What is demand marketing?

With innovations and advancements in technology, customers have become smarter as they have access to the luxury of information about a product or service and can now compare competitors and reviews before making their final decisions.

Since customers are the heart of any business, marketers tend to invest maximum efforts and spend their resources to put complex user acquisition and engagement engines that amplify brand-customer relationships in place.

Demand marketing is not a complicated concept, but from the standpoint of a B2B space, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of marketing terms to avoid any possibility of misinformation.

For the sake of clarity, "what is demand marketing exactly?"

What is Demand Marketing?

Without getting things complicated or out of context, creating "want" throughout the sales process is basically what demand marketing is.

Demand marketing is how marketers get people informed and excited about a new brand, product, or service in other to generate demand.

Demand marketing often involves tapping into the interests and wants of prospective customers and developing marketing programs that get them fascinated enough to make them interested in learning more about your product or service. Through this process, people become aware of your service and ultimately decide if it suits their needs.

The focal point of demand marketing is helping your organization reach new markets, promote new products or services, build consumer relationships, generate P.R., and eventually re-engage existing customers.

Other than just a branding concept, demand marketing also concerns building and nurturing key prospects and customer relationships for the long term throughout the conversion, optimization, and sales cycles.

Demand marketing campaigns marketers understand the importance of using marketing terms in the right way.

However, there are quite a couple of marketing concepts that are often used interchangeably. Lead generation, demand generation, and demand creation being the most commonly interchanged concepts. Hence, it's imperative to note the difference between them.

What Is The Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Generation?

Every business, whether a start-up or established, at some point, may need to inform consumers/customers about their brand, new products, or services. To create awareness, demand generation marketers commonly utilize demand creation to generate demand for products and services that have not been proven or tested yet.

Demand creation is the process employed by demand generation marketers to create demand where none exists.

What are the chances that anyone would demand a product or service that they are not aware of?

No matter how outstanding a product is, presence to market is vital because that is how potential buyers can get to know how important your product or service is to them.

Demand creation is where demand generation marketers plan for media coverage, press releases, helpful articles, videos, reports, and other types of content essentially to propel their brand and product into the market to capture the interest and attention of new and prospective loyalists.

Demand Generation

Now that the demand is already there, marketers need to generate more orders to increase sales and revenue by nurturing and maintaining relationships with prospects and customers. This is where the concept of demand generation comes into play.

Demand generation marketers use demand generation as a tool to help customers understand that they have a problem that can be solved satisfactorily with their products and accost them through the whole process.

Demand generation is "Want-based" and not "Interest-based," as data gotten from customer relationships and interactions are used to design marketing strategies that nurture key prospects over a long period.

Targeting people based on their wants doesn't insinuate forcing demand or tricking people into buying things they don't need. Demand generation strategy is about delivering the right information to the right people at the right time so that the product or service you're sharing matches your ideal customers' needs.

With demand generation, the ultimate goal is to create a predictable and trustworthy pipeline that will grow your business.

Lead Generation

After demand has been created and reinforced to generate more needs through the demand generation process, lead generation is the next crucial phase. Not all customers reached, regardless of their level of interest, will buy a product or service immediately.

Therefore, lead generation ensures that customers' contact information that can eventually be used to nurture them into customers is gotten.

The lead generation process aims to collect sales-driven leads from the established demands through lead generation elements such as email marketing, newsletters, content marketing, SEO, and social media posts or ads.

Lead-gen marketers also use gated content such as eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, videos, and webinars to get prospects to fill out their lead generation forms. This information is crucial to giving leads what they want precisely when they want it.

Developing an effective demand generation strategy that is efficient enough to give leads what they want would be impossible without understanding the fundamental principles guiding this concept.

The Fundamental Principles of Demand Generation

1. Understand Your Audience

Simple information such as demographics isn't a wrong place to start but knowing precisely who your target audience is should be fundamental to every good marketing strategy.

Knowing your target market and understanding their pain point, challenges, problems, and individual motivations are crucial, and that is why the importance of creating a buyer persona cannot be overemphasized.

B2b marketing requires carrying out a thorough research process that involves surveying or interviewing prospects in other to identify your ideal customers.

By understanding who your target customers are, delivering the right content at the right time will be a more effortless and productive exercise.

Understanding your customers should involve getting your facts right about where they are coming from and their preference for receiving information. In turn, this will help to devise better strategies that are tailored to their needs and wants.

2. Carry Your Audience Along

Building and nurturing strong brand relationships is essential to achieving the goal of brand generation. Hence, prospects need to engage and interact with your brand on all levels.

Simply creating content is one way to reach customers, but doing that alone isn't going to be enough. As soon as people start getting familiar with your brand, they want more and are craving to be carried along actively.

To fascinate your prospects into becoming brand ambassadors and promoters, you need to educate information that targets their pain points - while also building relationships with current customers, newly discovered markets, or freshly defined target audiences (in the context of demand creation).

3. Deliver Added Value

In other to deliver added value, marketers need to establish thought leadership and industry expertise. Added value can be effectively achieved by allowing your audience to get to know you, earn their trust, and establish authority.

With the level of competition, buzz, and hype that is already available, it is crucial for demand generation marketers to stick out by projecting through the noise by offering added value that sets their brand's content apart.

Think of added value as a traditional promotional effort that provides something uniquely valuable that encourages clients to remember and interact with your brand in the future, and not just trying to sell your products.

4. Integrate Marketing Efforts

Integrating marketing efforts is all about getting your business or product buzz across to potential customers through relevant channels or mediums.

Marketers should incorporate the contents published on blogs and websites alongside a search engine optimization strategy to make it more search engine friendly.

Marketing strategies and efforts should also be integrated with social media with the help of promotions through various platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels that are relevant to your target audience.

For brands to cope with the ever-increasing customer demands and the need for constant customer-brand relationships, marketing automation tools may come in handy to integrate marketing channels to increase efficiency and productivity. Alternatively, consider customizable business cards that let you share everything (contact info, landing pages, thought leadership) via clickable links or QR code across channels.

5. Measure and Evaluate Your Results Through Data

In your data collection process, it is crucial to answering questions like;

1. How easy can new and existing customers find your product and service on search engines?
2. Are people posting comments and sharing your content?
3. Can your website be found through various social media channels?

To measure performance, analyzing and evaluating Metrics and KPIs such as engagement, click-through rates, and website traffic can help you decide whether you're succeeding in creating interest and awareness with your demand generation strategies.

What are The Types of Demand in Marketing

In marketing, there are quite many demand types that every brand or marketer should know, but in this article, we will cover the five most important:

1. Negative Demand
2. Unwholesome demand
3. Non-Existing demands
4. Latent Demand
5. Declining demand

Negative Demand

A product or service is in negative demand when all its target audience, in general, don't find it unique enough to want it. A negative market demand doesn't always imply that a product is terrible, too expensive, or low in quality.

Other factors like annoying or irritating marketing strategies using pop-up ads and misleading information on other promotional contents can make potential customers develop a negative brand image, which affects the demand for such products.

Unwholesome Demand

Unwholesome demand and negative demand might share a few stripes. Still, the significant

difference is that consumers desperately need a product in unwholesome market demand but are also trying to kill their cravings for such products. Such products are alcohol, cigarettes, firearms, pirated movies, etc.

Non-existing Demand

This type of demand occurs due to a brand's inability to do proper research before concluding that its product is needed and on-demand in the market. Non-existing market demand can make a company lose its market value and even run into debt and huge losses.

In this era of technological advancement, any company that decides to keep making phones that uses infrared as a means of data sharing will never convince anyone to buy, no matter how excellent or outstanding the promotions are.

Latent Demand

As much as every consumer needs to have a product that can solve their problem, there are still many problems without products or services to cater to them. Products made to tackle consumer problems that are yet to get solved tend to get a lot of attention and market value to themselves.

These products are hot cakes for any business or brand capable of creating them. They always generate a lot of curiosity effective enough to lure potential customers into buying.

Declining Demand

The introduction of better technology in a particular market may bring about the decline of old products in that market. Nevertheless, a reduction in quality, bad brand marketing, and a host of other reasons could lead to declining sales of a product or service.

No matter how sought after these services used to be, they seem to be declining and losing the once established credibility with time.

How Do You Determine Market Demand?

It is crucial that every smart business, whether a start-up or established, must put a significant effort into determining the market demand of a product or service. This will help in understanding what industry is most profitable to venture into.

Determining market demand can be done differently, but we will cover three of the most effective and widely used methods in this article.

1. Surveys

Simply asking people what they feel about a particular product and how important a product is to their everyday life will go a long way in helping you determine if the demand for such service is high, low, or average.

Luckily, comprehensive coverage of targeted audiences can be reached through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and emails. Information gathered from these honest case studies can determine the market demand for a new product or even an existing product.

2. Experiments

Experimenting with many ideas before deciding which one works is another excellent way to do market research and determine market demand.

Although this method may seem expensive, especially for new brands - it is usually worth it in the long run. By experimenting, you can produce more than one version of a particular product and test to see which one does better within a given period.

3. Observation

Most times, information about services is readily available around us, but only if we are looking in the right direction. Every info, suggestion, review, or comment about a particular market is essential, as this information will determine your brand's success in the nearest future.

Observing trending topics on media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest can also provide quick insight into almost any industry.

Wrapping it up

Demand is the prerequisite of all marketing and sales processes, and all businesses looking to grow need to implement effective demand generation strategies. Demand creation is similar to planting a seed, while demand generation serves as the water and sunlight that helps it grow.

Through demand generation, proper market research, and a detailed understanding of types of demands in marketing, you can lay the fundamentals for your business and create awareness about your brand with the people that matter most, "your ideal customers!"