How to create a Demand Generation Funnel

Step-by-step Guide to Build a Demand Generation Funnel

Demand generation marketing is not a single marketing activity. Various marketing strategies align with your business goals to target your potential customers.

Thus, you need to streamline all your demand generation strategies in a proper funnel so you can better connect with your prospects.

Here are steps that you can follow to create a dynamic demand generation funnel:

Step 1. Define your goals

Every marketing strategy starts with defining your business goals. When you don’t have a clear idea about your requirements, you cannot find the right solution to achieve your goals.

So, you should gather up your marketing and sales teams and define a proper goal for your demand marketing.

Once you have your marketing goals, you can start mapping out marketing strategies that can help you achieve them.

Suppose you want to boost your sales within a month. In that case, launching a new marketing campaign will not work because you don’t have sufficient time.

So, you can use your sales funnel to target your existing customers with email marketing. But, not any kind of email marketing; you need personalized emails to sell your products quicker.

You can use your buyer’s previous purchase history to customize deals for them. You can also cross-sell or upsell your existing customers based on their previous purchases.

This is what we often use at UnboundB2B. We always use data to design our clients’ email marketing and content marketing strategies. Personalization has always helped us generate significant demand for our clients in the market.

Step 2. Build buyer persona

In order to sell your services, you must define first for whom you have created those services. Now, if you have not created something innovative, your product already has a market presence.

All you need to do is define your buyers’ characteristics and pain points. A buyer persona is the best strategy to identify your customers. It is a fictional characterization of your prospect. This will help you know your real customers and how you can approach them.

Usually, brands focus on general things like a buyer’s interest, income, and preferences to create a buyer’s persona.

However,?Salesforce?doesn’t focus on what its customers do with the software. Instead, they use rigorous data like interviews, surveys, and observations to create their buyer’s personalities. The reason?

Salesforce is a flexible and customizable portal. People use their platforms for different purposes. So, they can’t limit their buyer persona to a certain group.

Similarly, you must first understand your products and services and define criteria to build your buyer persona.

Step 3. Use content to know your buyer’s intent

Content is the best way to know your customers and their intentions. Intent data is a gold mine for businesses to understand what their customers are searching for online.

In this particular strategy, you monitor and observe your potential customers’ online behavior, especially with content. This will help you understand your targeted customers’ intent to purchase your services or products.

It is an essential part of the demand generation funnel because today customers want to learn independently.

Step 4. Produce content for each demand generation

Content marketing is the backbone of digital marketing strategy. Be it social media or digital ads, all other marketing efforts and strategies depend upon good quality content.

So, undoubtedly, you have to invest in producing high-quality content to generate demand for your products or services.

However, random blogs or social media posts will not generate significant demand in present market conditions. Therefore, you need to produce content for each demand generation stage to connect with your prospects at every stage

Here’s how you can create the right content for each demand generation stage:

• Awareness?— Blogs, PPC ads, landing page, etc
• Interest?— Social media marketing, blogs, ebooks, etc.
• Decision?— Case studies, reviews, etc.
• Action?— Webinars, CTAs, etc.

Step 5. Align content with other marketing strategies

Content is an essential part of demand generation marketing. But don’t just limit yourself to content marketing while generating demand for your brand.

You should also partner your content with other popular and result-driven marketing strategies like webinars. In addition, due to the pandemic effect, video conferencing and remote engagement have become big things.

Most companies are running their business operations remotely or in a hybrid environment. So, webinars are the best way to connect with your potential customers and understand their pain points.

According to?research, 95% of B2B marketers use webinars today. And 72% have seen growth in their revenue and pipeline with webinars.

Not only webinars. But you can also indulge in other marketing plans like social media marketing, digital ads, etc.

Step 6. Equal sales and marketing funnel

Throughout this post, we have tried to tell one very important point – never a hard sell. Nobody likes constant hammering of your sales calls or ads.

Once you tell people about your product or services, give them room to breathe. Then, let them do their research and make a purchase decision.

Thus, your demand generation funnel should be 50% sales-focused and 50% marketing.

There should be a balance between your demand generation marketing strategies. You should use different components to inform, engage and interact with your customers.

Here, identifying your leads and giving them scores based on their interaction with different marketing resources will help you greatly. This will allow you to target leads with the right marketing strategy.

For example, you can use hard sell to your SQLs as they are ready to purchase from you. On the contrary, focus on informing your soft leads as they might purchase in the future.

Step 7. Evaluate and reshuffle your demand gen funnel

Once your demand generation funnel is ready, don’t rest. In fact, keep on monitoring the performance of your individual marketing strategy and conversion rates.

This way, you can make real-time changes in your demand funnel if you are not receiving desired results. It is better to make changes instantly to save your marketing resources.

Moreover, you can invest in a marketing strategy that brings more results and helps increase your brand’s reach in the market.