Blog Post

Demand Generation

Driving Growth 101: The Basics You Need to Know About Demand Generation

Driving growth is critical to business success. In B2B SaaS — and any industry — if you're not growing, you're losing ground. But what if you don’t know where to start?

Running an expensive ad campaign and hoping for the best is a common best attempt at demand gen. But you've been burned by the short-lived results and low ROI of this method before.

Alternatively, demand generation is a high ROI, long-term growth-driving vehicle you need to know about. Here's how to use demand gen to drive growth.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand Generation is a data-driven marketing strategy that creates demand for your SaaS solutions. To accomplish this, you must determine the why, where, and how of the target audience's relationship to your B2B SaaS.

Why do they want it? Analytics — mixed with some common sense — tells you the goals and pain points.

Where do they look for it? It tells you the channels they frequent and sources they trust.

How do they need to get it? Demand gen focuses not only on how you initially deliver your SaaS. It cares about "how they receive it". Do they love it and tell others?

Focus on the full funnel

Demand generation seeks to align your marketing, sales, and customer support. In doing so, you create a seamless customer experience that delights customers — top to bottom, start-to-finish, a full funnel experience.

But demand gen doesn't see a funnel that ends at the bottom. It sees a cycle where the bottom of the funnel feeds the top. To accomplish this you'll focus on four demand engines.

Use all four demand engines

What's an engine do? It powers something. To get the most out of demand gen, you need to get all four engines humming in unison. This drives growth.

Creating demand

This engine focuses on generating awareness about the problem your SaaS solves for businesses.

Capturing demand

This one involves engaging people who've shown interest. Start conversations and engage them in the solutions in a meaningful way.

It's critical to note that small actions lead to bigger actions. Leverage this interest to strengthen this bond. Get them to take action like following you or signing up for an email list.

After all, 79% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective distribution channel. It's important to capture demand here when possible.

Accelerating demand

What's it mean to accelerate? You want to not only fill the funnel with high-quality leads but speed the funnel up.

How? Invest in deepening and widening this connection.

Deepen the connection by providing helpful content that serves their needs and goals. Simultaneously, they're learning about your offerings and developing greater intent to buy.

Use data to know when an individual is ready to buy. Deploy automatic lead routing technology to Speed the Lead to sales and close the deal.

At the same time, widen a connection. Encourage interested people to engage with you on multiple channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, etc.). They may not even be a paying customer yet! But this both passively and directly engages other decision-makers in their company (and others).

This also widens the bond because now they're talking offline too! As a result, more people are becoming aware of the problems and entering Top of Funnel.

Growing demand

What do you do after you've made the sale to delight new customers? You should offer robust customer support (people and self-service) along with data-driven, automated onboarding procedures, and advocacy programs.

Marketing creates relevant content to support these efforts, thus aligning marketing and customer support.

Create content for the full funnel...for each demand engine

Each engine needs its own special type of fuel to work. Content is that fuel! But the type of content is different for each stage.

  • Creating demand
  • Educational problem-centered content, blog posts, infographics, long-form guides, videos.
  • Capturing demand
  • Content focused on solutions, eBooks, case studies, white papers, webinars, social media posts.
  • Accelerating demand
  • Sales enablement content, managing objections content, success stories, demos, free trials.
  • Growing demand
  • Onboarding emails, videos, and other guides, troubleshooting guides, self-service content, ChatBot content. Simultaneously, you're facilitating and promoting User-Generated Content (UGC), Loyalty and Advocacy programs.

Identify and Grow Key Accounts

This demand-gen customer success strategy focuses on strengthening the bond you have with high-value accounts. Your goal is to maximize customer lifetime value.

On the surface, this sounds like an account retention strategy. After all, you've heard that increasing retention by just 5% can double your revenue. Of course, retention matters.

But customer lifetime value is more than how much one business account spends in their lifetime. Keeping that company engaged in the solutions fuels all four demand generation engines.

This engagement translates to ROI. This happens in several ways, all of which you can amplify through this strategy

First, simply having a long-standing well-known and/or active customer demonstrates stability, authority, and relevance. Key accounts often have many employees who engage with you on social media.

Let them do the talking. What they say about your products will mean more than anything you ever say about it.

To employ this strategy, actively build a platform that encourages these key accounts to create user-generated content. Then, promote on social media and at various stages. At the same time, leverage their feedback to make your product, pricing strategy, features, and content better.

They'll feel heard—a very basic human need. When businesses fill this need, they strengthen the connection and turn key accounts into brand advocates. These voices drown out the competition as the advocates further drive growth.

Ready to Grow?

Real Growth drives itself — but you have to get the engines started and fueled up. As you focus on full funnel demand gen, you fuel the four engines that turn customers into advocates.

These advocates propel others faster through the funnel. They amplify results you get from your efforts, saving you time and money. Then just keep those engines running, and you have long-term, sustainable growth.

To learn more about demand generation, check out our guide to demand generation. Here, you'll learn more about how to generate the demand that drives growth.

 

Blog Post

Demand Generation

Growth

Why You Need to Implement a Growth Marketing Strategy

Budding SaaS brands leverage growth marketing by constantly trying innovative marketing strategies, measuring their efficacy, and scaling them up accordingly to get more paying customers that add to a strong user base.

In this article, let’s look at five reasons why a go-to-market strategy is a must-have for every budding business aiming for hyper-growth.

1. Growth Marketing Improves Your Brand Awareness

The biggest challenge growing businesses face is that only a tiny percentage of their target audience is aware of them. This increases the effort that a brand has to put in to convert leads into loyal customers.

Growth marketing focuses on getting your business on the front page of the internet in the following ways:

  1. It increases your ranking on search results through strategies like link building and PR mentions.
  2. It boosts your social media following by capitalizing on User-Generated Content (UGC) and increasing activity on social media platforms.
  3. It increases the dwell time of visitors to your website through content creation.

All the above advantages get you more qualified leads, boost your conversion rates, and improve your average customer lifetime value.

2. Growth Marketing Increases ROI

Traditional digital marketing tends to have a lower Return On Investment (ROI) as it shares a one-size-fits-all promotional message without considering the factors that make each of its viewers unique.

Growth marketing is just the opposite. It segments the audience based on various parameters such as age and location and shares customized messages by understanding their pain points and requirements.

This personalized approach pulls the prospect closer to your product or service as they can relate to the message on a deeper level. Consequently, your conversion rates and customer lifetime values increase, and your customer journey improves.

An indirect way growth marketing increases ROI is that some of its tactics (like email marketing) can be automated, saving you time and labor.

In the long run, through sustainable growth marketing tactics such as content marketing, the cost of acquiring customers decreases. 

It also becomes more effective, as you can target your approach for each funnel state (as we know some demand generation content works best at certain stages).

Source: Content Marketing Institute. A table showing the effectiveness of each marketing channel at each buyer stage.

3. Growth Marketing Makes Customer Acquisition Easier 

You have ‘acquired’ a customer when a prospect who doesn’t know your business exists eventually purchases from you. For that, they need to find you, connect with you, and trust that you will give them the value they are looking for.

Growth marketing facilitates each of those things.

Through a diverse set of strategies like content marketing, referral programs, and social media marketing, you can increase brand awareness which will make your audience trust your business.

Once they become a lead, you can nurture them through the sales funnel using strategies like email marketing. Drip marketing campaigns through email (or any platform) are a great way of delivering value through personalized content.

Furthermore, by leveraging UGC, social mentions, and testimonials, you can earn their trust by delivering a great customer experience. This will not only increase the rate of customer acquisition but will also keep the acquisition costs low and improve customer retention.

4. You Can Adapt Growth Marketing to Your Needs

Adaptability lies at the heart of effective growth marketing. This makes growth marketing platforms an excellent option for businesses of all sizes, regardless of their marketing budget.

Based on your current objectives, you can facilitate rapid business growth by investing in selective growth marketing strategies. 

For instance, if you want to position yourself as a thought leader, you can just focus on PR campaigns. Or, if you want to increase your conversion rates, you can invest in tactics such as programmatic ads.

However, to know what will work best for you, it can be hugely beneficial to take assistance from successful growth marketers who have a wide array of experience. As every business, including yours, is defined by many variables, it can be easy to make mistakes that you cannot afford.

This is where a growth hacking team like Matter Made can help you immensely. 

5. Growth Marketing is Scalable 

Unlike traditional marketing, you can selectively scale up your growth marketing efforts to give you specific results.

For instance, if you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, you can scale up your content efforts. If you want to get more followers on social media, increase your activity on corresponding social media platforms.

Furthermore, you can scale up any of your growth marketing experiments whenever you want to. 

Apart from being adaptive to your need of the hour, scalability is another reason why working with an experienced growth marketing manager is indispensable.

Need A Growth Strategy? Chat To Matter Made

Growth marketing helps you in the following ways:

  1. It increases your brand awareness
  2. It improves your marketing ROI by targeting potential customers that are more likely to convert
  3. It makes it easy for you to gain new customers while reducing CAC
  4. It adapts to your needs and constraints of the moment
  5. It scales in the way you want to and when you want to

Matter Made's growth marketing team has helped SaaS companies like Loom and Dropbox grow astronomically by creating and implementing various growth marketing strategies suited to their respective niches.

Our growth hackers can help you strategize and execute growth strategies for faster revenue growth, get you more customers through demand generation, and cement your position as an industry leader through paid media campaigns.

Interested? Let’s talk.

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