Demand generation is generating interest and creating awareness of one’s company, products or services through content. Lead generation on the other hand is a strategy used to acquire contact information of your potential customer in the form of email address or phone number. The end result achieved through both the strategies is different – one looks at changing perceptions and the other serves as a source for data collection.
Demand generation relies heavily on content to push one’s message across. While there are various tools that contribute towards demand generation, it’s beneficial to explore them by understanding demand generation strategies.
Content Marketing
As the old adage goes “Content is King”, cliche as it is, it’s still true for any marketing initiative. Unique and quality content is the crux for any organisation or individual to be regarded as an expert. While there are established tools like Feedly, Contently etc. for content curation, an overlooked part of content marketing at times are hashtags. Hashtags are common across social media platforms, helping consumers look for your brand easily and for you to track the performance of each hashtag used. Using relevant hashtags would get your message across to the right audience.
Tool: Keyhole is a real-time hashtag tracker. Users get insights into how their hashtag is performing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Bonus Tool: ShareTally a simple tool that is used to track and measure content sharing analytics across all networks.
Public Relations(PR)
While content is essential to be recognized as an expert, a good content strategy would work when coupled with PR. Most companies use PR for press releases or getting featured in a magazine/ newspaper. PR can be taken further to create awareness of your brand by telling your brand story and engaging your customers.
Tool: HARO – Help A Reporter Out. An excellent tool for companies to build their media list and for journalists to find news sources.
Social Media
Social media is essentially an extension of your PR efforts. Its helps in amplifying your message across platforms – keeping a consistent brand voice. Here your content strategy and hashtags would be put to use. There are many tools that help with social media management – SocialSprout, Hootsuite, Buffer etc. What we recommend for you is a simple trend-spotter that would help in knowing what’s trending in the your locality, country and internationally.
Tool: Google Trends – While Google Trends is a popular site, it features on our list as many marketers fail to use it in their campaigns. With Google Trends one can get insights into web traffic, understand geographical trends and also compare website data.
Data Insights
While lead generation employs data collection and calculating with every strategy there should be certain metrics that need to be looked into, especially the 4 V’s of marketing strategy –
Volume – All marketing campaigns are targeted to acquire consumer data (identification data, age, gender, occupation, domicile, purchase history, online consumer behaviour etc.). The volume of data only increase every year and an effective analytical tool should be able to handle such growth
Variety – Marketers collect data from multiple sources (website forms, social media, emails etc.) and also of various types (documents, audio files, video files etc.). Checking for volatility and validity of data is also crucial. An agile analytical tool will be able to manage various streams of data and segregate them into groups for easy access
Velocity – Consumers have access to multitude of data consumption points that organisations need to consider in their strategies. A brand should be able to quickly respond to queries, feedback, purchases etc. if their data management system is in place.
Veracity – Big data, like any other data pools, is plagued with data organisation due inconsistencies and incompleteness of data. Group user data based on value and significance and update it regularly as customer preferences change every now and then.
Tool: Klipfolio is a cloud based business analytics dashboard that displays real-time performance of organisations from various sources. It’s easy to integrate, can be accessed anywhere and represents data in clean visual displays.
The tools mentioned here are to help B2B organisations delve deeper into understanding online marketing and successfully implement demand generation strategies. Organisations can benefit tremendously by concentrating their efforts on demand generation in the initial phases of campaigns to aide their lead generation efforts down the line.
