Demand marketing is a no-brainer—run a content marketing campaign to reach your target audience to attract potential customers, engage with them, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
According to research by Activate, 35% of marketers agree that creating brand awareness to drive demand yields better results in the long term. To create brand awareness, you need content.
Of course, knowing how to create and publish content isn’t going to yield much. Successful demand generation is all about how you leverage different content formats on different channels to execute an effective demand marketing strategy.
Despite economic uncertainty, companies have allocated 43% of their budgets to content marketing which means that content still plays an important role in driving demand.
If you’re struggling to use content to boost product demand, then you’re in the right place. In this post, we will define what demand marketing is and share how you can use content to drive demand.
What is Demand Marketing?
Demand marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and nurturing customer demand for a product. It involves various marketing activities that help generate interest, drive engagement, and create a strong pipeline of qualified leads that you’ll convert into customers. Some of these activities include the following:
Audience Research: Identifying and targeting the right audience involves conducting thorough market research, analyzing customer data, and segmenting your target audience based on demographics, psychographics, and firmographic data. Understanding who your ideal customers are helps you develop personalized content that resonates with your audience.
Creating Relevant Content: By providing valuable information to prospects throughout their buyer’s journey, on a variety of platforms, you build trust and establish yourself as an industry expert. Different content formats include blog posts, videos, infographics, webinars, whitepapers, and case studies.
Lead Generation: As you publish content to create brand awareness, some of your potential customers will express interest in your brand and what you’re offering. Capture their interest through email sign-ups to access your gated content and newsletter. Webinars or virtual events registration pages, demo sign-ups, and free trial sign-ups will encourage them to take action.
So Where Does Content Fit in Demand Marketing?
In a demand marketing campaign, content plays a crucial role in capturing the attention of potential customers and nurturing them through the buyer’s journey.
It seeks to provide informative and educational content that addresses their pain points and challenges, building brand awareness, credibility, and trust among the target audience.
By delivering valuable content that solves their problems or provides insights, businesses can position themselves as trusted advisors rather than just salespeople.
Additionally, content marketing allows businesses to engage with their audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
From creating awareness to consideration and decision-making stages, tailored content can be used to guide prospects through each step of the process.
Furthermore, by consistently producing high-quality content optimized for search engines, businesses can improve their organic visibility online. This not only increases brand exposure but also directs relevant traffic to their website or landing pages.
The Difference Between Demand Marketing, Lead Generation, & Inbound Marketing
While these terms may sound similar, they actually serve different purposes in a company’s overall marketing strategy. Let’s look at each of these marketing approaches:
Demand marketing refers to the strategic activities to create awareness and interest in a product. It involves building brand awareness and creating interest in a company’s offerings through various marketing tactics such as content creation, social media engagement, advertising campaigns, and events.
Lead generation focuses on identifying and capturing potential customers who have expressed an interest in a company’s product. It involves collecting contact information from potential customers who have shown intent or engaged with a company’s offerings.
Lead generation typically occurs further down the sales funnel compared to demand generation since it targets individuals who are more likely to convert into paying customers.
Inbound marketing aims to attract potential customers by providing valuable content that addresses their needs and interests. By creating engaging blog posts, informative videos, or interactive social media campaigns, businesses can organically attract qualified leads who are actively seeking solutions to their problems.
Inbound marketing also focuses on building strong relationships with customers through personalized communication and nurturing campaigns.
Demand marketing is effective in generating immediate results by reaching out to a broader audience. It is particularly useful for businesses looking for quick lead generation or promoting time-sensitive offers.
In contrast, inbound marketing fosters long-term customer engagement by focusing on building trust and establishing thought leadership within a specific industry or niche market. This approach appeals to consumers who are seeking relevant information before making purchasing decisions.
Demand Marketing: How To Create A Demand Content Strategy That Boosts Sales
Creating a demand-focused content strategy framework that effectively boosts sales involves understanding your target audience, providing valuable and relevant content, and guiding potential customers through their buying journey. Here’s what you need to focus on when creating your demand marketing content strategy:
Define your target audience: Create an ideal customer profile that reflects your ideal customers’ demographics, preferences, pain points, and behaviors to guide your content creation efforts so that you create content that resonates with your audience
Map out the buyer’s journey: Divide your audience’s buying journey into stages like awareness, consideration, and decision. Identify critical touch points when your audience needs content that helps them move on to the next stage of their buying journey. Knowing these critical touch points will help you create content that addresses the needs and questions of customers at each stage.
Set SMART goals: Determine specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals for your content strategy, such as increasing website traffic in 90 days, generating a certain number of leads, or a specific number of sales. Your goals will shape your content and measurement metrics.
Research keywords and topics: Identify relevant keywords and topics related to your industry, products, and services. Using keyword research tools, start by looking for low-volume, long-tail keywords that will drive more conversions. As you publish SEO content, create thought leadership content to help you build links and grow your brand.
Create high-quality content: Develop content that satisfies searcher intent and context to make sure it’s relevant to what your audience needs. Diversify your content formats to cater to different audience preferences. Some people prefer reading, while others prefer watching videos or listening to podcasts. This widens your reach and keeps your audience engaged.
Leverage social media: Promote your content on social media platforms where your audience spends their time. Use engaging captions, images, and hashtags to increase reach and encourage sharing.
Guest posting and partnerships: Collaborate with influencers, industry experts, or complementary businesses for guest posting opportunities. This exposes your content to new audiences and establishes credibility.
Use analytics and data: Continuously monitor your content’s performance using analytics tools. Track metrics like website traffic, engagement rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates to help you adjust your strategy based on the insights you gather.
Demand Marketing & Content Roadblocks
When implementing a demand marketing strategy, you’re going to run into a couple of challenges that threaten the effectiveness of your efforts. Here are five potential challenges you’ll face and their solutions:
- Generating high-quality leads: Producing content that attracts and engages the right audience is difficult because you have to target the right people and be relevant. Get around this challenge by creating content that matches the searcher’s intent and is relevant to your audience. This will help you weed out irrelevant leads as you will be providing relevant information to potential customers who need it.
- Consistent content production: It can be hard to keep producing good content when there aren’t enough resources, or when people have too much time or pressure to come up with ideas. To deal with this challenge, you can either hire more writers (if your budget allows it) or work with your internal team from different departments to contribute to the content.
- Measuring ROI and attribution: It’s often tough to accurately measure the direct impact of content on sales and attribute specific sales to particular content pieces, especially when multiple touchpoints are involved in the buyer’s journey. Since the buyer’s journey isn’t linear, solve this challenge by using last-click attribution to simplify things.
- Content distribution and visibility: Promoting your content effectively is hard, but it’s essential if you want it to reach the right audience and be seen among all the other content online. Make your work easier by promoting your existing content. For example, share a quote from a subject matter expert, an image from your blog, or a resource that you created to help readers implement what they learn.
- Balancing educational and promotional content: Finding the right balance between promoting products and services and providing educational content can be tricky.
Solve this challenge by using product-led content, which helps you integrate your product into your content to help readers see how they can solve their problems using your product.
Conclusion
Content is the engine that drives your demand marketing efforts which means you need to get it right from the beginning by understanding your target audience and creating content that meets their needs.
As you implement your demand marketing strategy, make your job easier by using tools and templates provided by Demand Playbook to manage your campaigns, automate your marketing tasks, and collaborate with team members
