If you’ve been operating in the B2B SaaS space for quite sometime now you probably heard the term ‘Demand Generation’ or ‘Demand Gen’ but what is it exactly? What type of marketing approach is it? And why does it increasingly become popular among B2B SaaS companies to hire Demand Generation Marketers as a primary function to help them scale their business and take it to its next stage of growth?
Today we’ll be covering everything Demand Gen and make sure you’ll know which path to choose when scaling your operations and hiring your next Demand Generation Marketing team members. Let’s zoom in.
Table of Contents
What is Demand Generation all about?
Simply ss it sounds, Demand Generation is how your marketing approach of educating, and creating content to solve your ideal customer profile biggest challenges is essentially moving the needle and creating true value, hence, Demand for your product or service. But, there’s obviously more to that…
Demand Generation Marketing serves as the main function especially for B2B SaaS brands in their early stages and is practically incharge of creating pain-focused Marketing collaterals that will resonate the most with the ideal customer profile the company is after. Their job as the main Marketing function is also to align Sales & Marketing to work together and break the traditional silos between the two teams.
The best Demand Generation Marketers are the ones to see the big picture, they understand the entire buyer’s journey and are always looking to work in complete collaboration with the Marketing Operations teams to enhance and optimize different processes along the funnel.
The main goal of Demand Gen Marketing is to create excitement among your prospective buyers by crafting and promoting different collaterals that meet them at the right time and at the channel of their choice.
Demand Generation Vs. Lead Generation – The shift in mindset
In the past, and unfortunately some are still today, following the old method of focusing only on lead generation marketing which is essentially considered as less customer centric than demand generation which puting the customer at the center of things by creating educational and helpful content.
At its core lead generation marketing is all about generating new leads and feeding the sales team with more prospects to call to, but in today’s reality B2B SaaS businesses must adopt a new approach for marketing, hence, Demand Generation.
The major difference between the two approaches is that demand generation takes more time, requires more research, and really focus on the customer want and need, compared to the traditional lead gen approach which is more focused on paid advertising, instant results, and pipeline velocity.
Today, we see more B2B SaaS companies that are on the hunt for Demand Gen Marketers for the very simple reason, lead gen doesn’t work anymore. Today’s buyers are looking for a product or service that will help them solve their biggest challenges, fast, and at a reasonable cost. Providing such an educational approach by producing Marketing collaterals such as: Whitepapers, Case-Studies, Guides, and anything else that is focused on education and problem solving is the right way to increase pipeline and revenue in a scalable way.
Why is Demand Generation crucial for early stage B2B SaaS startups?
Besides being the main Marketing function for B2B SaaS startups in their early stages of growth, Demand Gen Marketing plays a significant part in growing the company’s customer base and brand authority. So, how does Demand Gen Marketing help you grow your early stage startup?
The only way to win customers in the digital era
Winning customers has always been a tedious task, but it is even harder for early stage B2B SaaS startups with no product market fit or any recognition. Creating a strong demand generation marketing plan will help you in creating stronger demand around your brand and win more customers in the digital era.
Sales & Marketing alignment
One the very first things that Demand Gen Marketers should focus on is the alignment of the Sales & Marketing functions. By creating more content that is around your customers challenges, sharing it with the sales team and sharpening the messaging for the initial outreach, demand gen will easily align both Sales & Marketing on the same line to persuade after the same business goal – REVENUE.
Strong brand awareness
Strong brand awareness is all about the effectiveness of your Demand Generation strategy. The better the strategy, the more collaborative Sales & Marketing are the stronger your brand awareness will be.
Become a market leader within your niche
Becoming a niche leader doesn’t just happen overnight, it requires a lot of demand generation efforts around crafting the right content, distributing the content wisely, and tracking the performance to understand what’s been working and what’s not.
By knowing what’s working you will also know what you should double down on and then increase budgets for this particular initiative to pave the ultimate path to become a market leader within your niche.
Creates healthy consistency and longevity for your business
Demand Gen is all about how consistent you are as a brand.
Your messaging, positioning, website content, PR, and everything you do must be followed by strict guidelines to ensure consistency all across the board.
The more consistent you are as a brand, the more you narrow down your content strategy to hit the right pain points for your customers the more successful you will become.
Conclusions
Demand generation marketing is all about driving value for your targeted audience, and as the time goes by, winning more customers becomes a tedious task for many B2B SaaS businesses out there.
Demand generation Marketing approach is now mostly adopted by many Startups big or small to bridge the gaps between the company’s mission and goals and align those with their ideal customers.
When you show your prospects that you really care about their problems and that you’re all about building long lasting relationships with them that are based on trust and education, you automatically build a strong and authoritative brand that people can come to anytime they need and get answers to their biggest challenges, cause after all, you have a stellar Demand Gen Marketing team that did the research and are knowledgeable enough to address any issue your targeted audience is experiencing.
