3 Surefire Demand Generation Strategies for Small Brands!

Demand generation is often mistaken for lead generation. A lot of small businesses believe that by tracking visitors to your site or then tracking their subscriptions on your site, you can follow these “leads”, nurture them via emails into a state of readiness to buy, and then try to take them over the finish line and convert them into customers. Demand generation is a whole lot different from that. The basic difference is that in demand generation you make the customer want to buy your product of his own volition, rather than by catching him on a stray visit and then trying to woo him to the end you want him to reach. How can you make a prospective customer feel the need for your product from his or her own volition? Read on for these 3 surefire tactics that are especially helpful to small brands …

First, be very clear about the difference between demand generation and lead generation!

A lot of small brands need help in differentiating the techniques of “lead generation” from “demand generation”. Let’s look at some thoughts from experts on how to be very clear on the two separate concepts:

Dan Shewan in his article “9 Killer Demand Generation Strategies For New Brands” writes:

Although demand generation and traditional lead generation might seem very similar, there’s actually an important distinction between the two. Some businesses are indiscriminate when it comes to leads and what qualifies a prospect as a lead. Someone who merely visits a website, for example, might be considered a lead to some companies. This is especially true of businesses that rely on high-volume cold-calling to generate new businesses – think those annoying companies that call you up to try and sell you steak knives. However, demand generation identifies potential prospects based on their initial actions and takes them through a (oftentimes lengthy) nurturing process to provide sales teams with much higher quality, genuinely qualified leads. This results in better conversations between sales reps and prospects, and – of course – higher conversion rates and more sales.

David Capece in his article “Content Marketing For Brand Engagement And Demand Generation” holds that:

For a blueprint on content marketing for demand generation, we look at Marketo, which is a specialist in demand generation software, and practices what it preaches. As an aside, B2B companies, and in particular B2B technology companies, tend to be the most progressive in content marketing for demand generation. In the case of Marketo, their efforts are focused on establishing trust with their buyer, thereby reducing the personal risk to the buyer. Their thesis is that content marketing provides the B2B buyer with information that will help make them smarter in making the best decision. They use content marketing throughout the process, starting with lead generation, moving to lead nurturing, and then creating content touch points to generate demand. Marketo uses a portfolio of content that includes articles, white papers, brochures, case studies, product data sheets, resource libraries, presentations, videos, and even more advanced content such as eBooks, podcasts, webinars, workbooks, and online courses.

When many B2B marketers say demand generation, they mean lead generation

Lead generation and demand generation, often used interchangeably, are essentially at odds with each other. When many B2B marketers say demand generation, they mean lead generation — which is to say they will measure success based on the number and value of the leads their efforts bring in. The problem is this: demand generation is focused on shaping the audience’s perspective, while lead generation is focused on capturing their information. What’s the difference? Lead generation involves collecting registration information, often in exchange for content, in order to build a marketing database for email or telemarketing follow up. The direct outcome of lead generation is new contacts available for sales or marketing. Demand generation, on the other hand, involves the practice of creating demand for an organization’s products or services through marketing. The direct outcome is that your audience is more likely to purchase your products or services. Often a single content marketing plan is expected to do a kick-ass job of both delivering leads and driving demand. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

From all of the above expert opinions it becomes clear that the demand generation arises from customers’ perceiving their own needs and seeking solutions. Marketers can influence the process by instigating customers to begin the process of searching their own needs!

3 simple and easy ways to create more customer-driven demand for your small brand!

1. Increase your marketing visibility to be able to whet customer appetites!

What happens when you pass by a gourmet pastry shop, or leaf through a magazine rich with food pictures? You may not be hungry to begin with but the visibility of the well-arranged food near you starts you salivating, and suddenly before you know it, you feel you want to bite into that delectable dish, don’t you? If someone had asked you just a moment before if you were hungry, you’d probably have said “No!”. But the visibility of food has created a “felt need” where one didn’t exist before. This is one hallmark of demand creation. It creates need where need did not exist before.

When Steve Jobs was asked if he designed Apple products after talking to focus groups, he pooh-poohed the suggestion. His theory was that people don’t know what they want till they see something that makes them want it like they’ve never wanted something before. Wasn’t that exactly the kind of demand he created for the Apple iPhone when it first appeared on the scene?

If you’re waiting for people to search for you in Google you may be a trifle late in the demand curve, for then people are answering to a demand they have already felt. If consumers have already felt their own need, they tend to compare you with competition before they buy. Whereas if you are proliferated in many places across the digital space, you may fall accidentally into the eye-zone of many who then get the idea to want your product after they have set their sights on it. These people have fallen for your product and they never consider competition in such a state of mind!

2. Create an urgency for the customer to act by showing small quick rewards!

One of the biggest secrets that ace marketers know is that the quicker you convert a person into a “customer” the “brand loyalty factor” sets in and unless competition is extremely aggressive the customer tends to want to go with the surety of the good experience of buying from you than trying to buy anything from someone else. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are a Chartered Accountant offering a higher-priced consulting service. So long as you are waiting for customers for that service, you will keep waiting till you’ve nurtured the customer into a state of readiness to buy. The higher the price of the product or service you sell, the longer is the nurturing time needed to make the person want to buy from you.

Suppose, on the other hand, you had a number of small info products on your site that people could buy without having to develop deep trust of a very high level. Let’s say you have many low-priced e-books, a medium-priced online course and a couple of slightly higher priced webinars. Now you’ve created a scenario where with less trust, less gestation and less recalcitrance a person can buy small products from you without risk. If you get people to bite into these small sales, you have instantly turned “prospects” into “customers”. And once people feel comfortable with the smooth experience of having bought anything from you, the progressively bigger buys then become easier, and less risky. People start trusting you.

We often see marketers online asking if trust can be created or hastened, or if it’s a slow-grown thing. Well, trust can be encouraged actively if small but valuable products were made available by which potential customers can grow into deeper relationships with you. It’s not the number of emails that nurture that works wonders, it’s the number of small sales you can do that can hasten the demand for your higher-priced products.

3. Create content – articles and blog posts and social updates – that spur a sense of need!

When you write content for prospective customers you will often find advice that says “map your content to their pain points”. In other words, the experts tell you to get to know what your prospective target audiences are suffering from, where they feel a sense of need for help, what their personas and “pain-points” in life are, and what queries they have that they are seeking answers for. You are then supposed to help them by producing articles and blog posts of value that answer all their issues.

Again, this is a bit of a reactive tactic because it assumes that the customer has already felt much pain that you can help address. But contrast this with the way clever car salesmen behave. They ask you a series of leading questions to which you progressively answer with a “Yes” … till you reach the question on whether you need that car, and you have to say “Yes!” again!

Here’s a sample of what the dialogue may look like …

SALESMAN: “Does your wife commute to work on a bus?”
PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER: “Yes!”

SALESMAN: “That must be tough for a lady with two kids and a busy home and a tough job?”
PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER: “Yes, it is. But she gets through it!”

SALESMAN: “Does she often isolate herself from the family to catch some downtime? Do the kids miss having her happy around them?”
PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER: “Yes, indeed!”

SALESMAN: “Do you think a woman like her should have her own car, so she’s a happier less-stressed Mom? Would the kids love it?”
PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER: “Yes, absolutely!”

You get the point, don’t you? You don’t wait for pain-points your prospective customers cognize and articulate that you can assuage! You actively prod them to feel pain acutely in areas where your product can become the answer. Now in our example, the salesman would have jumped at the nearest “happy date” to sell the lady a car … e.g. her birthday, Mother’s day, Women’s day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas Day …

He would have then buttonholed the customer into feeling that some grand gesture for his wife is needed for the next special day coming round the corner. If the man has financial bottlenecks to overcome, that’s when the salesman would have popped an instalment-payment offer to “seal the deal”.

Moral of the story: You don’t wait for demand to show up. You create a felt need. You create a small customer as soon as you can, who then becomes a bigger customer. You don’t wait for pain points, you sharply remind people of their pains to get them to act. Isn’t all this a whole lot different from “nurturing a lead after he has shown some interest”, when he is likely in a comparison-shopping mode?