Search Results for: marketing strategy

Demand Generation Etiquettes: 5 Best Practices Every Marketer Should Follow

Posted on By Arit Kumar Sinha

Just like life and business, demand generation also has its etiquettes and rules, if you break them, it will lead to poor results, wasted money and effort, and a frustrated marketer. Let us start with 5 basic demand generation etiquettes every marketer should follow.   Must Read: 9 demand generation books every marketer must need to know Must Follow Demand Generation Best Practices in 2026 We will be quick having a look at some of these demand generation best practices you should follow as a marketer. We will be sharing with you five (5) of them based on our experience: 1. Build a Strategy Around a Tactic Keep yourself updated, do the research. Learn maximum about the market, your customer, their responses and your competition first. Once you’re done with all the research, build a strategy around a tactic that has the greatest response in the market. What maximum marketers do is they build strategies based on no research and no tactics. Must Read: 15+ Demand Generation Statistics that Every Business Should Know 2. Having a Strong Demand Funnel Framework One of the good examples of demand generation etiquettes that most of the marketers lack is having a strong demand generation framework. Always keep in mind that demand framework is just like a factory – it needs to have a framework in place, a sales and marketing lead management process and a closed-loop reporting system that improves conversion rates. To make sure that everything operates effectively you need to have a well-documented framework. 3. Lead Nurturing that Maps to the Buyer’s Journey Once you score your lead and develop content for each stage of the funnel, always make sure that you have a lead nurturing system in place. As a lead scoring system comes under sophisticated “demand generation etiquettes”, so does a lead nurturing system in place that has blueprints and programs for each stage of the buying process comes under the demand generation etiquettes. Having a lead nurturing that maps to the buyer’s journey ensure that you have a solid strategy in place to make sure that the right content is getting delivered to the right people at the right time. Everything starting from nurture flows, content strategy, persona tracks and overall performance metrics comes under this. Must Read: 15+ demand generation statistics that every business should know 4. Think from a Buyer’s Perspective Companies think inwardly. Which is why the bulk of content created nowadays are focused on the product’s qualities instead of what your buyer really wants to learn about. To build a successful set demand generation strategies, you should be focusing more on what the buyer’s needs are rather than focusing more the product publicity. Create it so that your content can be easily found where they do their own research and craft it so that your messages resonate. For this, the research that you carried out earlier can be a tremendous help. Must Read: 5 Common Demand Generation Plan Problems to Avoid 5. Accept that You’ll Make Mistakes Making mistakes is what we learn from. No matter how many demand generation etiquettes, demand generation tactics and demand generation strategies you apply and follow, you are supposed to make mistakes. Using various demand generation best practices done nowadays like appointment setting, account-based marketing and much more you are going to get stuck once or the other. And with so many demand generation best practices marketers still do commit mistakes. What you need to do is accept it, learn from it and never repeat it. Once you learn about the mistake you committed, determine what it means, and then be willing to make adjustments.

The Importance of Business to Business Services

Posted on By Ameet Bhinganiya

In the B2B domain of business, business to business service providers, also called Business Service providers (BSP) refers to firms that engage in providing services in terms of back-office and front office support.  A business service provider extends its services in the area of HR (human resource), infrastructure, administration, security, mail delivery, and finance to name a few. The business to business services for back-office usually consists of off-site services. They include areas like: Business to business service providers usually outsources back-office work. This is a major factor in making BSPs cost-effective and attractive.  The front office aspects on the other hand include: The front office services usually are the ones that establish contact with the clients. Must Read: 7 Lead Management Strategy Best Practices How does Business to Business providers make it easier for businesses?  Responsibility Sharing:  A business will always have its core intent described. However, other than making a sale, and performing on the core business KRAs, some ancillary services are inevitable to an organization. However, these are crucial to sustaining the business. For instance critical departments like the payroll and the security, Human resources etc. Business to business service here makes life easier for organizations. For instance: Many mid and small-sized companies today outsource their payroll responsibility to Business to Business service providers. Flexibility: Flexibility refers to the adaptability of a business. This is evident from the back-office services that a business provider provides to a BPO. A BPO works on the outsourced work of a business. The pricing or billing is usually on the output. For instance, if it’s a lead generation BPO, the services provided to the business will be free. However, the charges will be levied on the leads generated. This allows the business the flexibility of dealing with a BSP according to their advantage. Legalities: An organization has to abide by many bureaucratic rules and regulations. These rules and regulations are legal hurdles and obedience protocols which are updated regularly. They also have numerous timelines and legal formalities that need to be taken care of.  Focusing on these parameters, which are to be mandatorily met, would mean taking away from the core business needs. Hence the legal responsibilities of an organization are usually outsourced. Given the fact that B2B services are making life easier for corporates, it would be interesting to see the types of business services provided by providers. Here is a list of Business to business services that are provided by the business to business service providers: Software Upgrades and Security: Though a business service provider does not provide any kind of software they, however, do have the expertise to upgrade the currently used software. Along with an up-gradation, the service providers also help with software enhancement. Such enhancements not only improve software performance but also modifies features and fortifies security. Software security upgrades are one of the many ways to counter illegal hacking of sensitive data. Management Services: These services span across domains and industries. Some of the management services include: Marketing Communication Services: Have you ever thought about who does the creative work in the advertisements? How are the strategically placed hoardings displaying different brands on its face every week? These are services rendered by the advertising agencies which are also Business to business service providers. Imagine a pan India launch of a product. This would mean working out the logistics across the venues, making reservations, coordinating with the media, getting the essential launch materials accumulated, getting the venue ready, etc. It is a whole process that takes months of preparation and constant traveling. This aspect of work is hence often outsourced to media houses and advertisers, which not only ensures effective execution of the work but also saves on time and cost for the corporate. Must read: 6 Best Strategies for Targeted Lead Generation Tours and Travel Services: Corporates and businesses that have a presence across the country and the globe or have clientele across, have to let professionals fly or travel often. Ticketing, confirmation and scheduling these travels can prove to be a handful of a job when people from different departments are traveling almost every day. Hence, travel arrangements of corporates are also outsourced for smoother operation. Food and Beverages: Along with travel, food is another crucial part of any event. Corporates often have clients visiting them and have events where they interact with stakeholders, dealers, suppliers, clients and the media. Lunch or Dinner along with beverages always remain a part and parcel of such events. Catering services, therefore, becomes a must for businesses. Most of the time this aspect of the events is therefore outsourced to a business provider in the catering business. Internal Security Services: Corporate premises are always vulnerable areas, as far security is concerned. It may be internal security in terms of thefts, ugly fights between employees, substance abuse, etc.  For financial institutions like a bank, security is of utmost necessity all the time, especially when big amounts are being transported physically. For instance, money transportation to ATMs. It is not surprising to be checked by security when we enter office premises. However, maintaining a security force becomes a huge liability for a corporate especially given the fact that many offices operate 24X7. Consequently, security services are always outsourced to security firms where they recruit people with relevant experience and exposure for the job. There are other business to business services that are rendered to companies across the industries and domains like software services, personal services, waste management services, infrastructure services, etc. Conclusion: Business to Business services are aimed at corporates. These services include serving almost all aspects of corporate life. The range of services can extend from transportation to catering services, insurance services to BPOs. Business to business services are optimized on and liberally used by the industries across, for smoother operation and real-time problem-solving.

6 Best Strategies for Targeted Lead Generation

Posted on By Arit Kumar Sinha

You need a lot of high quality leads to make your business successful. Targeted lead generation is equally important and just putting your website together with a contact form is not enough. You will require various tools in your toolbox for enough lead generation to make your business profitable. We have put together 6 strategies in this article that will help you to target lead generation effectively. Use Email Marketing for Lead Generation The biggest question here arises is can you use email marketing for generating targeted leads? The reasons may be enough for questioning the liability like the ones who are already in your list also lead, right? The answer is yes, but they aren’t paying you, yet! Are they? It can also happen that they must have just signed up for a free eBook that you were giving away on your website. There are still in the first stage of your sales cycle.Must Read: 7 Lead Management Strategy Best Practices There are a few things that you can do for converting them into your customers. An ideal email marketing does NOT start and end with sending emails 10 times in a week. Instead, you should focus on building a better relationship with your contact list. Give them quality content and let them trust you before you begin promoting offers. Let them see you as a friend or at least a next door neighbour. Use Effective Landing Pages This is directly related to the above technique. Like your content, your landing pages should also look like they are providing value to the prospects. You can use the tripwire offer, an offer that is hard to resist because it is full of value. It works something like this: Suppose you offer social media marketing services to businesses. To make them take up your service, you can make them a tripwire offer saying you will set up their social media page for $10 and will bring in leads for only $0.02. Trust me, plenty of offline business owners don’t even know how to set up a Facebook page, leave the targeted lead generation list for 2 cents. After you are done with your initial campaign, they will realize how effective your service is and would want more. This is where you offer them services as per your price. You need not use the tripwire element on the landing page but you can surely use it somewhere to get in more business. Must Read: 7 Tips on How to Market Your Business Use LinkedIn for Targeted Lead Generation The reason for using this strategy is that people not only consider LinkedIn to be a social media channel but also a platform where they can share their resume with others. They are also looking for information for growing their careers or for helping their businesses. Therefore, LinkedIn will have a more targeted audience than any other social media channels who are just waiting to become leads. Create Great Content What are the types of content that you think your audience values? The best place to determine such content is to go through the reader’s social conversations. You don’t need to learn rocket science to achieve this feat. All you have to do is use tools that allow you to see the information that the potential leads share around freely. Some of these tools allow you to specify a particular keyword and then read conversations that are taking place around that keyword. Now, determine what your target audience needs. Listen to their problems and then offer solutions in the form of your products by creating valuable content. To do this you need to give them exactly what they need. Speak at Events Events, mostly offline, can be a good way to acquire more leads. There is more honesty when you stand in front of your audience and talk to them about how you can solve their problems. People love immediate solutions and more so when they see the face behind it. They love face-to-face conversations. Incorporate Live Chat People struggle to find solutions that fit their needs and which is not costly. They tend to read the reviews and then trust a specific product. If you stand there and do not solve their problem your targeted lead generation list might wander and contact someone else. You can set up a live chat option where they can contact you and be quick to help them. The bottom line is that support emails are fine but nothing beats instant live chat or quick call (if feasible) option. A targeted lead generation list is like a lifeline for every online business. Try all or any of the strategies that can eventually get you the right leads.

Quick Guide: Retain Customers with Demand Generation Strategies

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

One of the biggest challenges in saturated markets today is generating demand for your business. Big brands make it look so easy. And guess what, IT generation may be a tiny part of the bigger marketing plan, it is crucial to ensure that your demand generation strategies, tactics, and practices work along the sales funnel and result in customer acquisition.  Must Read: 9 demand generation books every marketer must need to know So, What is Demand Generation? As the name suggests, demand generation is all about creating a need for your product/service in the minds of your potential buyers. According to Sproutsocial, It is a multi-step process that shows your prospects a problem they face, acquaints them with your brand as a potential solution and illustrates the value of choosing you over others.   There are many demand generation strategies and tactics, like email marketing, free tool or resources, webinars, videos, apps, etc, which are known to have impressive ROI  Source: leadsmarketer.net  While implementing any of these strategies, you need to follow certain rules or best practices which are known to increase customer acquisition and retention rates. Let’s look at them one by one.   1. Remember, You Need Demand Generation We have met a few clients who thought they didn’t require demand generation strategies. Ooo! That one mistake always leaves me speechless! Many businesses start off planning their marketing assuming that customers will know and want to buy their products/services. Let me break it to you – Unless you are selling on Mars and have a monopoly, customers aren’t automatically going to come to you and buy. Always start with generating demand and do not skip steps   2. Understand the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Generation You may skip over this point thinking you know it but, countless marketers make the mistake of using lead and demand generation interchangeably.  While demand generation is focused on driving awareness for your product/service, lead generation focuses on conversions. You cannot expect conversions if your marketing plan is demand-driving only and vice versa.  Must Read: 15+ Demand Generation Statistics that Every Business Should Know 3. Lead Nurturing, Segmentation and Tailored Communication There are three absolute essentials to any demand generation plans: Lead nurturing, segmentation and tailored communications. But, for any of this to happen, you will need to start with a buyer persona. Use data to extract relevant information and understand your target audience (their preference, likes, dislikes, pain points, etc). Once you have demand generation aligned with the right persona, the quality of leads will drastically improve. A buyer persona will also help you tailor communications in a way that talks directly to your audience. Did you know that personalized experience converts 1.5 times better? We have carried out demand generation for several businesses and we have seen success in narrowing our focus and increasing personalization at every single step. For personalization to work in your favor, you will also need to segment your audience. Narrowing your targets will help you understand their specific situation leading to tailored communications which will help you achieve higher conversions. If you send the same message to all your audience, you will reach no one. All of this put together is the best recipe for lead nurturing. Remember, a poor lead nurturing and demand generation strategies will waste valuable leads.  4. Campaign Analysis and Feedback Just admit it. You cannot get the perfect demand strategy in your first attempt.  How would you know it? By campaign analysis and feedback. You need to set up KPIs and performance tools before you start implementing any strategy. Measuring revenue influence against budget investments is important. Other metrics would have a cost per acquisition, lifetime value of customers, time taken to convert, percentage to convert (SQL, MQL, SAL, Buyer), etc. Do not mistake vanity metrics (social clicks, likes, follow, page views) as a measurement for success.  5. Qualifying Leads If you want to increase customer acquisition with demand generation strategies, you must qualify leads the right way. Incorporate a detailed lead scoring system in your strategy that can help you target the quality leads in your funnel. With lead scoring in place, the sales team can touch upon hottest leads and improve sales.  Must Read: Boost your Engagement with Email Personalization in Your ABM Strategy 6. User friendly UI/UX Websites are the best way to generate demand. You can use multiple tactics on it: Landing pages, lead magnets, free tools, free resources, etc. It is imperative that you are invested in the designing of your website and ensure that it is attractive, user-friendly, mobile-friendly and at the same time takes up the least amount of resources and loads fast. 7. Social Media Interactions Social media platforms are the best way to engage with potential buyers today. Be active and comment, like, share, tweet, etc. The classic example is the Xbox. They have assigned a dedicated Twitter account for customer support and 27 people to manage it. An active social media presence can help you generate demand, build credibility and establish you as a thought leader.  8. Branding Consistency Just ask yourself, Can your target audience distinguish your graphics, pictures, feature images, logo, in short branding, just by looking at it?    If your answer is no, you are missing out on generating demand and building loyalty.  Check out Melyssagriffin.com 9. Partner or Outsource This is the mistake we all are guilty of! Partnerships, collaborations with similar businesses and outsourcing to expert demand generation companies/agencies go a long way in managing and creating demand generation that leads to higher customer acquisition.    10. Clarify Goals Don’t shoot in the dark. You can analyze the performance of a campaign only if you know what you were trying to achieve from it. Without goals, it is difficult to optimize and make decisions on what to change and what to keep. For example, if my goal is 300 sign-ups in a month, how does my campaign work to fulfil it? 11. Have Clean

15+ Demand Generation Statistics that Every Business Should Know

Posted on By Ameet Bhinganiya

Demand generation is significant for every business. When you begin, your target buyer does not know you exist and you need to work on generating awareness for your product/services. Demand generations are these set of strategies that help you expand awareness about your brand and drive demand for your product/service. Let’s analyze 15 demand generation statistics that every demand marketer should know.  1. Marketers who document strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t and Marketers who document process are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t. Key takeaway: You must have a documented demand generation plan which fits into the bigger realm of your marketing plan. This helps in understanding what part of the strategy is resulting into a roadblock or deviation from prescribed goals. Bringing sales and marketing team together to draw a strategy that aligns with your sales funnel, demand generation funnel, lead nurturing strategy, and customer journey is quintessential.  2. Successful marketers are 242% more likely to report conducting audience research at least once per quarter and 56% of our study’s most elite marketers conduct research once or more per month. Key takeaway: You should conduct customer research at regular intervals and update buyer persona to maximize ROI by staying relevant to your audience in all your campaigns. What does your target audience want to read? Are you making a quality contribution? etc are important questions that are clarified by research.  3. 75% of small business owners see internet marketing as an or tool to attract new customer. Key takeaway: Internet marketing includes a bunch of tactics including email marketing, social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), content marketing etc. You need to research your audience (the point above) to see what works best for them. Having the right mix of demand generation ideas will help you achieve the best results.   4. Email marketing has an average return rate of $38 for every $1 spent (EmailMonday) Key takeaway: Emails remain the most favorite tool to generate leads for your product/services and staying on top of your audience’s mind.  5. More than 79% of the leads don’t convert into sales. The absence of lead nurturing is the leading cause of that. (MarketingSherpa via HubSpot) Key takeaway: Demand Generation marketers should aim to create content that not only aligns with business goals (like, brand visibility and lead generation) but also nurtures the buyers. Businesses that can provide useful content along the buyer’s journey will always have an edge over others who cannot.  6. Recipients are about 14% more likely to open an email if it’s a part of a segmented campaign vs. traditional email. (Mailchimp) 7. About 49% of marketers are learning to drive content to align with the buyer’s journey. (LookBookHQ) Key takeaway: It is important that content created is strategic (keeping in mind what your target audience wants to read) and fits into a lead nurturing scheme to convert maximum qualified leads (Marketing qualified or Sales qualified) into customers. According to Neil Patel, If brands can develop an effective strategy for creating content based on proper understanding of their target audience, they’ll not only drive leads but will also increase sales.  Must Read: Top Advantages of B2B Marketing Plan 8. 74% of companies that weren’t exceeding revenue goals did not know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities. (Hubspot) Key takeaway: For effective demand generation, you need to get the basics right and have relevant metrics, lead scoring systems or KPIs which define leads and success at every step (MQL, SQL, SAL).  9. Converting leads to customers is the top marketing priority for 70 percent of organizations in 2017 (HubSpot, State of Inbound) Key takeaway: Success for demand marketers is no longer defined in terms of quantity of leads but terms of conversion of leads into customers. Marketers should take the responsibility to augment buyers journey through alignment with sales and customer support/success teams.  10. Improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact was a top demand generation priority for 61% of organizations in 2017 (Demand Gen Report) Key takeaway: Any strategy without a performance review program will not fetch the desired results. Demand generation strategies should include smarter technology, KPIs and metrics which align with business goals. This will help you analyze the results and make necessary amends to the strategy 11. According to Dragon Search Marketing, 61% of consumers are influenced by custom content. 12. 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Hubspot) 13. Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Aberdeen) Key takeaway: Content is the king. You need to make content marketing a part of your demand generation strategy to achieve maximum ROI. Just like The Truckers Report, a forum for professional truck drivers. With great content, they were able to increase landing page conversions by 79.3%, leading to over 1,000,000 visits per month and over 4.5 million page views. Similarly content syndication can drive desired results as well. Neil Patel, when talking about content syndication, says – when we started republishing content from the Kissmetrics blog on sites like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal, we saw the referral traffic pick up (we got almost 9,492 visitors a month).  14. Video will make up 80% of consumer online traffic by 2020 (Animoto) 15. 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference (Alist daily) 16. 48% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2017  (Linqua) Quality demand generation which effectively merges with the lead generation goals remains a challenge for B2B marketers at every stage. These demand generation statistics give us an overview of the market and help us focus on areas that require our attention. Let us know if we have missed any important demand generation statistics. Comment below and let’s talk about it.

Steps to Reintroduce BANT in Modern B2B Sales Cycle

Posted on By Ameet Bhinganiya

Countless organizations, in the past, used to follow the BANT methodology for qualifying the leads (Marketing qualified or Sales qualified). This is essential in today’s complex B2B sales cycle that a company’s marketing and sales team build a clearly defined definition of a qualified lead that both have agreed upon. If you are able to identify distinctly where the lead handoff takes place, it can act as a first step towards creating a seamless transmission between marketing and sales. What is BANT? BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline, which was developed by IBM as a method of identifying new opportunities. The question you need to ask for implementing the BANT strategy will be: Budget: What is the budget of your prospects and how much are they willing to spend? Authority: Who is the key decision-maker? Need: Can you fulfil the need or solve the problem of your prospect? Timeline: Do they have time to purchase or need your solution immediately? This method is used to identify more information about your prospect for each of the above categories. You can determine a quality prospect for your business through this strategy. This helps you decide if the effort you put in the long working hours is worth it. This way, it saves a lot of your time in the end. Questions for BANT Lead Qualifications Instead of creating a checklist and making the prospects feel like you are interrogating them, ask questions that are more tactful. While doing so, make sure it is a two-way conversation so that you can discover what you need for each category without affecting a sale. Must Read: BANT VS MEDDIC Budget It gets easier for you to quote on a value-based system when you know the budget parameters of your prospects. Instead of simply going around asking what their budget is, consider the following alternative questions: How much will it cost you to solve the problem internally? How much are you spending on the problem? What kind of ROI do you want to achieve? How much will you lose if the problem sticks around for 5 years? Authority Identifying the people who are behind the decisions and then targeting them correctly can be beneficial to your business. It makes the tone of the voice, research and finding the pain points a little easier. However, instead of asking who makes the decisions outright, try asking the following questions: Who will be using your product or service? Tell me about the decision making process if you have used a similar product? Who all will be included in the decision to take our product? Need You cannot serve a prospect who doesn’t need your product or service. Therefore, finding the need for your prospects will help you decide whether you want to pursue the lead it may be a quality lead or submit a proposal in any way. For example, if you ask how long a prospect has had the problem, their answer can reveal quite a bit about their situation. You need to be mindful about the question you ask in this situation and ensure to reveal the value that you offer which they cannot receive without your help. How long are you having this problem? What will happen if you don’t solve the problem? Is your problem on priority right now? Have you tried to address these problems internally? Timeline The saying ‘timing is everything’ stands true in a lot of aspects of life including business.  Obviously, the more important their need will be the more urgently they’ll require your solution. Depending upon your delivering capacity, you can determine the least time that you can solve their problems. Must Read: 5 Ways to Implement MQL Marketing Tactics It may also happen that they need your solution only for the next year. These people may take your solution once and forget about you in a few days or months down the line. You need to use all your sales skills to push the urgency of such a problem so that they don’t forget about you. The least you can do is to prepare for a long term client acquisition process. You can ask the following questions: What are your goals and how not solving the problem will affect your goals? Do you have a deadline for solving your problem? BANT Process As we have mentioned earlier, having a ham-fist approach for your BANT process will not do your business any good. Subtle and polite conversations will help you get the required information without pushing off the prospect. Your first contact will be to secure the time of your prospect, after which, it is up to BANT to decide how to move ahead. When you apply BANT carefully, be it emails, calls or face-to-face, you will save a lot of time. Face-to-face identification is recommended followed by a phone call but in case you get only an email conversation, try to make the best out of it. This provides you will all the time you need to formulate your BANT questions. The way people qualify B2B sales lead has changed a lot since BANT was introduced. Multiple Decision Makers For medium, to large business, we have already adopted the ‘Authority’ part of our BANT formula. You no longer have to find the decision-maker, you have to instead seek them out. Here you may have to deal with more than one person and as long as you are aware of this, the formula for BANT remains unchanged. Is Budget Still Your Problem? A lot of businesses offer a subscription model these days and if you are running this model you need not worry about the client’s budget. Many businesses can afford 100 USD a month and by this method, you can earn easy ROI. If you are this business, stop worrying about the budget and spend time on finding out if your solutions are a good fit for them. To use BANT you need to adapt it

How to Generate More Demands in 4 Easy Steps

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

What takes for a customer to choose one product/service over the other? Loyalty to any particular product is not a mental act, its an emotional one. In addition to that customers are more likely to buy the product they previously used and they might continue to ignore the one they previously did (Study by Journal of Consumer Research). I would like to discuss with you one more scenario. A few marketers invest in demand generation when the market hasn’t gained least maturity required and hence their efforts results into nothing much. If you don’t want to do that, you need to assess the following things before you start your demand generation activities.   As listed by MartechAdvisor, Do you care to do the analysis first before you jump on the decision to invest in demand generation? If yes, you are doing right and if yes, what Demand Generation ideas will work for you best so that your prospects choose you over others?   Make them choose you. We are listing below 4 easy steps to demand generation. 1. Produce stellar content Whether its an Ebook, whitepapers, or blogs your content is going have greater impact as it addresses customers pain points. If you are posting blog posts regularly then think of making them more educational and valuable. Make sure to incorporate your research data into it rather than just the same things as others do. You also need to have a social media calendar, otherwise, you will randomly create articles. As we said earlier, sharing quality content is important. Social media calendars allow you to plan and schedule posts for months together. You can make out which posts resonates and then also decide about the frequency of your posts.   Below I am sharing guideline on the frequency of the posts per week    Always create original content and make your headlines strong because 80% of visitors only read your headlines and rest others only will read the content. In the end, whatever content you are providing, make sure that you are answering your prospects questions which they ask through search engines. If you are able to do this, it will generate more demand for you. Must Read: Quick Guide: Retain Customers with Demand Generation Strategies 2. Feature testimonials Trust is crucial to your customers and you can gain the trust of your customers through testimonials. Yes, trust cannot be brought but has to be earned. Your customer was once a potential buyer and was deciding which product to choose, comparing prices, etc and finally he becomes your customer. Now, the testimonials of such ones help the others to choose your product/services as they deepen their trust in you. Thus, it is very crucial for businesses to site testimonials on their websites.   You can use testimonials even in your AdWords and other places like landing pages, product and pricing pages, and marketing campaigns. How can you make your own testimonial pages?   You can use various types of testimonials.   One of them is social media interaction which is also very organic, giving a natural feel. These testimonials are captured by social media or reproduced as they are without any formatting or editing.   Industry Insider Testimonial  These testimonials are opinions from Industry thought leaders and they are ideal for any B2B company.   3. Offer a Free Report At first, giving away your stuff for free sounds counterproductive but in reality that is the key to creating more demand. It would be great if you could create a tool that creates reports as this will make the users want to see for themselves how to run all these reports. You can offer them a free social media report. So people will visit your page, fill the contact information, grant access to their Twitter page and this way you can generate a report. This was just an example for those in the B2B marketing industry. If you create any report and the visitors are downloading them, then they are considered to be qualified leads ( Sales qualified or Marketing qualified ). This is the way you can increase your leads using demand generation by creating free reports. 4. Make webinars part of your demand generation strategy According to InsideSales.com, nearly 50% of marketers find it challenging to generate quality leads and next to that it is difficult to convert these leads into customers. One way you can generate more leads is to help prospects with webinars so that they come to the decision of buying. According to the Benchmark Email sales manager, with webinars, you can achieve more than a 50% conversion rate. Everyone might not get the same results but 70% of the sales & marketing leaders find it effective in generating more leads. So, why not think of webinars as they can be produced at a low cost?   Must Read: MQL to SQL conversion rate If you are going to make webinars as a part of your demand generation strategies, then you have to pair with your industry superstars. Doing so will increase your reputation in the society. In the beginning, though, you might not be able to do it with the speaker you want but slowly over time you will have your relationship established and when you get the chance do your best to give away best tips, strategies during the webinars themselves.   Webinars can go for 30-60 minutes and that’s all you have time for building rapport and during this time you can explain difficult terminologies, Questions  answers, demos, and tutorials. If you get a very low response for the live event, you can invite them for on-demand webinars.   Make the webinar more personal by sending poll questions using tools. You can ask questions and answer them. Another way could be to make them raise hands digitally throughout the webinar so that they don’t feel like reading an eBook or a blog post but feel more involved. Above were the ways to generate more demand during the initial stage of marketing where you focus

15+ Demand Generation Statistics that Every Business Should Know

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Demand generation is important for every business. When you start, your target buyer does not know you exist and you need to work on generating awareness for your product/services. Demand generations are these set of strategies that help you spread awareness about your brand and drive demand for your product/service. See Also: 3 Demand Generation Trends Lets analyze 15 demand generation statistics that every demand marketer should know.   1. Marketers who document strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t and Marketers who document process are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t. (Coschedule) Key takeaway: It is important that you have a documented demand generation plan which fits into the bigger realm of your marketing plan. This helps in understanding what part of the strategy is resulting into a roadblock or deviation from prescribed goals. Bringing sales and marketing team together to draw a strategy that aligns with your sales funnel, nurturing strategy and customer journey is quintessential.   2. Successful marketers are 242% more likely to report conducting audience research at least once per quarter and 56% of our studys most elite marketers conduct research once or more per month. (Coschedule) Key takeaway: You should conduct customer research at regular intervals and update buyer persona to maximize ROI by staying relevant to your audience in all your campaigns. What does your target audience want to read? What are their pain points? etc are important questions that are answered by research.   3. 75% of small business owners see internet marketing as an effective or very effective tool to attract new customers. (Business2community) Key takeaway: Internet marketing includes a bunch of tactics including email marketing, social media, content marketing etc. You need to research on your audience (the point above) to see what works best for them. Having the right mix of these tactics will help you achieve the best results.   4. Email marketing has an average return rate of $38 for every $1 spent (EmailMonday) Source: ironpaper Key takeaway: Emails remain the most favorite tool to generate B2B leads for your product/services and staying on top of your audience’s mind.   5. More than 79% of the leads dont convert into sales. The absence of lead nurturing is the leading cause of that. (MarketingSherpa via HubSpot) Key takeaway: Demand Generation marketers should aim to create content that not only aligns with business goals (like, brand visibility and lead generation) but also nurtures the buyers. Businesses that can provide useful content along the buyer’s journey will always have an edge over others who cannot.   6. Recipients are about 14% more likely to open an email if its a part of a segmented campaign vs. traditional email. (Mailchimp) 7. About 49% of marketers are learning to drive content to align with the buyers journey. (LookBookHQ) Source: NeilPatel Key takeaway: It is important that content created is strategic (keeping in mind what your target audience wants to read) and fits into a lead nurturing scheme to convert maximum qualified leads into customers. According to Neil Patel, If brands can develop an effective strategy for creating content based on proper understanding of their target audience, theyll not only drive leads but will also increase sales.   8. 74% of companies that werent exceeding revenue goals did not know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities. (Hubspot) Key takeaway: For effective demand generation, you need to get the basics right and have relevant metrics, lead scoring systems or KPIs which define leads and success at every step (MQL, SQL, SAL).   9. Converting leads to customers is the top marketing priority for 70 percent of organizations in 2017 (HubSpot, State of Inbound) Key takeaway: Success for demand marketers is no longer defined in terms of quantity of quality leads but in terms of conversion of leads into customers. Marketers should take the responsibility to augment buyers journey through alignment with sales and customer support/success teams.   10. Improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact was a top demand generation priority for 61% of organizations in 2017 (Demand Gen Report) Key takeaway: Any strategy without a performance review program will not fetch the desired results.  Demand generation strategies should include smarter technology, KPIs and metrics which align with business goals. This will help you analyze the results and make necessary amends to the strategy   11. According to Dragon Search Marketing, “61% of consumers are influenced by custom content. Source: Ironpaper 12. 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Hubspot) 13. Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Aberdeen) Key takeaway: Content is the king. You need to make content marketing a part of your demand generation strategy to achieve maximum ROI. Just like The Truckers Report, a forum for professional truck drivers. With great content, they were able to increase landing page conversions by 79.3%, leading to over 1,000,000 visits per month and over 4.5 million page views. Similarly content syndication can drive desired results as well. Neil Patel, when talking about content syndication, says – when we started republishing content from the Kissmetrics blog on sites like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal, we saw the referral traffic pick up (we got almost 9,492 visitors a month).   14. Video will make up 80% of consumer online traffic by 2020 (Animoto) 15. 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference (Alist daily) 16. 48% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2017  (Linqua) Quality demand generation which effectively merges with the B2B lead generation goals remains a challenge for B2B marketers at every stage. These demand generation statistics give us an overview of the market and help us focus on areas that require our attention. Let us know if we have missed any important demand generation statistics. Comment below and lets talk about it.    

How to make your Demand Generation Plan Fool-proof

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Creating a demand generation plan which is successful is not be easy. But then again, if it were that easy, every marketer of a B2B company would be driving full-funnel results remarkably. The top B2B marketing players are cutting down the complexities of demand generation strategies that covers different marketing targets, channels and lead sources. Not only are marketing programs challenged to scale their efforts, but they also need to achieve balance in the same. If any one of the aspect of your demand generation plan doesn’t work accordingly, you will not be able to see the result that you need even if the rest of it is perfect. Do you think you can drive more deals that are attributed with marketing without good content? If you are using incorrect lead sources, will you be able to hit your metrics? We don’t think so. Read More: Top 6 Demand Generation Strategies Which Works. We have interacted with a lot of B2B marketers who struggle to transit to drive results. These interactions have made us aware about the most common pitfalls that troubles every B2B marketer virtually who is creating a demand generation plan. Even your competitors fall into these pitfalls. When you avoid these common problems you can run a fool-proof demand generation campaign. 5 Common Demand Generation Plan Problems to Avoid Problem #1: Deficient Messaging Map If your content isn’t able to attract the right quality leads or unable to nurture your marketing qualified leads (Marketing qualified or Sales qualified) effectively in your pipeline opportunities, chances are that you are facing from one of the most common pitfall of deficient messaging map.You may have program objectives, buyer persona profiles as well as content strategy but you have nothing to link them together.It might also be possible that you have many content assets at the top of your marketing funnel, but the middle or the bottom of the funnel might be weak. You may have, in this case, never taken out the time to connect your resources and your key messages at each stage of your buyer journey.If you are facing this problem, you need a messaging map, that is, a document that can connect your content and key messages to all your relevant personas, accounts and buying stages. This should address consideration, awareness and decision phases, in the leas, as well as the buyers problems and priorities at every stage of the journey. With an efficient messaging map, B2B marketers can: Problem #2: Limited Marketing Channels A lot of demand generation marketers are using a combination of paid and owned efforts on both digital and non-digital channels for generating and nurturing their leads. It is very uncommon that we stumble upon a program that does not use the combination of inbound marketing, social media, third-party lead generation, digital, live events and more. This is where your demand generation can mostly go wrong: the lack of oversight done by B2B marketers at the top of their marketing funnel. There isn’t a shortage of lead sources but marketers are unable to check where their results are derived from. B2B marketers may also not be able to compare marketing channels effectively, without time-consuming data. In this digital era, you cannot get away with just one marketing channel. Even the organizations that are present in the narrow verticals are unable to fill their sales pipeline with only inbound marketing leads. If this is the case, chances are that you need to depend on live events, emails, and co-sponsored webinars and so on. However, if you want to maximize the performance of your campaigns, you need to have a solution that can provide you with automation and visibility at the top of the marketing funnel. This allows you to manage the number of growing channels for B2B lead generation. This is the only way to avoid this most common problem. Problem #3: Neglect Top Funnel Strategy When you are pinned down by the inefficiencies at the very top of the funnel, it is hard to scale your demand generation plan. Demand generation marketers are marketing throughout the sales and customer lifecycle. There are not limited to marketing at the top of the funnel anymore. Very often, the programs recognize the need to spend some time on the middle as well as the bottom of the funnel. Best class marketers, however, use technology to create top funnel automation. The right software automates the management of campaign, integrates top-of-funnel efforts with middle and bottom of funnel activities and centralize your data sources. Must Read: 9 demand generation books every marketer must need to know Problem #4: Lead Quality Ignorance Imagine the number of hours that is wasted for just trying to manually standardize, validate, de-duplicate and upload the bad leads. You cannot simply dismiss the third party sources of the leads that occasionally provide you with bad leads. Demand marketers manage to dodge this problem safely and usually turn to technology to solve this same problem. The best organizations adopt software solutions that automates the review of lead quality and route new leads to the right sales representative or nurture tracks. Problem #5: Inadequate Performance Measurement If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it. Demand generation is a data-informed approach for the B2B marketing. Metrics are the medicine for improvement and effective alignment between sales, marketing and customer success teams. Marketers know the real value of KPIs for demand generation, like average deal size, funnel conversion rates and cost per lead. Eliminating All Barriers of Demand Generation Plan Success The B2B marketers who are most effective aren’t superheroes, no matter what you think about them. In many cases, they just think smartly about the ways and places to spend their time. Creating automation in your time consuming and error prone processes will enable you to spend more time on thinking and implementing the demand generation plan. Must Read: 5 Best Practices Every Marketer Should Follow

What is The Best Way to Generate Leads

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Let us all agree to the fact that the best way to generate leads and acquiring customers for your products or services is to get them to know about you first. You will not be able to send your product or service if nobody knows about it, no matter how good it is. In this article, we will help your B2B Company sell your product/service by putting them in front of people. We will discuss strategies that guarantee to be the best way to generate quality leads. You need to, first and foremost, realize that you do not have to have the best product and you need not be the cheapest provider in the market. All you need to be is the best seller if you want to succeed in generating sales leads. For effective sales, you are required to know the best way to generate B2B leads that can be converted to customers, the leads that your salesperson can move through the funnel and complete the sales cycle. You can make this process fully automatic but you still need to generate. Must Read: The Ultimate Lead Generation Content Syndication Strategy Best Way to Generate Leads and Revenue If you are able to increase the value of your leads by 10% while the average of your lead quality does not decrease, you can make 10% increased income. Simple as well as effective. Each phone number, email address, name of the company or the address that you generate is always worth something. They will, however, have different values on an average. It might so happen that the email addresses that you have acquired through people subscribing on your blog post are of more value as compared to the email addresses you acquire through competition. This is the reason why it is crucial to take lead generation very seriously. Lead generation is one of the most essential processes of your business which you should constantly evaluate for maintaining the effectiveness of your tactics. As much as 85% of the marketers consider lead generation as their #1 challenge. Let us look at 7 best way to generate leads that you can use to improve your lead quality for B2B companies. Must Read: Sales Success Secrets: The Critical Role of Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Converse as often as possible Do not rely heavily on one-directional communications like blog-posts, websites, and videos. Try and establish a real conversation with your leads as and when possible. Suppose your lead asks about a particular feature of your product in a chat, do not offer a link that will guide him, instead offer them a call option where you can walk him through the product features. If you are drafting an email to your customer, offer him a video call. Offer them to meet if you are already in a video call. Every time you interact with the prospects, try to get closer to them. Must Read: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads Use Twitter Since Twitter is so big, it works for every business. The main challenge in Twitter is, however, finding the right people. Further ahead in the list of challenges is engaging these people. Engaging people can be simply following them or conversing with them at the most. You can use the search option on Twitter for finding people using relevant keywords or hashtags or you can use one of the many specialist tools like Crowd Fire. The best way to generate leads using Twitter requires a good amount of time but if done religiously, you can reap huge benefits. Must Read: High-Performance Inbound Marketing Techniques for Successful Lead Generation Campaigns Lead Generation via Website Tracking the users who visit your website on an account level is a significant tactic that suits nicely with any and every lead generation strategy. You can fill your sales pipeline with leads by identifying, automatically, the anonymous visitors on your website that you never knew you had. Must Read: How the lead generation strategies in USA market differ from the rest of the world Use Databases You need to step on this with caution. When you are using someone else’s database that they have built, you will not be able to predict its quality. If your business is new or you need a huge lead volume, various lead databases can provide you with the extra source of leads. LinkedIn is an endless source of professionals from different fields. You can even consider LinkedIn as a database in this sense. Most definitely some of them would be interested in your products and hence they will go searching. Must Read: What Is Data Cleansing, Why Is It Important, And How Can You Do It? Marketing Automation If you are not already collecting email addresses, you have a problem that you need to fix right away. When you have a new source that provides you with more email addresses, you can use the marketing automation technique to nurture them and get more data on your lead. Once they have moved ahead in their purchase cycle with the help of your marketing automation, a sales rep can pick them up. Use the data for segmenting your customers to send relevant messages to them. Do not send similar messages to both the news as well as old customers. Must Read: 7 Top Marketing Automation Tools for SMBs Answer on Q&A Services Quora can be a great source for generating new sales leads. Your customers will already be present on Quora, asking questions. All you have to do is answer their questions, provide them with solutions in the form of your products. You are likely to generate leads if you are out there helping leads solving their problems. Use Emails to the Fullest A well-structured email works as a lead generation tool. The best way to generate leads is to have a good email signature consisting of links to all your social media profiles to help your leads to find your products easily. You

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