Demand marketing is what you need to grow your business today.
Let’s face it; the typical digital marketing landscape isn’t working anymore.
Today, you can’t run a few ads on Google, publish some blogs on your website, share a few posts on social media platforms and expect results.
Why?
That’s because the average conversion rate is 0.71% and 0.72% for Google ads on the display network.
That means all your hard marketing efforts will generate only limited results, which isn’t good enough in the coming days.
Now, I am not here implying that social media marketing or running digital ads won’t be effective in 2022. In fact, digital ad spending is projected to be $645.80 billion by 2024.
The point here is that your scattered digital marketing efforts will not work today. You have to streamline your marketing and sales funnel to generate demand for your product or service.
In short, you have to go beyond digital marketing realms and adopt demand marketing to establish a direct connection with your audience.
But what demand marketing is, and how it can help you grow? Well, hold your horses and scroll down to know all about demand marketing.
What is Demand Marketing?
In simple terms, creating ‘want’ or ‘desire’ throughout the sales process is demand marketing.
Demand marketing allows marketers to inform and excite people about a new brand, product or service.
It is a psychological process that involves tapping into the user’s interest and fascinating them to learn more about your brand.
Overall, the focal point of demand marketing is to expand reach, promote new services, generate PR and engage customers.
Does demand marketing sound like a tough thing?
Well, let me tell you, demand marketing is not at all complicated. You can easily implement it in your sales process. Let’s take an example for a better understanding.
Demand marketing means understanding your customers and then exciting them. And this Burger King ad exactly did that.
Burger King launched a moldy Whopper campaign in 2020 to announce that they no longer use artificial preservatives or flavors in their Whopper.
After understanding their customers’ interest in healthier and organic food, Burger King took this initiative, especially after the pandemic. With this ad, Burger King captured demand for healthy food and marketed its brand among new customers.
They also took a subtle jab at their rival Mac Donald’s, which hasn’t changed its burger in over 20 years.
It shows that demand marketing isn’t only about brand building. It is also about nurturing prospects and customer relationships throughout the sales cycle.
In short, your sales and marketing teams need to sit together in 2022 to build a winning marketing strategy.
5 Steps to Incorporate Demand Marketing into Your Sales Funnel
Wondering how to fit the demand marketing concept into your sales funnel? Well, it is pretty simple. You just have to focus on five things:
1. Know your audience
Every marketing assignment starts with knowing the targeted audience. So, first, understand who you are targeting in your sales funnel.
This knowledge will further help you understand the audience’s pain points, challenges and needs at an individual level.
That’s why before writing a blog post, I always create my targeted audience persona to streamline my writing style and voice.
For example, when I was writing the ‘How to protect your content using the MemberPress plugin’ guide.
Here my targeted audience was:
- Someone who runs a membership website but has the limited technical knowledge
- Someone who wishes to make online money
- And my direct audience includes content creators and online course sellers.
I used simple language throughout the post so a person with minimal technical knowledge could understand it. Also, I explained the topic with an example for better understanding.
Thus, the first step in-demand marketing is knowing your audience to personalize marketing efforts.
2. Establish a relationship with your audience
As of August 2021, there were 1.88 billion active websites available worldwide.
That means you are today competing with millions of websites in your niche to rank on the search engines. Here if you don’t connect with your targeted audience, they have a million other options out there to explore.
So, don’t stop your marketing efforts once you have gained the user’s attention. In fact, monitor your user behavior and personalize your marketing strategies accordingly.
For example, Domino’s regularly shares engaging posts, Reels and Stories with its followers.
Now think, Domino’s already has an established brand name and good audience base; why are they constantly engaging with their audience?
That’s because demand generation is useless without nurturing!
So, demand marketing’s second phase is nurturing the audience that you have generated in the first step.
3. Add value to your brand
Competition, buzz and hype are at the top right now. Every brand is sharing, posting and tweeting to win the race today.
In this, you can’t attract and retain users with random information. You have to be unique in your approach to survive.
But how can I find unique information?
Since we all can’t afford to have a research team who can constantly find new information, the simple solution is to use your creativity and give a spin to pre-existing information. For example, the way I did with this blog.
Here I haven’t shared any new information to become a good writer. Instead, I have just spun the points discussed many times with a Superhero twist.
You simply have to steer demand with value to rule the market.
4. Integrate your marketing efforts
Integrated marketing helps to sustain demand. However, with all the buzz that you have been making to promote your products on different marketing channels, you have to streamline it.
Marketers need to coordinate with content creators and search engine optimizers to publish the blogs that people want to read.
Marketers also need to leverage different social media channels to target the relevant audience.
In short, all online marketing players need to accumulate marketing strategies together in 2022 to succeed.
To create a good blog post to generate demand and promote brands, this is the perfect hierarchy—
Digital Marketer > SEO Professional > Content Writer > SMM Expert
Remember, demand marketing is integrated marketing where every step helps achieve a goal.
5. Measure your results
Finally, you have to measure your marketing output with your expected key performance indicators (KPIs).
For example, if you have published a blog post to generate more traffic, your KPI is how much traffic it has generated. You have to measure actual traffic generated with your KPI. Thus, decide your KPI first and accordingly create your marketing plan.
Today, you have many tools to measure your online performance, such as:
- MonsterInsight helps to track on-site traffic and visitors’ behavior
- Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI and track website, videos or social media performance
- GTmetrix is a popular commercial website performance tracker, etc.
Ready for Demand Marketing?
Are you ready for demand marketing?
Because demand marketing is all set to revamp your marketing strategies in 2022.
Demand marketing is the ultimate marketing trend today, whether it is a better collaboration between sales and marketing teams or providing more value to your customers.
I have already streamlined my content writing and marketing strategies to support demand marketing. So, if you want any help setting your demand marketing funnel using content marketing, ping me anytime on my social networks!