Everyone wants to build a brand. Everyone wants to grow their brand. Everyone wants their audience to know who they are, and what they do. No one wants to invest time in doing so.
Most companies (B2B and B2C) want to create a demand engine, a mousetrap, where prospects come flying in and don’t leave without converting into paying customers.
Having worked with a few B2B and B2C organizations on their demand engines, I’ll try to list down the considerations you need to keep in mind to generate demand for your product(s) and solution(s).
These suggestions will get you 80% of your revenues if done the right way. Here we go!
Positioning
Positioning impacts everything your company does. Your lead generation will be profitable only if your positioning is strong (and right). If you aren’t positioned correctly, you will generate bad demand — wasted dollars!
Answer the following questions:
- Who do you help?
- What problem you solve?
- Differences from the competition.
Positioning seems easy on the outside yet is the trickiest part of marketing.
What usually works is:
- Identify the desire you serve (fear, want, aspiration, etc).
- What’s your premise? (any belief your prospects hold that needs to be addressed)
- How are you different from others in your market?
- Make the promise (easy, reliable, cheap, quality, etc)
- What’s the cost of doing nothing? (the alternative)
Once you’ve identified your positioning, build your messaging.
Structure your Website to Generate Leads
Most organizations are guilty of setting up a new webpage each time a new solution/feature/product is launched.
Don’t add too many pages, such that you forget the journey to get to each page. Start off by making your structure right.
Homepage
Use a headline that speaks directly to buyers and tells them the product is meant for them. Follow up with a strong benefit statement. Keep in mind that average visitors don’t have a high level of buyer awareness.
Speak to the visitor on how they feel now vs how they’ll feel once they use this product.
Eg. Increase website visits by 25% by using XYZ tool. Future proof your business.
Lastly, add social proof s— awards, testimonials, certifications. They increase the chances of conversion.
Products and Features
Don’t list features for the sake of it. Tell a story — how will each feature solve the user’s pain. Sell the solution of the problem user is after.
Try and answer the questions below:
- o Is it the product user is looking for?
- o Does it solve the user’s problem?
- o It is a positive return on investment?
- o How to take the next step? — clearly defined CTA
Invariably, these are the questions you want answers to when you are looking to buy something for yourself (or solve any of your problems).
Blogs
Always optimize your blogs for conversion. All your blogs should be aligned to customer pain points. The thought process should be — how does this blog help a visitor convert?
A lot of organizations post blogs (and content) without much thought. Make it a point to remember that this will be the highest frequency touchpoint for prospects in the long run.
Interestingly, a lot of times a call to action comes only at the end of the blog. In this day and age, people will rarely read all the way through. Include CTAs in the body to get maximum traction.
SEO
SEO is often the most underrated (and therefore overlooked) tool for lead generation. SEO can further be sub-divided into 3 parts:
The Geeky SEO Stuff
- Increase the relevance of your pages to fulfill searcher intent. Work to decrease your crawl errors using Google Search Console. Don’t leak visits off your site.
- Deploy content changes often. Empower your content team to be cognizant of this.
- Increase the quality of your content and the context that it is setting up. If you cover your topic well, you’ll do better in search.
Content Marketing
- Consolidate existing pages together to avoid keyword cannibalization. If two or more of your pages point to the same keyword, you split the traffic and competitor wins. Lesser pages also mean easier maintenance.
- Don’t create a page for every new feature or solution. Look for opportunities to club several ones into a single narrative to give out a strong and compelling narrative. And refresh often. Refreshing often is more important than piling on new content.
Outreach
Identify publications/influencers relevant to your industry and build relationships. Each time you publish for yourself, share links with them and request their opinions/insights. Request them to share in their network.
Secondly, try and reclaim unlinked brand mentions. If there are brand mentions by a third party, provide a link to your website. It will increase traffic and build site credibility.
Performance
Best ads find the customer channel fit early.
What does that mean? It means that the creative you are running as ads match the user behavior and intent of the user on your chosen channel.
Ads work for almost everyone. It doesn’t work for one of the below reasons:
- Not enough testing
- Gap in the buyer journey
- Not enough use of Remarketing
- Failure to revamp creative
But then again, which platform works best? Let’s look at each one:
Works best for B2B products and services. Consulting and SaaS organizations must leverage the power of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn requires a decent budget. It will give you fewer leads but the lead quality will be high. Along with geography, add broad job titles of your target audience and the organization employee size you are after.
Facebook works best if you are a B2C business or an eCommerce business. It is even more effective if your target group is above the age of 30.
What has worked best for me is retargeting on Facebook. If a customer has visited you, he is most likely to be found on Facebook or Instagram. This will be one of the cheapest sources of your leads.
What also works is lookalike audiences of your paying customers (B2B or B2C). The Facebook algorithm identifies similar prospects as your customers and gets them to you.
Works the best for eCommerce or B2C businesses. It has a huge audience base and allows you to segment basis interests apart from other demographics.
Invest in search — it will enable you to form a marketing funnel and categorize users basis their intent.
Identify:
- High purchase intent terms for your product/service and category
- Branded search — for your brand name
- Brand vs competitor intent
- Google display network using Account-based targeting
- ABM lists paired with keyword targeting
Remarketing
This is the most underutilized form of targeting and easily the most rewarding. How to go about it?
Segment your audience on basis of actions or the pages visited. Once done, go omnichannel with your remarketing.
The trick with Remarketing, unlike other forms of performance marketing, is that you need to keep it steady for a month. Look for the obvious mistakes (if any) within the first week but refrain from changing course too soon.
Target a customer acquisition cost (whether B2B or B2C) and spend accordingly. As mentioned above, Remarketing with fetch you the best RoI.
Optimize basis your funnel. If you are getting impressions but not clicks, change your creative or your messaging. If there are plenty of clicks but not enough leads (or converts), change the form messaging, or your CTA.
There is a huge amount of time that needs to be invested in creating a lead gen engine that works on auto mode. The key is to start slow and grow asset by asset. One asset at a time!
Conclusion
In conclusion, successful brand growth and demand generation require a strategic focus on positioning, website optimization, content marketing, SEO, outreach, advertising performance, and remarketing. By addressing these key aspects methodically and continuously refining your approach, you can create a robust lead generation engine that steadily drives revenue growth and enhances your brand’s presence in the market.
