Demand generation is a key component of any business's marketing strategy, aimed at generating awareness and interest in your products or services.
At its core, Demand Generation is a data-driven marketing program leveraging the inbound methodology to drive awareness and interest throughout the entire buyer and customer lifecycle.
When it comes to b2b demand generation, you’ll want to account for every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey — from anonymous visitor to delighted customer and throughout the customer’s lifetime. With demand generation tactics, you’ll use data to align marketing and sales, track marketing's revenue contribution, and drive long-term growth for your organization.
But of course, that doesn’t happen overnight, which is why variety is key to success. Looking at different campaigns and their performance can help you create a robust and successful demand generation strategy.
Let’s take a look at five of these types of key demand generation campaigns:
- Pre- & Post-Webinar and Event Campaigns
- Re-Engagement Campaigns
- Contact Enrichment Campaigns
- Account Based Marketing (ABM)
- Interactive Campaigns
1. Pre- & Post-Webinar and Event Campaigns
Effective pre-webinar or pre-event promotional campaigns are critical for driving registrations and ensuring a strong return on investment (ROI), as they inform a targeted audience about an upcoming event. These campaigns, executed in the weeks leading up to the event, are key to attracting registrants and ensuring the event's success.
But just as important as it is to get people to the event, you can still drive conversions post-webinar and within your event follow-up to maintain contact with attendees and non-attendees alike.
Neglecting to follow up after an event can result in wasted resources and missed opportunities. Creating targeted content and continuing promotional efforts post-event is essential for leveraging connections made and maximizing the impact of your event participation.
Pro Tip: Beyond the webinar replay, consider putting together a few relevant content resources such as a helpful blog or case study relating to the topic at hand to drive more interest. You can even put a call to action to subscribe to your blog or request a demo, depending on how down-funnel the email is.
2. Re-engagement Campaigns
Re-engagement campaigns are a vital component of demand generation strategies, aimed at rekindling interest among disengaged contacts. This can be an opportune time to show your database a refreshed brand or value proposition or to understand your current target market, as those who raise their hand are more likely the ones that you want to continue engaging.
Utilizing email platforms like HubSpot's CRM, these campaigns target contacts who have become inactive, using content such as popular blogs or new e-books to prompt action.
Successful re-engagement can lead to integrating these contacts into segmented nurture campaigns, but only once they've shown renewed interest.
It can be easy to neglect re-engagement campaigns, but this can be a quick win to engage with high-fit prospects and should be a part of your overall calendar.
Pro Tip: Take a look at your top-performing content, whether converting content or trafficked content, and consider sharing these with your database as a roundup of “most popular articles” to spark interest and engagement. Make sure those are well-optimized, too, taking a closer look at their internal links and a good variety of content-driven CTAs (visual, inline, etc.)
3. Contact Enrichment Campaigns
Contact Enrichment Campaigns are crucial for enhancing your understanding of your contacts by filling in missing information such as buyer personas, job titles, industries, and locations. You can improve your database's accuracy by encouraging contacts to complete a form with the missing information, usually through an email campaign promoting gated content.
This enriched data is essential for effective segmentation, allowing you to tailor your messaging to address each individual's specific challenges and goals based on their industry, persona, and other relevant factors.
What’s more, contact enrichment campaigns prevent operational disruptions, such as the inability to assign marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales reps based on geography or industry when such information is lacking. By ensuring you have a clean database that is comprehensive and up-to-date, contact enrichment campaigns enhance your marketing and sales efforts.
Pro Tip: The content you use for this campaign should be highly valuable, relevant, and personalized, especially if you’re asking for more information than usual! Consider exclusive access to a report that’s being published, or a ‘VIP’ content-rich hub for prospects to engage with.
4. Account Based Marketing (ABM) Campaigns
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Campaigns are crucial to incorporate into your demand generation strategy for targeting high-value accounts with personalized messaging and content. ABM campaigns focus on identifying and engaging key decision-makers within specific target companies, ensuring that marketing efforts are tailored to the unique needs and pain points of each account.
ABM helps create a seamless customer experience, build stronger relationships, and ultimately drive higher ROI compared to traditional, broad-based marketing approaches. In a recent webinar from BrightTALK, 76% of B2B marketers surveyed said ABM-based approaches deliver a higher ROI than other marketing efforts. Incorporating ABM into your demand generation strategy allows a more focused and effective approach to reaching and converting your most valuable prospects.
Pro Tip: Successful ABM starts with Alignment! By aligning marketing and sales efforts around a set of clearly defined accounts, ABM campaigns enable more efficient use of resources and a higher likelihood of converting these targeted accounts into customers.
5. Interactive Campaigns
And last, but not least, let’s talk about Interactive Campaigns.
Interactive Campaigns are essential for engaging and capturing the attention of your target audience. Interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, surveys, and interactive infographics not only provide a more engaging user experience but also encourage active participation from potential customers.
In fact, new research from Demand Metric shows marketers who’ve adopted interactive content strategies report that interactive content generates conversions “moderately” or “very well” 70% of the time, compared to just 36% for passive content.
This increased engagement leads to higher levels of interest and investment in your brand, ultimately driving more conversions. Additionally, interactive campaigns provide valuable insights into your audience's preferences and behavior, allowing for more targeted and personalized marketing efforts in the future.
By making your content more interactive, you can differentiate your brand from competitors, increase the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts, and build stronger connections with your audience.
Pro Tip: Interactive content can be a place to show a little more personality in your brand and have a less formal tone. Consider a quiz showcasing different personality types (loosely) linked to your personas or a watercooler-like poll question to generate debate among your audience.
The Takeaways on Key Demand Generation Campaign Types
Incorporating a mix of these campaign types into your demand generation strategy can help you attract and engage your target audience more effectively.
- Pre- and post-webinar/event campaigns are crucial for driving event registrations and maximizing ROI by maintaining contact with attendees.
- Re-engagement campaigns rekindle interest among inactive contacts, utilizing platforms like HubSpot's CRM to target and reintegrate them into segmented nurture campaigns.
- Contact enrichment campaigns fill in knowledge gaps about your contacts, improving database accuracy for effective segmentation and preventing operational disruptions.
- Account based marketing (ABM) campaigns target high-value accounts with personalized messaging, aligning marketing and sales efforts for a higher conversion likelihood.
- Lastly, interactive campaigns engage and captivate your audience, driving conversions through active participation and providing valuable insights for future targeting.
Looking to drive more demand from your audience?
Our expert team at New Breed can help you improve your demand generation strategy using the campaigns discussed above, among others in our toolkit. Chat with us today to learn how we've helped customers drive more conversions and create better engagement for their core audiences.
