Demand Generation

In marketing, demand generation refers to a variety of activities, programs, and processes designed to build interest and excitement in a brand, its products, and services among potential buyers. A demand generation strategy will cover all stages of the customer journey by combining sales and marketing activities to nurture prospects and provide them with the information they need to take action. The focus is on creating long-term engagement that helps create predictable pipelines to grow business.

There are three distinct streams that make up any demand generation strategy: demand capture, lead generation, and pipeline acceleration. In order to capture demand for a company’s products and services, brand awareness campaigns or demand capture efforts must create enough interest to motivate people to find out more. This interest must then be converted into genuine qualified leads that can be passed to sales. If demand capture and lead generation are executed successfully, then pipeline acceleration occurs naturally, as potential buyers progress further down the funnel faster, accelerating the sales process.

Any demand generation programme has many moving parts and there are tools to enhance and automate efforts at every stage of the demand generation journey. Most important is the strategy. The strategy dictates the tools you’ll need. From data targeting to email marketing and outreach, measurement to reporting, every tool is focused on helping to improve the quality and volume of the leads delivered, through driving more, higher quality traffic to your website, that converts more prospects, to close more deals, faster.

A well-executed demand generation strategy aligns a company’s brand and product offerings with what customers need and want. If done correctly, they generate higher-quality leads that convert faster and accelerate sales. By nurturing prospects further down the marketing funnel, demand generation also helps lower acquisition costs by delivering much higher quality leads to sales.

There are many reasons why a company might choose to outsource their demand generation activity. Among the most common is a need for flexibility. Outsourcing demand generation to a specialist team, lets companies test the viability and performance of different lead generation channels, and methods, to determine the right mix of activities for the business. Using the latest tools and technologies, specialist demand generation partners can supplement internal teams with extra capacity to drive a reliable stream of leads into your sales team.

Specialist demand generation partners are focused on providing full funnel, integrated demand programmes that increase qualified leads, improve conversion rates, and accelerate growth. Typically, this combines inbound and outbound activity including programmatic display, paid social, email marketing, content syndication in one powerful demand generation strategy to interest, engage and convert more leads and shorten the sales cycle.