Though the U.S. inflation rate dropped from 9.1% to 6.0% between June 2022 and February 2023, it was still higher than it had been since September 2021, leaving companies with the challenge of making their budgets work harder for them. According to the 2023 Demand Generation Benchmark Report, upwards of 75% of surveyed businesses struggle with hitting their growth goals.
If you’re caught in the position of doing more with less, generating leads isn’t enough. You need to find ways to move those leads down the path to purchase, without the help of third-party cookies, by the end of 2023.
Fortunately, you can put your content to work for you. We’re digging into how to create demand-generation content that targets ideal customers and leads to conversions.
What Do We Mean by Demand-Generation Content?
In today’s market, your company’s audience is likely fragmented across platforms and distributed across wide geographies. We also can’t forget how many other businesses compete for the same online spaces and prospective customers’ attention.
Generating demand for your products and services is no straightforward, easy task. Demand gen marketing is a long-view approach, requiring strategies that nurture prospective customers from awareness to purchase. The approach is designed to:
- Create awareness in your brand
- Generate interest
- Expand your markets
- Promote long-term engagement
Demand generation relies on a variety of tactics and data to move new prospects through the buyer’s journey.
When you employ strategic use of content that fulfills the promise of awareness, market expansion, and engagement, you get demand-generation content. Incorporating content into your demand gen strategies is an effective means of accomplishing long-term marketing goals.
What Are the Benefits of Using Content for Demand Generation?
Developing a content strategy for demand generation focuses on specific content at each stage of the buyer’s journey. It hits on your target audience’s needs at each touchpoint, providing them with the right information in the right way and at the right time.
When your strategy is successful, you benefit from:
- Lower marketing costs and a higher return on investment
- Higher rankings on search engine results pages
- Increased trust in your brand and brand credibility
- Increased customer retention and brand loyalty
- Boosted sales and a higher bottom line
Demand-generation content isn’t a strategy that drives fast results but can lead to consistent, long-term, sustainable growth.
Which Content Strategies Drive Demand?
Driving demand for your products or services using content requires a well-considered approach. The following strategies are essential to producing content that delivers results across the customer journey.
Develop Solid Buyer Personas
Any good marketing strategy starts with solid buyer personas. It is no different with content marketing. The more developed your personas, the better you can produce content targeting them.
We also recommend that you think about various ways to segment your audience. Think beyond demographics and chunk into specific needs or niches related to your brand’s offerings.
Use a Full-Funnel Approach
Demand-generation content uses a full-funnel approach to marketing. You need to determine customer pain points at each funnel stage before crafting content that speaks to your ideal customers as they move along the buyer’s journey.
The goal is to ensure you meet your audience’s needs with tightly focused content for every step of the journey, from top-of-the-funnel education and problem-solving topics to bottom-of-the-funnel product-led content. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 demand generation survey, 56% of companies report that TOFU content drives demand more than content designed for any other stage.
However, you don’t want to neglect prospects at other stages of the funnel when producing demand-generation content. Understanding what customers need along their buying journey can give you the edge when crafting content geared toward later stages.
Focus on the Customer
Your content should have a customer-first focus rather than a brand-centered focus. Align your topics with customer personas, interests, and pain points. Your content should be:
- Relevant
- Valuable
- Well-researched
- Informative
- Well-written
These days, building relationships with trustworthy and authentic brands is imperative for B2C and B2B customers. Create content showing you think more about customers than in dollar signs, and make it sound like a human wrote it for other humans.
You may also want to consider developing lead magnets to draw audiences to your webpage or email list. If you are a B2B company, consider crafting content that targets making decisions, collaborating with partners, and incorporating account-based strategies.
Image Source: Content Marketing Institute
Optimize Content for Customers’ Search Intent
Search engine optimization is imperative for any digital marketing approach. However, you should optimize demand-generation content for your target audience’s search intent.
Image Source: Think With Google
During content planning, assess how a topic might fulfill a prospect’s goal when searching. Determine your keyword strategy based on matching intent with content topics. Don’t forget to optimize your website, too.
Use Data To Target Content
Your content should be data-driven, involving research on your competition, audience, and topics. You also need to understand how individual assets and overall strategies perform.
Data analytics and content audits tell you how you’re doing and inform future content strategies. Use our content audit template to simplify the audit process.
What Types of Content Are Useful for Demand Generation?
You’ll need to make sure you meet customers where they are, which means implementing a demand-generation content strategy that reaches across channels. While social media posts are an obvious channel, expand your content toolbox to include:
- Blog articles
- Short-form video
- Webinars
- eBooks
- Case studies
- Nurture emails
Divvy’s platform makes it easy to plan content across platforms. Use metadata to categorize content according to audience and channel. Duplicate these on the content calendar, assigning a different color to each. You can view content distribution across categories at a glance or filter to focus on specific channels or audiences.
How Can You Simplify Demand-Generation Content Production?
Incorporating demand-generation content into your marketing strategies is a complex operation that can quickly devolve into chaos without the right organizational tools. Divvy has everything your team needs, housed on a single platform.
We make planning, coordinating, collaborating, scheduling, and analyzing easy, providing a central hub that keeps teams aligned and organized. Request a demo to see how we can help you streamline the process!
