How to Build a Demand Generation Strategy [2024]

An efficient and resilient demand generation strategy is crucial for cutting through the noise of today’s competitive market.

However, building one that works for your unique goals and needs isn’t that easy—which is what brought you here in the first place.

In this detailed guide, we’ll explain how to build a successful demand generation marketing strategy that will help you raise brand awareness, attract prospects, and drive them further down the sales funnel.

Let’s dive straight in!

What is demand generation?

It’s always best to begin by breaking down the basics, so here’s a quick reminder of what demand generation entails.

Demand gen is a specific marketing strategy that focuses on creating demand and interest in a product or service and nurturing them throughout the buyer's journey.

To achieve this, demand generation aims to build long-term relationships by:

Educating potential customers on topics closely related to their interests and needs on the one hand and your product as the ideal solution on the other.
Addressing their pain points and showing that their well-being matters to you by distributing valuable content and resources focused on helping them solve these issues.
Guiding them through the sales funnel with a combination of nurturing efforts.

This unique approach sheds light on the key differences between demand generation and traditional marketing, which lie in their main objectives and methodologies.

When it comes to traditional marketing, it typically focuses on broad campaigns aimed at raising general customer awareness and driving short-term sales.

In contrast, demand generation is more holistic, integrating various tactics such as content marketing, lead nurturing, and personalized outreach to create and maintain constant interest and engagement throughout the buyer’s journey.

Consequently, demand generation plays a crucial role in the sales funnel, as it helps prospects progress from mere brand awareness to becoming actionable leads.

Namely, due to its focus on building trust and continuously engaging with prospects to move them closer to a purchasing decision, demand generation both:

Boosts overall efficiency of your sales and marketing teams.
Increases the quality of leads that move down the funnel, as they’ll already have an established relationship with your brand when they get to your sales team.

This means that demand generation essentially enables a seamless transition from sparking initial interest to closing sales deals, making it a key factor in driving long-term business growth.

Which brings us to the next question.

Why is having a demand generation strategy important?

Today’s digital landscape requires businesses to put in the extra effort to stay competitive, and that’s where demand generation strategies step in.

By focusing on targeted engagement throughout the buyer’s journey, demand generation improves the quality of leads entering the sales funnel and boosts conversion rates.

The reason is simple: high-quality leads nurtured through tailored content and personalized interactions are much more likely to convert into paying customers.

Running a demand generation campaign has another important benefit in improving your overall business success and performance - it helps align marketing and sales teams, driving close collaboration between the two departments.

Namely, to do demand generation right, marketing and sales need to work on reaching the same goals—attracting, identifying, and nurturing potential leads with the greatest potential to convert.

As a result of this alignment, leads that move down the funnel will be qualified, warmed-up, and ready for sales, significantly reducing friction in the sales process and directly leading to more conversions.

Finally, demand generation has a number of long-term benefits that go well beyond immediate sales.

If you continuously nurture leads, increase brand awareness, and build trust, you’ll be able to create a robust pipeline of potential customers who are familiar with the brand and trust it, making them more likely to convert.

Moreover, this approach drives customer loyalty, meaning that you’ll also improve retention rates over time.

And all these combined lead to one massive benefit - consistent revenue growth.

That alone is reason enough to include demand generation in your general sales and marketing efforts immediately, if not now.

However, to create an efficient demand generation strategy, you must first know who you’re targeting.

How to identify your target audience?

There are a few key methods you can use to pinpoint who your ideal customers are, including:

Surveys - These enable you to gather direct feedback from your current and potential customers, gaining firsthand insight into their preferences, challenges, and needs.
Analytics - You can use various tools to collect relevant data and extract data-driven insights, which can help you understand customer behavior, demographics, and purchasing patterns.
Website traffic tracking - Tools like Warmly enable you to track who visits your website and how they interact with it. This way, you’ll be able to identify the characteristics of your most engaged users.
Competitor analysis - Studying your direct competitors' customer base can reveal who they are targeting and how they engage with their audience. This analysis can help you identify gaps in the market or opportunities to make your offering stand out from the crowd.

Finally, once you’ve gathered all these insights, you can use them to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers—i.e., buyer personas—that offer a clear picture of who you should target.

After you’ve identified your target audience, you should focus your efforts on segmenting it, that is, dividing it into smaller, more specific groups based on factors like demographics, behavior, or purchase history.

This kind of audience segmentation is crucial as it enables you to create highly targeted campaigns built to resonate with each segment’s unique needs, which will, in turn, improve both engagement and conversion rates.

What are the key components of a demand generation strategy?

When it comes to building a successful demand generation strategy, it’s important to know that it always consists of several key components, each playing a role in driving awareness, engagement, and conversions.

Among these components, content marketing, SEO, social media, and paid ads stand out as fundamental pillars.

Let’s get a closer look at each.

Content marketing

Content marketing is at the heart of demand generation, as it provides valuable, relevant, and consistent content that attracts and nurtures prospects throughout the buyer’s journey.

You can use various kinds of content to establish your brand as a source of truth and guide potential customers toward choosing your product in the end, including:

Blogs
Whitepapers
Case studies
Webinars
Quizzes
Videos, etc.

The types of content you’ll include in your strategy depend only on your goals, vision, product, and resources you’re willing to invest, as they can all drive interest and build trust.

SEO

SEO ensures that your content and website are discoverable by optimizing them for search engines.

By using relevant keywords, improving site structure, and earning backlinks, SEO increases the visibility of your content in search results, driving organic traffic to your website.

This organic reach is crucial for attracting high-quality leads actively searching for solutions like yours.

Social media

Social media networks help amplify your content's reach and drive direct engagement with your audience.

Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook allow you to share content, interact with prospects, and build relationships in real-time.

Moreover, social media offers valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences, helping you tailor your demand generation efforts more effectively.

Paid ads

Paid ads complement your organic efforts by providing targeted exposure to specific audiences.

Using marketing channels like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and social media advertising helps you reach prospects who might not have discovered your brand organically.

These ads can be fine-tuned to target specific demographics, behaviors, or interests, ensuring your message reaches the right people at the right time.

Creating an integrated approach

Finally, once you’ve got these components figured out, it’s crucial to integrate them to maximize the effect of your demand generation strategy, as each plays a distinct role in it:

Content marketing raises brand awareness and builds trust.
SEO ensures that potential leads will find your content.
Social media enables you to nurture relationships through direct contact.
Paid ads fill in the gaps left by your organic efforts, ensuring your brand will be displayed to relevant audiences.

Therefore, when content marketing, SEO, social media, and paid ads work together, they create a robust, unified approach that:

Attracts potential customers.
Nurtures them throughout the entire sales funnel, ensuring that your brand stays top-of-mind all the time and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

How to create a content strategy for demand generation?

Since content is pretty much the cornerstone of each demand generation strategy, we’ll explain how exactly to leverage content to get the results you want.

Creating a content strategy for demand generation involves creating and distributing content that attracts potential customers and nurtures them through the buyer’s journey, making them more likely to purchase your product.

To achieve this, it’s essential to focus on three things:

Choosing the right type of content to create demand
SEO
Align content with different stages of the buyer’s journey

Types of content that drive demand

Various types of content can be used to fuel demand generation efforts, each serving a unique purpose, such as:

Blogs - Blogs are ideal for attracting organic traffic and addressing common questions or challenges your audience faces. As such, they help build brand awareness and establish your brand as a thought leader.
Whitepapers - They offer in-depth insights into specific topics, making them valuable for prospects in the consideration stage who need detailed information to make the right decision.
Webinars - Webinars provide an interactive platform for engaging with prospects, offering real-time value, and showcasing your expertise. They are particularly effective in the decision stage when prospects are evaluating their options and looking for deeper engagement and connection.

These are just a few examples of efficient content, as other types, such as testimonials, videos, and infographics, can all do the trick equally as well.

The role of SEO in creating content

SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring that your content reaches the right audience.

Namely, SEO helps boost content visibility in search engines by:

Optimizing it with keywords relevant to your audience and related to your product.
Improving on-page elements like meta descriptions and headers to make sure that your content meets all the search engine guidelines.
Ensuring that it is readable.

This increased visibility drives organic traffic to your content, making it easier for potential customers to discover your brand and engage with it in a meaningful way.

Mapping content to different stages of the buyer’s journey

To maximize the impact of your content strategy, it’s important to align your content with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

During the awareness stage, content should focus on educating prospects about their problems and potential solutions. Blog posts, infographics, and social media content are effective here.
In the consideration stage, where prospects are evaluating different options, more in-depth content like whitepapers, case studies, and comparison guides can help them assess your offerings.
Finally, in the decision stage, content such as webinars, product demos, and testimonials can provide the final push needed to convert prospects into customers.

How to leverage data and analytics in demand generation?

First off, why is data important?

Given today’s fast-paced market, it’s essential to optimize your campaigns on the go, and having quality data helps you understand what needs improvement and what works well.

This is why investing in tools that can help track essential demand generation metrics is never a bad idea.

For instance, tools like Warmly can help you identify anonymous website visitors and track how they interact with your website content in real-time.

As a result, you’ll be able to:

Determine whether the companies and individuals visiting your website actually fit your ICP. If they don’t, it means that the other segments of your demand generation efforts are failing to target the right audience or that your buyer persona needs to be updated.
Understand how engaging your website content is by gaining insight into drop-off points, high-converting areas, etc., allowing you to review and improve underperforming parts.

In addition to using Warmly and similar tools, you can test the effectiveness of various parts of your demand generation strategy by applying A/B testing.

By testing different variations of your campaigns - such as email subject lines, landing page designs, or call-to-action buttons - you can determine which elements resonate best with your audience and make necessary improvements.

How to implement marketing automation in demand generation?

Thanks to its ability to streamline processes and boost efficiencies across levels, automation has become virtually omnipresent in all business areas, including sales and marketing.

This is why implementing marketing automation in demand generation is always a good idea, as it can significantly enhance the overall success of your campaigns due to several key benefits:

Streamlining repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and lead nurturing. As a result, your team can focus on strategic initiatives while ensuring that every lead receives timely and personalized communication.
Enabling more efficient segmentation, which allows you to deliver highly targeted messages that resonate with different buyer personas.
Allowing for more precise lead scoring and qualification, as many of these tools can be configured to automatically recognize criteria you specified as relevant and qualify leads accordingly.

The best way to understand the value of marketing automation is through a practical example, so let’s look at Behavioral Signals - a textbook example of successfully deployed marketing automation.

Namely, Behavioral Signals had a carefully designed demand generation strategy that included targeted email campaigns and content, all of which resulted in a high website traffic volume.

However, without knowing who their visitors are and without a way to engage them, Behavioral Signals couldn’t respond to the thousands of leads that landed on their website each month.

This is when its team decided to implement Warmly to automate a part of its demand generation efforts, and this is how they did it:

Warmly’s website visitor identification feature would reveal who’s visiting their website.
The platform’s enrichment option provided detailed B2B and intent data on each identified visitor, allowing the team to easily identify the hottest leads among them.

3. Automated Slack notifications would alert sales reps when a high-value or high-intent lead landed on the website, enabling them to immediately engage them.

4. Warmly’s Orchestrator was used to engage visitors who’ve taken certain high-intent actions (visited the pricing page or frequently returned to features overview, etc.) by adding them to automated LinkedIn and email sequences tailored to each individual lead.

Moreover, Behavioral Signals’ reps made sure to use the insights and intent data Warmly provided for each identified visitor when designing their approach, making sure that it was perfectly tailored to every lead they contacted.

As a result, Behavioral Signals sourced $7M in the enterprise pipeline within several months of using Warmly.

How to measure the success of your demand generation strategy?

So, you’ve created a killer demand generation strategy and applied it, but your work doesn’t end there.

You have to keep a close eye on how your strategy is performing to understand whether it’s effective so you’ll know which steps to take next.

To do so, you need to track certain KPIs and metrics, including:

Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), which measure the number of leads that meet specific criteria indicating they are ready for sales engagement.
Conversion rates are another critical metric, reflecting the percentage of leads that progress from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
Cost per lead and overall ROI help assess the financial efficiency of your campaigns, indicating how much you’re spending to acquire leads and the overall profitability of your demand generation strategy.

However, gathering data is only the first step, as the real value comes from actually using these insights to refine your demand generation strategy.

Regularly reviewing your KPIs and analyzing trends enables you to identify what’s working and what isn’t.

For example, if you notice a drop in conversion rates, you can investigate potential causes, such as ineffective lead nurturing tactics or content that doesn’t align well with your audience, and adjust your approach accordingly.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, you’ll feel much more confident about building your own demand generation strategy by now.

It takes time to get everything right, but the end results are definitely worth it.

And if you’d like to see results faster, Warmly can help.

With it, you’ll be able to make the most of all the website traffic you generate as a result of other demand generation tactics, as you’ll:

Know who’s visiting your website.
Identify the hottest leads right now.
Automatically engage them.
Reach out precisely when they’re most likely to convert.

Intrigued to see if Warmly can help with all this?

‎