Hoe B2B-vraaggeneratie te gebruiken voor marketinggroei

"We verkopen hier geen zadels" schreef Slack medeoprichter Stewart Butterfield in een bedrijfsbrede memo vóór de lancering. Die woorden vormden de basis van een strategie die van Slack een van de snelst groeiende B2B-startups aller tijden zou maken:

Verkoop het product niet, verkoop wat het klanten mogelijk maakt.

In de kern zit een motor die alle B2B-bedrijven drijft. Achter de zadels en memo's, de echte reden voor Slack's astronomische groei: geweldige vraag van B2B-klanten.

Wat is de generatie van B2B-vraag?

Het genereren van B2B-vraag impliceert interesse in een product of dienst die een zakelijk probleem belooft te realiseren. Met andere woorden, het is het proces van het genereren van vraag naar een aanbod dat specifiek B2B is. Het is het antwoord op "hoe krijgen we bedrijven die dit willen?"

Maar het is niet altijd zo eenvoudig.

Voordat we verder gaan, laten we een paar algemene misvattingen over het genereren van B2B-vraag ophelderen door te definiëren wat dat niet is.

Wat is niet de generatie van B2B-vraag?

De term 'vraaggeneratie' wordt vaak door elkaar gebruikt met 'leadgeneratie'. Hoewel de twee nauw verwant zijn, zijn ze niet hetzelfde. Dit is het verschil:

Om een ​​lead te genereren, moet je de vraag genereren. U moet mensen overtuigen om hun persoonlijke gegevens te verhandelen voor een actief, zoals een e-boek, een fooi of een consult. Dus, alle lead generation campagnes zijn een soort van het genereren van vraag.

Aan de andere kant zijn niet alle campagnes voor vraaggeneratie een vorm van leadgeneratie, want het doel van een campagne voor vraaggeneratie hoeft niet altijd te zijn om leads te genereren. Een campagne voor vraaggeneratie kan bewustzijn genereren, gratis proef aanmeldingen, verkoop en nog veel meer.

Het verschil tussen het genereren van B2B-vraag en het genereren van B2C-vraag

Een andere belangrijke differentiator is het publiek. Een strategie voor het genereren van B2B-vraag zal er iets anders uitzien dan een B2C-strategie voor vraaggeneratie, omdat het van oudsher voor bedrijven langer duurt om te verkopen.

A B2C company usually has to get buy-in from one, maybe two people maximum. A B2B company, though, has to earn the approval of entire teams, departments, sometimes whole businesses. Generally B2B purchases are also more costly.

Together that adds up to a longer buying cycle, which is why B2B demand generation strategies usually focus on guiding the prospect to a sales representative instead of going for the sale straight away. Here’s a useful infographic to keep in mind when you’re determining your B2B demand generation strategy:

4 powerful B2B demand generation strategies for your next campaign

Looking to build a B2B demand generation campaign from scratch? Keep these four powerful strategies in mind:

Build a foundation with conventional methods you can track

It’s a universal truth: People like secret knowledge that gives them an edge over everybody else—little-known “tricks" and “hacks" to get ahead.

That’s why marketers scour blogs and case studies for unconventional tactics hoping to find their secret sauce…

But secret sauce doesn’t exist.

Most times the answer to “how do we get people to want our product?" is hiding in traditional marketing methods like:

• Search advertising: Bidding for clicks based on keyword searches related to your business.
• Display advertising: Real-time bidding for impressions based on key targeting capabilities like demographics, behavior, browsing history.
• Email marketing: Sending out emails to well-defined lead segments. Email has long been the unwavering king of nurture. Once you have a prospect’s information, this is a great way to drive demand generation.
• Organic marketing: Updating organic channels like your blog and social media accounts to boost awareness of your product or service. This also includes the creation of lead magnets like ebooks or tip sheets you can offer in exchange for prospect information.

Tried and true marketing methods should be at the core of your B2B demand generation strategy. They may not be sleek or secretive, but there’s a reason so many businesses use them: they work. Use them, track them closely, and determine which delivers the highest ROI for your business.

Be less intrusive

Advertiser Howard Gossage famously said “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them, and sometimes that’s an ad."

Today advertisers and publishers are finally catching on. The New York Times, for instance, announced last year that it would no longer count on display advertising to reach its readers, and instead rely more on native advertising.

While the method is rooted in Gossage’s days, it’s still widely misunderstood by many. Our founder Todd Garland explains it simply, and why it’s an alluring option for advertisers and publishers alike:

“At its core, Native can be described as a user experience (UX) optimized ad unit that fits into a publisher’s design style guide. The New York Times is creating advertisements that meet their internal, advertiser, and reader needs."

Think product placement over pesky TV commercials here. You’re probably more receptive to a product or service if it’s naturally worked into your show than if it interrupts your viewing experience.

Unlike product placement, though, native advertising isn’t about disguising products or services as organic content. It’s about writing an ad that people want to read or filming one they want to watch.

Explain your product or service simply

Sometimes getting people to claim your product is as simple as, well, making it simple. Too many businesses still focus on touting their product’s features: a second-gen processor, a CSS editor. But the more effective way of creating demand for a product or service is to tease out its benefits and explain them simply.

Dropbox found that out after publishing their famous explainer video to the homepage of their website. Instead of getting into the nuts and bolts — the code their new multi-device storage solution was built on — they used a two-minute hypothetical scenario to demonstrate its capabilities, describing the tool as a “magic pocket: a single secure place for all your stuff."

The result?

The two-minute explainer video generated demand in the form of over 10,000,000 customers and $48,000,000 in revenue. Here’s a look at the original:

Dropbox Intro Video

Think beyond the conversion

Marketers trying to run a B2B demand generation campaign often get tunnel vision. They’re so focused on one product, one promotion, one landing page, that they forget there’s always opportunity to intertwine demand generation campaigns — to generate demand for one product with another. One of the best ways to do it is with an optimized “thank you" page.

An optimized “thank you" page has three components:

• It shows sincere gratitude and appreciation for a new lead once they convert. None of this ‘thank you’ stuff. These pages are one of the few places where exclamation points come in handy. Remember: Without these people, your company’s not much of a company at all. You owe all you have to your customers. Make sure your gratitude shows through.
• It lets new leads know what they need to do next to get what they came for (will you send an email with the ebook? Will it start downloading immediately?) and what to do if your instructions don’t work (if they don’t get an email, what should they do?).
• It directs visitors to another related resource of yours that could supplement what they’ve just converted for. If your ebook is on the importance of buyer personas, do you have buyer persona templates you could direct them to?

Here’s a great example from IMPACT Branding & Design of what an optimized “thank you" page looks like:

You’ll be surprised at what else people will read, download, or sign up for if you just ask them to.

Push pain points

Let’s quickly refer back to that company-wide memo from Slack’s Stewart Butterfield:

“We are unlikely to be able to sell ‘a group chat system’ very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine). … That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation."

Aside from doing a great job of teasing out the benefits of the communication tool, these words highlight a major problem that many businesses overlook:

People may not understand why they need your product. Sometimes you have to remind them.

At first glance this may seem similar to “describe your product simply," but it’s more than that. It’s about really emphasizing the problem your potential customers face.

For Slack’s audience, it was disorganization—long email chains, poor file-sharing capabilities, and altogether cluttered communication. So they emphasized those problems in their marketing by painting the picture of a company held back by communication woes. As the team at Growth Hackers writes, they focused on “selling a solution to a problem that people didn’t know they had."

A great way to do this is by following the PAS formula:

• Problem: Spell out the problem your prospect has without your product or service. Why would they be looking for it?
• Agitation: Push their pain points. Remind them of the symptoms of their problem and the overall effect it has on their life.
• Solution: Detail the solution that your product or service has by alleviating each one of the aforementioned symptoms and describe the overall effect on quality of life.

Here’s a simple breakdown of how to do it from the team at Instapage:

Don’t hesitate to adapt these B2B demand generation strategies

Remember: These strategies are just a baseline. Your own B2B demand generation efforts depend on things like your audience, your campaign goal, traditionally successful channels, and much more.

Use these techniques as a starting point and test, test, test to determine their effectiveness. Then, tweak them to your business’s needs.

 

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