When it comes to selling a product or service, it all boils down to solving a problem. But, what if your target audience is not yet aware of the problem you are trying to solve? This is where demand generation kicks in.
Generating demand helps your potential customers understand what the pain points are and why your solution is the best fit. It isn’t just about getting any lead but high-quality leads and turn them into paying customers.
If you haven’t completely wrapped your head around demand generation and its impact on revenue, it’s time to get started.
Table of Contents
What is demand generation?
At its core, demand generation is a marketing practice that focuses on creating demand for a brand’s products or services. It requires a deep understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to use marketing channels and tactics to nurture prospects through their decision-making process. It shows your potential customers a problem they may be unaware of, and ultimately positions your brand as the best possible solution.
In order to get started, you’ll need to identify who you’re trying to target with your demand generation strategy. Who are your customers? What do they want? How can you help them?
There are three common ways to establish the success of your demand generation program:
- By evaluating the quality of your leads.
- By nurturing your leads so you can convert them into revenue.
- By actually generating revenue for your company’s bottom line.
To ensure that your campaign runs smoothly, it’s a good idea to have a designated team that can manage your demand generation efforts. This can be especially important when it comes to converting leads through your sales funnel. If you don’t have the right people in place, there is a risk your campaign will fizzle out before it reaches its full potential.
A standard demand generation team is made up of the following:
- A content manager to provide relevant and useful content.
- A web manager to ensure that the website is optimized for conversions.
- A paid acquisition manager to make sure that your online ads are bringing in the customers you want.
- A marketing operations (or automation) specialist to make sure that your email campaigns and other digital marketing are performing well.
- A marketing lifecycle manager who is responsible for developing and executing campaigns for deeper engagement and relationships with customers.
- A sales development representative to identify and engage potential customers through a variety of channels and convert them into leads.
- A social media analytics and PR coordinator to bring in those warm leads from all over the internet.
- An event and campaign manager who helps generate leads with events, contests, and giveaways.
- A graphic designer to help with designing landing pages, infographics, brochures, etc.
What are the best demand generation tools you will need this 2022?
You may think that your demand generation strategies are working just fine but they could be a lot more effective especially when you are utilizing tools for a more streamlined process. However, there could be instances that the tools you’re using and strategies you’re employing could actually be costing you revenue.
For example, do you know what your conversion rate is? Do you have a way to calculate it accurately? If not, then you probably can’t determine if your demand generation efforts are paying off or not.
Or, let’s say you are able to measure success rates of your inbound marketing goals, but aren’t sure how to use that data effectively to boost conversions in the future. What if you had a resource that could shed light on all of these questions?
Here’s a list of some of the top demand generation tools digital marketers use to perform key daily tasks and run successful campaigns.
1. SEO tools for demand generation
Everyone knows that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the top priorities for business owners. However, it can also be tricky to know exactly what to do, especially when you get into the nitty-gritty part of it. If you’re trying to figure out how to make your website more visible, you’ll want to look at keyword analysis.
The problem is, there are so many ways to approach it and so many tools that claim to help improve your ranking. To make it easier for you, here are the best SEO tools you can use for demand generation.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs lets you know exactly what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages on their websites those keywords bring in the most traffic.
It also offers a set of other SEO toolsets, including:
- Site Audit: To optimize your website.
- Site Explorer: To analyze your competitors.
- Keywords Explorer: To figure out what your competitors are searching for.
- Content Explorer: To get insights into your industry’s top-performing content
- Rank Tracker: To track your ranking progress.
SEMrush
SEMRush is like Ahrefs in the sense that both tools break down your competitors’ link profiles. But SEMRush also allows you to see your competitors’ rankings over time, giving you a better idea of what it might take to rank on top.
SEMRush offers PPC management and social media marketing, too. The SEO features include:
- Keyword research: To figure out which keywords will bring maximum traffic to your site.
- On-page SEO: To audit your pages and improve the overall site health.
- Local SEO: To optimize your site for searches in local geographies.
- Rank tracking: To keep track of the ranking of your target keyword.
- Link building: To help you strengthen your backlink profile.
2. Content marketing tools for demand generation
Blogging or posting on social media can be a terrific way to reach out to your audience. Content marketing tools, such as these, help you create smooth, streamlined content that appeals to leads.
Sprout Social
With Sprout Social, you can finally get a hand on your out-of-control social media schedule and focus on what matters most: creating the right content that will resonate with your audience.
Sprout helps you create a content marketing calendar, schedule social posts, and track the results of your efforts.
Some of the features include:
- Engagement: It offers a unified social inbox to streamline your engagement efforts.
- Publishing and scheduling: It helps you plan, create, and manage your content.
- Analytics: It helps you access your sales metrics with automated, presentation-ready reports.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream gives you a comprehensive one-stop shop for nurturing relationships with industry influencers. You also get reports that show you the best-performing pitches you’ve sent to them.
Other features include:
- Digital PR: It offers press list building and pitching features.
- Link builders: It helps you analyze prospects and monitor links.
3. Reporting tools for demand generation
Data, data, and more data. That’s what you need to drive your demand generation efforts. If you’re using the right reporting tools, you can really get a handle on exactly what’s happening on your site.
These tools help you gather information about every aspect of your site performance: traffic sources, campaign performance, content performance — you name it, and these tools will provide in-depth insight into exactly how each of these things is performing.
Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can see what devices your visitors are using and what time of day they’re most active. You can see how long people spend on your site and which pages they read the most.
When it comes to demand generation, though, there’s more you can do with Google Analytics. For example, you can measure the performance of a campaign to see which channels are driving the best results. Also, you can use Google Analytics to find out which content performs best and use that knowledge to craft future campaigns or content.
Panguin
Panguin overlays your Google Analytics data on top of your website and analyzes changes in behavior from the time of an update or change to the present day. It helps you identify if Google algorithm updates have caused traffic drop-offs for your website.
4. Lead nurturing tools for demand generation
Lead nurturing is used when you target potential customers willing to buy your products. With the help of the following lead nurturing tools, you can generate interest among potential customers and then convert them into paying customers.
Aloware
Aloware is a cloud-based software that helps you optimize how your business interacts with its customers. It helps with demand generation by supporting your outbound campaigns such as cold calling and cold emailing. Your team can use Aloware’s unlimited text messaging and call capabilities to nurture your leads and grow your customer base.
Aloware integrates with popular sales CRMs like HubSpot, making customer communication even more efficient. Aloware comes with a sales dialer that allows you to call up to 200 leads a day. From your HubSpot automation page, you can also set communication triggers that can be sent at a predetermined schedule. Contacts can be enrolled to Aloware’s call and text sequences so that you can follow up with leads in a timely manner.
LeadFeeder
Leadfeeder is a visitor identification software. It helps you make the most out of your website traffic by showing you which companies visited your site, how they got there, and what pages they clicked on. It also offers integration with tools like Google Analytics, MailChimp, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
You can sign up for a free trial and later upgrade to its premium plan.
5. Conversion optimization tools for demand generation
Clicks, or the number of times a visitor has clicked on something on your website, are one indicator of whether or not your target audience is engaged with the content you’ve put in front of them. The process of conversion optimization is an ongoing cycle that determines how businesses can increase the number of those precious clicks based on visitor behavior.
Hotjar
Hotjar’s heat-mapping software gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your visitors interact with your website. Session recording allows you to see how visitors click around your site and where they decide to drop off, as well as what information they find and what information they don’t. This lets you take action on objective data to optimize your landing pages for conversions.
6. Outbound tools for demand generation
Outbound lead generation tools aim to help you find new leads for your sales team to contact. They are built to automate tedious tasks such as finding new prospects, and sending them messages in the hopes of converting them into customers. Outbound lead gen tools generally leverage a combination of different channels (email, phone calls, social media) and provide functionality to track those efforts.
Hunter
Hunter is an outbound email search tool that allows you to enter any web domain name and find all the associated email addresses. It gives you full control over selecting your ideal email targets, saving you hours of tedious, repetitive work.
Hunter also comes with an email validation tool. This allows you to check whether your emails are going to the right inboxes, and also makes sure that you’re sending them to people who want and expect to receive your messages.
Conclusion
While every business is different and will have its own unique needs for demand generation, these tools should help you achieve your goals effectively, and efficiently. You can pair these tools with an effective website theme specifically designed to help generate demand.
The key to success lies in communicating your needs, understanding your ideal customers’ needs, and focusing on optimizing lead quality instead of the quantity. These demand generation tools will assist you in getting better leads faster — and that’s what really matters.
