Wouldn’t it be great if your ideal customers discovered and developed a level of trust with your brand before they even recognized they needed your services?
These already ‘warm’ prospects would require less effort and investment in outbound sales, less product education, and take less time to convert. Pretty fantastic, right?
Well, thanks to B2B demand generation, this idyllic scenario is entirely possible.
Demand generation in B2B refers to marketing activities designed to build awareness and trust. Typically focused on the early stages of the buyer journey, B2B demand generation campaigns target a company’s ideal customer before they are actively seeking a solution.
There are two essential components of these types of campaigns: having a thorough understanding of your target audience(s) and creating a B2B content marketing strategy tailored to them.
By knowing your ideal customers’ interests, challenges, and pain points and proactively addressing them through targeted insightful content, brands can build familiarity, trust, and authority with their audience in a non-sales-y way. So, when the customer encounters a problem or is looking for a new product, they are already educated and informed about your brand. After all, they’ve been learning from your content and getting to know your company – perhaps without even realizing it – simply by engaging with you online.
It gets better. With successful B2B demand gen efforts, the customer instigates contact. Can you hear your sales team rejoicing? Already primed to purchase by being familiar with your company, understanding your product, and trusting your authority, but to top it all off, these prospects come to you when they are ready – no cold calls, not even any warm calls – the customer initiates the process.
Almost too good to be true, right? Well, not quite. Turns out that freely giving the gift of useful, educational, informative, or even just entertaining content that has value sparks the psychological need for reciprocity. When we are given something of value for free, we feel indebted. We feel we owe something to the giver. This operates at above and below levels of our awareness. Customers may not feel that they “owe” you something, and yet…. They still feel loyalty to your brand because you’ve provided value. It’s just human nature.
Voila, better SQLs. You’re welcome, sales team.
So how do you take advantage of this for your brand?
By developing a customer-centric approach to your content marketing efforts. It’s vital to know where your target audience spends time online and which modes of content they prefer. Are they podcast listeners? Social media addicts? If so, which platforms? Meeting buyers where they are with the types of content they consume most is step one.
Next, you must consistently create well-researched, authoritative content that is useful to your audience. You need to know your audience inside and out. Where they spend time, what keeps them up at night, what’s trending in their industry, and where they are in their business journey. Tailor your content to what you know about your audience and you’re off to a great start.
Now, its time to create and distribute your content. Create a content calendar and make sure you are posting consistently and generously on a handful of platforms – typically this should include a blog or podcast, select social media platforms, and an email newsletter. Does this require a lot of content? Yes, yes it does. The good news is that a lot of content can be repurposed across platforms giving each long-form piece a lot of extra mileage.
Bolster your posts and support these new customer relationships through automated email and retargeting and remarketing with paid ads or paid social posts. You want this to be a gentle reminder, not an annoying onslaught. Do this in a deliberate way to further educate and build trust – to keep adding value – and to be top of mind when they are ready to move forward.
A comprehensive B2B inbound marketing strategy that prioritizes demand generation through great content marketing can help the customers that need your product or service the most discover you before they even start looking for a solution. By being attuned to your audience’s needs, challenges, and goals and creating helpful, useful content to address them, you can prime this audience to come to you first.
Modern B2B customers want time to do their research and feel comfortable and confident with a brand before committing to its products. They want to reach out in their own time, not be hassled with sales calls or overtly sales-y emails. If you can earn their trust and respect by showing them you understand them and are an expert in your industry, you’ve just made your sales team’s job a lot easier.
At Brand Theory, we help B2B companies develop a comprehensive growth marketing strategy that includes inbound and targeted content marketing to ensure that our clients are meeting their customers in the right places, at the right times, and with the right messaging. Curious how an outsourced team can leverage demand generation and start bringing more of the right customers into your funnel? Schedule a no-pressure one-on-one session today and get a free growth game plan, tailored to your business goals, in just 30 minutes.