Published 13 September 2022

10 Demand Generation Campaigns to Inspire your Marketing Goals

Demand generation marketing campaigns aim to build trust and connect with the target audience for long-term customer loyalty. Key steps include setting clear goals, defining the buyer's persona, selecting the right marketing channels, using lead magnets, setting metrics, and monitoring campaign performance. Ten campaign ideas include informative content, influencer partnerships, webinars, podcasts, industry reports, free solutions, content syndication, personalized emails, and fun quizzes.

Introduction

Demand generation marketing is a steep hill. It is not just about creating awareness for your products or services. It also builds trust and a deeper relationship with your audience to create a legacy customer base.

And for that, a well thought and analyzed demand generation campaign is a must.

A demand generation campaign is a data-driven marketing strategy companies use to create brand awareness. It focuses on properly delivering content and conversation throughout a customer journey.

Therefore, you must consider several touchpoints before formulating a result-driven demand marketing campaign.

Now, let’s not get overwhelmed; just walk through this guide to inspire from the best 10 demand gen campaigns.

Core Components of Demand Generation Campaigns

Demand gen campaigns aim to bridge the gap between sales and revenue. These campaigns help to reduce the sales cycle and buyer’s journey.

Thus, there are several components that marketers must consider before launching a demand gen campaign, such as:

1. Clear marketing goals

Why are you creating a demand marketing campaign? When you plan to invest in a demand-creating campaign, this must be your first question.

You cannot select the appropriate marketing channels and strategies to connect with your potential customers without clear marketing goals.

Moreover, a recent CoSchedule study shows that 70% of marketers set clear goals before launching a campaign. In addition, 47% of marketers have seen better growth in campaigns with clear goals.

2. Buyer’s persona

Next, you must define – for whom you are creating demand marketing campaigns. Finally, you must define your targeted buyer’s personality. It will help you create personalized marketing campaigns.

To define your buyer’s persona, leverage first and second-party intent data. You can get the first-party intent data by observing your customers’ interaction with your on-site content. For second-party intent data, you can share your content on other websites and see how it performs there.

At UnboundB2B, we start all our marketing campaigns by building a buyer persona. This gives us leverage to target only those people who are actually interested in the given products or services.

3. Target the mixed marketing channels

Apart from creating marketing campaigns, distributing them on the right marketing channel is a big challenge for marketers. If your marketing campaign is not visible to the right audience, it will generate no new leads for you.

Therefore, you must target mixed marketing channels to create brand awareness after understanding your buyer’s persona. The reason?

Are you aware of the marketing rule of 7’s?

Well, in the 1930s, this marketing concept was developed. Based on movie industry research, a customer viewed a movie poster seven times before watching a movie. This principle is developed for radio and television audiences.

But, in this digital age, this principle also works very well, as a study shows that an average person has 8.5 social media accounts.

Thus, you have to target multiple channels with your demand gen campaign to showcase it to your customers whenever they go online.

4. Develop lead magnets

The lead magnet is a bait you throw to catch a fish slash a lead. The way you need different bait to attract a specific fish species. Similarly, you must use the right lead magnets based on your buyer’s persona to attract your hot leads.

For example, SaaS businesses often use a free demo or product version to attract prospects. Contrary, B2C retail brands use discounts, contests, or festive sales to motivate their customers.

So, you need to work on creating the right lead magnet before building your demand creation campaigns.

5. Set metrics and KPIs

Metrics and key performance indicators can help you understand how your demand campaigns work. This will show whether your demand generation efforts produce desired ROI or not.

You must monitor several KPIs, like traffic rate, conversion rate, engagement, monetization, and more. Some of the other important metrics are:

CAC : The customer acquisition cost is the money you have invested in converting a customer. This metric will help you define your marketing budget and achieve maximum ROI.
CPL : The cost per lead is the money spent on acquiring a lead. Therefore, you can multiply CPL with the number of leads you have generated to determine your marketing campaign’s success.
CLV : The customer lifetime value metric will show you how much you can gain from a customer. You can further multiply a purchase value with purchase frequency to know how much revenue you can expect during a period.
Sales cycle timeframe : It tells you how long it takes to convert a customer from a lead. This data will help you determine which marketing channel delivered the best results and which is incompetent for your business.
Average sales value : This data will help you anticipate how much revenue you will make from a project and which customer is more valuable. With this metric, you can also determine the investment rate for each marketing channel.

10 Inspiring Demand Generation Campaign Ideas

Are you excited to launch a demand generation campaign? If so, take inspiration from some of the leading demand generation campaign ideas before deciding on your camping message.

This way, you can generate better ROI from your marketing campaigns. Here are some of the best demand generation campaign ideas with examples to take inspiration from:

1. Informative content

Do you know 81% of shoppers prefer to research before making a purchase decision?

If you want to attract customers, you must first inform them. Content here is the best way to educate your potential customers.

You can create content based on your customer’s pain points and interests. Here, you can leverage intent data to understand what type of content your customers are searching for online.

This way, you can produce customer- and search-engine-friendly content. You can also use keyword research tools to find competitive keywords in your industry and target them in your content pieces.

Moreover, content allows you to inform your customers in several ways. For instance, you can publish blogs, case studies, e-books, and industry-specific news to inform your customers.

Almost every B2B and B2C online business are today using content marketing to educate their users. Let’s take UnboundB2B, for example.

We frequently publish blogs, informative e-books, and relevant case studies to educate our customers. This strategy not only helps us to inform our customers. But, it also helps us to gain a first-page position on search results.

2. Partner with industry influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the oldest yet most impactful ways to give a push to your demand-creating campaign. You can partner with leading influencers in your industry and make your campaign seen by more people.

According to 80% of marketers, influencer marketing brings the highest ROI compared to other marketing tactics.

All you need to do is a partner with the right influencer who has a similar audience base and tone as your business. Mostly, businesses fail to connect with the right influencers and end up ruining their entire marketing campaign. So, take your time and do proper market research before teaming up with an influencer.

Here, the unique example is designer Gaurav Gupta’s association with IBM’s Artificial Intelligence platform, Watson. Gupta used artificial intelligence to create a stunning cocktail-style sari gown. This unusual creation was revealed at the Vogue Women Of The Year Awards.

3. Host a webinar

Demand generation is about connecting with your customers and establishing personal connections with them. And webinars are turning out to be one of the best ways to connect with customers.

Hosting a webinar event can present your products and services to potential customers. Moreover, you can receive real-time feedback from your customers to make changes to your product.

Further, webinars deliver the personal touch that most digital marketing channels don’t offer. In fact, today’s webinars offer around a 55% conversion rate, which is great for demand generation purposes.

CISCO is here fully leveraging webinars. They host webinars on almost all the relevant categories like cloud, networking, etc.

4. Podcasting stirs demand

The podcast is another excellent way to create demand. Statistica showed that there will be 424.4 million podcast listeners in 2022, which is expected to reach 504.9 million by 2024.

So, to reach out to the masses, you can create a podcast to spread awareness of your brand and connect with relevant audiences.

Leading CRM brands like Salesforce also use podcasts. They host podcasts on several topics like marketing trends, mental health, and more.

5. Insightful and original reports

When introducing your product as a perfect solution to customers’ problems, it is better to back up your points with valid research and statistics.

Thus, you can create insightful and original reports on your industry. In addition, you can collect data from different resources and compile a comprehensive report that your sales agents can use to validate their points.

Sharing reports will not only help to educate your customers. You can also use reports to generate backlinks and improve your search engine ranking. It will also help to establish your brand authority.

Today, many companies are using reports to sell their services, such as HubSpot.

HubSpot shares the annual state of marketing report. This report helps them sell their marketing products to potential customers by motivating them with statistics.

6. Offer a free solution

By offering a free version of your premium tool to audiences, you can better help them understand your products. Often B2B SaaS companies use a free tool trick to create a demand.

This strategy helps to add potential leads to your sales funnel. Further, you can motivate free users to upgrade to premium subscriptions by showing them how much they are missing out.

Grammarly uses this demand-gen tactic perfectly. They offer basic grammar checks for free. But they motivate users to move to premium plans with an exclusive plagiarism checker and readability improvement features.

7. Content syndication

Content syndication is our favorite way to fuel up demand-gen campaigns. It is cost-effective and lets you target multiple marketing channels.

We often run a content audit for our clients and select their best-performing content pieces. And then, gradually, syndicate them on different marketing channels so a campaign message can reach targeted audiences multiple times.

For example, we turn high-traffic generating blog content into videos, ads, or infographics to reach more people.

Here you can take inspiration from Branticles. They published an email marketing guide infographic, which was further syndicated on Agility PR, Site Pro News, and many other websites.

8. Personalized emails

Undoubtedly, email marketing is the best lead generation strategy. However, today’s marketing dynamics also demand personalization.

Campaign Monitor reported that personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened.

So, you can segment your email subscribe list into relevant groups and start producing personalized email content.

The best thing about emails is that they land you directly in your customers’ inboxes. This allows you to stir a conversation and build relationships with your customers.

For example, Buffer sends welcome emails to their new sign-ups to tell them more about the platform and to start a conversation.

9. Create fun quizzes

Yes, quizzes also work for B2B audiences. Now, in the end, B2B decision-makers are also humans. They also like entertainment and fun.

Though you can make B2B quizzes more professional and your services related. For example, if you sell project management software, you can ask quizzes like “Do you know which was the first PM software?” Or, “Name two open-source PM software.”

Besides being fun, quizzes can help you pinpoint a problem for your audience and build brand awareness. For enhancing social media engagement, quizzes work like a charm.

A leading European adhesive films distributor of windows and furniture, Solar Screen gave new meaning to quizzes. The company hosted a quiz contest on its Facebook page to offer its partners and retailers 500€ worth of technical training in Paris.

10. Involve your employees

Your employees can make your demand-generation campaigns go viral. You can leverage your employees’ social reach to generate demand.

Allow your employees to promote your campaigns on their social media. Moreover, you can host webinars and podcasts where your expert employees share insightful tips with audiences.

Making your employees the face of your campaign will humanize your brand, and customers can easily connect with it. Moreover, it will build your strong employer brand and motivate industry professionals to work with your company.

For example, Intel has created an Instagram account to only share its employees’ stories. We Are Intel is the page where you can see heartwarming photos and videos of people who made Intel a leading technology brand.

Let’s Launch Your Demand Generation Campaigns Now!

There you go, people! You have now learned demand gen campaign components and strategies that work for all. So, you can now start creating buzz for your brand in the market.

Though, we suggest defining your goals and buyer’s persona before you move ahead because it is the foundation of your marketing campaigns.