related to lead gen and should be aligned with it in practice, it needs its own focus in order to help companies maintain brand visibility and stay competitive in crowded markets.
In this guide, we’ll walk through five smart ways you can enhance your demand gen strategies to build a healthier, more reliable pipeline (and ultimately earn more revenue for your business).
Quick Takeaways
- TOFU content should be targeted to specific audience segments and provide immediate value to buyers.
- Branded social media should shift toward organic, authentic, and personalized content in 2023 to capture audience attention.
- First-party data informs demand generation strategies by offering insight on things like browsing behavior, buyer preferences, brand perception and more.
- Optimizing for voice search is becoming essential — more than half of people across all age groups use voice-powered devices every day.
- Conversational marketing tools (like chatbots) don’t replace humans but do provide the type of 24/7 availability critical to effective demand generation.
5 Demand Generation Strategies to Grow Your Brand in 2023
Create Targeted, High-Value Content
Content remains far and away the most effective and necessary part of any B2B demand gen strategy — on average, buyers are engaging with 13 pieces of content across more than a dozen channels throughout the buyer journey.
Content is what’s usually responsible for a buyer’s first impression of your brand, and it’s what they’re using to learn about your offerings, your experience and expertise, and your track record with previous clients.
But the digital content landscape is also more competitive than ever for brands. For your content to rank on Google (and other search engines) and stand out in a crowded online marketplace, you need to make it both highly targeted to the right audience and hyper-focused on delivering immediate value to the buyer.
Here are some ways to do it:
- Refine your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, then use SEO to target content by buyer segment
- Create content that helps buyers solve problems or accomplish tasks (think templates, guides, checklists, etc.)
- Optimize your content strategy to align with buyer behavior and preferences (ex: make your content mobile-friendly, use visuals, create more video content)
And remember: when a buyer begins their search for a new provider, they’re looking first for solutions (not individual brands). Content that demonstrates the best understanding of buyer needs will win them over during the TOFU demand gen phases of the purchase journey.
Get Active on Social Media
Research shows that when a consumer follows a brand on social media, a staggering 90% visit their website and make a purchase from that brand (among other actions listed below).
This stat alone tells you why social media should be a primary part of your demand gen strategy in 2023 — but you’ll need to step up your game to make your brand and your social content stand out. Using social media for a mostly-passive targeted ad campaign and/or to boost content from other channels (like your blog) won’t be enough.
On social media perhaps more than any other platform, buyers want content that feels authentic and engaging — content that goes beyond making a hard sell for products and services.
Try these tactics to level up your social media’s demand-gen power:
- Create user-generated content (created by real users, posted by your brand)
- Create interactive content (surveys, polls, discussion questions, etc.)
- Use “story” features for more casual content that shows brand personality
- Host live events (Q&A sessions, webinars, guest interviews, etc.)
- Expand to new platforms to widen your audience reach
Use First-Party Data to Personalize TOFU Experiences
The widely-talked about cookie-pocolypse is happening — Google (and other big tech powers that be) are phasing out third-party cookies, meaning brands need a first-party data strategy in order to learn about their audiences and generate demand.
First-party data is any data you collect directly from the source. It includes things like website behavior data (from your own site), survey data, customer feedback, social media engagement data, and CRM data.
And while many companies are refocusing on first-party data out of necessity, it has significant benefits when it comes to demand gen and top-of-the-funnel engagement — it’s focused directly on customers’ interactions with your brand, it’s more reliable, and you own it because you collected it directly.
Fortunately, collecting first-party data is pretty easy using the right tools and tactics, and buyers are willing to voluntarily share their information with brands to improve their experiences. Ways to collect first party data include:
- Landing pages connected to specific products, services, or campaigns
- Surveys and other interactive content
- Website behavior data analytics from your CMS, Google Analytics, or similar tool
- Social media engagement data
- Content subscription forms (for your blog, email newsletter, and the like)
To maximize ROI on using first-party data for your demand generation strategy, look at your data holistically for trends that inform your top-of-the-funnel strategy — for example, the channels your buyers are using to find and interact with your brand, site behavior that indicates collective visitor preferences, engagement data that highlights content preferences (and more).
Use this data to create TOFU experiences that are aligned with buyer needs both as a whole and by segment, creating the type of seamless and personalized interactions today’s buyers expect.
Optimize for Voice Search
Successful demand generation is all about capturing your audience’s attention at their initial inquiry. And how are many people making those initial inquiries? By asking Siri, Alexa, or their device’s equivalent voice assistant. Today, well over half of consumers in all age demographics are speaking to voice devices every day.
Voice searches are typically longer and use more conversational language than typed search engine queries. Optimizing your content for voice search, then, requires a slightly different approach from traditional SEO — like targeting question inquiries and focusing on long-tail, conversational keywords.
For the most common search queries your audience makes related to your brand, products, and/or solutions, consider creating content and web pages with the question as the headline, a clear and concise answer right below it, and an expansion on the details lower on the page.
Adopt Conversational Marketing Tools
The role of AI and machine learning in top-of-the-funnel buyer experiences is growing — and while buyers still prefer humans for end-to-end service, they’re turning to chatbots for quick answers to initial inquiry questions, sign up for a mailing list or service, or resolve a complaint.
Using chatbots in your demand gen strategy, then, doesn’t mean replacing your human teams — it means enhancing their capabilities with 24/7 availability while providing a steady stream of potential buyer data to help you grow your pipeline (and your business).
Over to You
A successful demand generation strategy starts with effective prospecting to the right audiences. RevBoss’s outbound email software and demand gen services are custom-built for startups, marketing agencies, consultancies, and other B2B organizations to help them grow.
Schedule a quick call with us and find out how RevBoss can help you win more clients.