Before you can increase revenue and market share for your business, you need to generate interest in and awareness of your brand. Marketers are faced with an ever-growing arsenal of channels through which to achieve this—which is both a blessing and a cause for confusion when it comes to honing in on the right mix of channels to attract quality leads. The precise balance of tactics you use will vary between B2B demand generation campaigns, but campaigns do have some shared traits that can be applied to all demand gen campaigns.
1) All B2B demand generation campaigns are relevant to their target audience
Successful demand gen campaigns might look different from the outside (and inside), but all of them are relevant to their target audience. There’s little point in launching a glittering campaign to generate interest if it doesn’t resonate with who you’re trying to target and where they are in the buying funnel. Before you can formulate a winning campaign, you need to understand your audience by creating personas around your ideal customers: understand their fears, desires, and what channels they interact with, as well as demographic information relating to age, gender, job title and location. Next, consider how each persona would behave at each stage of the buying funnel (awareness, consideration and evaluation). Marketing data plays a pivotal role in all this, as the more information you have about your audience, the more relevant your campaigns can be.
2) Lead gen campaigns use content marketing to attract the right type of audience
Content really is king when it comes to B2B demand generation campaigns. If your campaign is the line that reels in leads, your content is the bait that gets them into the buying funnel. But try to fish with the wrong bait, and your campaign will attract either the wrong audience or none at all.
Content marketing focuses on creating content with your ideal customers in mind, and audiences are a lot more drawn to content that’s centred around their problems and priorities than content designed to push a product. Without relevant content, you’ll have a tough time getting your audience to take an interest in your brand by relying solely on other channels, such as B2B telemarketing.
3) Lead gen campaigns must deliver value to their audiences
Let’s say you’re on track creating a lead gen campaign that harnesses the power of content marketing and is relevant to each of your target audiences. The best lead gen campaigns also add significant value to their audiences—does yours? We consume content because we think we’ll extract value from it—whether that’s information, entertainment or cost-saving. Your content might be fantastic and relevant to your personas, but if it doesn’t add value to your audience (as far as they’re concerned), then your content, or chosen marketing channels, won’t achieve its goal of engaging its audience. This is why you need to discover what your audience values, and then decide how to give this to them.
4) The best demand generation campaigns have sales and marketing playing on the same side
The lines between the roles of sales and marketing are becoming more blurred, thanks to digital and data-driven marketing tactics. The two divisions need to work closely if they’re to attract, engage and convert increasingly fickle buyers. The reality is that your sales team generates insights that can enhance what marketing does, and marketing knows a thing or two that can make closing deals easier. Successful lead gen campaigns understand this and ensure that sales and marketing are working as a smarketing unit. If the two sides don’t share the vital information each has access to, a lead generation campaign has a much lower chance of succeeding.
Whatever the goals and objectives of your next B2B demand generation campaign, you can improve its efficacy with a holistic approach to lead generation. Download our guide to find out how holistic lead generation used alongside B2B telemarketing can help you reach out to the right audiences:
