Demand Generation: The Complete Beginner’s Guide (2017)

“What is demand generation? Is it different from inbound marketing? How?”

“Why do I keep hearing this term? It sounds like something I should know about…”

Believe me, if you’re reading this article, you already do know about demand generation. You just might not know you know.

Y’know?

This guide will take apart and examine the three pillars of demand generation. I’lll also give you a 7-step walkthrough for how you can start rolling with demand generation today.

Demand generation strategies have driven most of Wishpond’s growth in the past few years. Advertising and PR are great, but since 2013 we’ve prioritized the demand gen strategies I’ll go over in this guide.

So this is something I’m really excited about, and know can have high-impact on your business as well.

Click below to navigate the guide.

What is Demand Generation?

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That’s a great question, and one we should get out of the way as soon as possible…

Demand Generation encompasses the marketing strategies designed to drive awareness and interest in a business’ products.

It’s an umbrella term which encompasses social media, inbound marketing, email marketing, real-world marketing and customer retention strategies.

It does not cover advertising or PR.

There’s two points in that demand generation definition that I’d like to pull out and take a look at before we get started:

1. “Drive Awareness”

Part of generating demand for your business’ product is about driving awareness of the fact that you exist.

This can be done through content marketing and SEO, social media, community outreach, affiliate marketing and more.

2. “Drive Interest”

Once people are aware you exist, you need to have a secondary strategy in place to communicate your value.

I don’t care that Salesforce is extremely well-known. If I don’t need a CRM platform (or don’t believe I do), why would I care?

Driving interest can also be done through all the strategies above, but it also involves the other side of demand generation – email marketing and customer retention.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, let’s get rolling with our Guide to Demand Generation…

Demand Generation: Strategies to Reach New Prospective Customers

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The strategies I’ll go over in this section are designed to get your business in front of people who might be interested in buying your products.

This can, of course, also be done with Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and a solid public relations strategy. But, for the purposes of this guide (and to align ourselves with the whole idea of demand generation), we’ll ignore those and focus instead on the three most impactful demand generation strategies to drive awareness.

Social Media

Social media, if invested in correctly and optimized (with management tools, visual marketing apps, and a well-measured approach, can be profitable without having to pay for exposure.

It’s a challenge, though, for sure. The organic reach on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest are extremely limited (as the platforms are encouraging businesses to pay-to-play).

Here’s what I recommend to get organic reach and brand awareness on social media:

• Choose a couple social platforms on which to focus your time and energy. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
• To get rolling, start off with frequent social media promotions to increase your number of Fans and Followers. Use social incentives (bonus entry rewards for Liking or Sharing your promotion) to spread the word and get more Followers. Exclude past entrants from your targeted posts when promoting a new campaign.
• Measure the success you see on social media with a comprehensive analytics tool (either within your social media management tool or the platform itself). Measure how much time you’re spending and the dollar value of engagement you receive. Remember that social media, like content marketing is a long-game. It takes several months for anything to happen (though social promotions can help you get a boost).

To learn more about social media marketing, including when you shouldn’t invest in it (and where you should invest), as well as how you can get started, check out my article, “Social Media Marketing Plan: An 11-Step Template.” To see a full guide to the tools necessary to make it profitable, check out “50 Social Media Tools: The Ultimate List 2017.”

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a huge part of driving awareness about, and generating demand for, your business.

Imagine the content you create as a megaphone. When you start out, without content, your business is only able to whisper into the buying world. As you create more and more content, your voice gets a bit louder – because you’re more likely to be found, more successful on social media, and because the more content you create the more respect you’ll get from Google.

STEP 1: SEO

When we’re talking about the content marketing strategies to reach new prospective customers, we’re primarily talking about content’s role in SEO.

SEO, very simply, comprises the strategies that businesses use to get their brand on the first page of search results when someone types in something related to them.

How to start ranking and generating awareness of your brand through search results:

• Identify key words and phrases associated with your business. For Wishpond’s marketing campaign software, we target tool searches, questions associated with how to use tools like ours, and queries associated with strategies which use our tools.
• Identify what the competition is for your keywords. If a given keyword is dominated by a competitor, create better content than what they’re produced (longer, higher density of keywords, etc) or go for lower-hanging fruit. Tools like LongTail Pro and BuzzSumo can help identify the types of content you should be creating.
• Start creating content with those key phrases as the URL and interspersed frequently throughout the content.
• Create long-form, high-quality content.

STEP 2: PROMOTION:

A big part of content marketing is also promotion. Become more active on communities like Reddit, GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.org and those which are most relevant to your business.

Tap into influencer marketing to increase the organic reach of your content. For a guide, check out “Influence Marketing: How to Amplify Your Content with Social Leaders.”

STEP 3: USING CONTENT TO GENERATE LEADS:

Content marketing is only valuable if you’re able to turn traffic into customers. And once you’re driving readers, for many businesses that means turning those readers into leads.

For a guide to using content to generate leads, check out “The Complete Guide to Gating your Content.”

To learn more about content marketing and how you can build a more powerful inbound strategy, check out my article, “How to Build a More Complete Content Marketing Strategy.” You can also grab a high-value tools guide with “77 Tremendous Tools to Make You a Content Marketing Superstar.”

Real-World Marketing

Real-world marketing still has a place in getting your business out there. Conferences, local meet-ups, job fairs – all these can showcase your business to the people who are there – and therein lies the problem of real-world marketing.

If your business is new on the stage, you need to implement strategies designed to show you to as much of that stage as possible.

This is the problem I see with a lot of early-stage, well-funded tech startups (and perhaps why so many of them fail): If you have a bunch of VC money, you’re going to hire the marketing team with the most proven experience.

Unfortunately, that often means you’re hiring people who haven’t had to “break into” their industry. If they have that experience you want, they’re likely corporate marketers who have marketed businesses who are already well-known to the entire business stage. They’re not breaking onto it, needing to try innovative strategies to be seen. They’re people who need to keep their brand top-of-mind – people who need to give buyers a reason to go with their well-known brand over a well-known competitor.

And that’s why digital marketing and the strategies of growth hacking are so powerful. They allow you reach a massive audience with a limited budget. Yes, it’s scarier, but it’s also more powerful in the early stages.

Then again, I’m a startup marketer, so I’m as biased as they come…

Demand Generation: Strategies to Engage Prospective Customers

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Now we really get into the nitty-gritty of demand generation – actually generating demand for your business. Creating awareness is only 1/3rd of the battle, we still need to get people to actually buy and then stay with us for more than a week or first purchase.

Let’s dive into those strategies which convince people who know who we are that our product is worth buying. Let’s dive into the strategies which get people to buy. After all, why else are we here?

Content Marketing

Once you’ve created a content funnel based around SEO, promotion and lead generation, you can continue to use it to generate demand for your tools.

Incorporate your content, including how-to guides, case studies, platform walkthroughs, video, “about us-style” pieces and more, into your email marketing campaigns which turn prospective customers (leads) into paying customers.

Content plays a major role in building trust and a relationship with prospective customers. After all, I’m far more likely to buy from someone I know – far more likely to buy from someone I trust.

Here’s an example of an article from the CEO and founder of Buffer, in which he is completely open about why a couple of the other co-founders are moving on:

To learn more about using content marketing to engage with the prospective customers who already know you check out my article on Content Marketing Institute, “Transparency Reveals Great Content Opportunity.”

Email Marketing

Before we dive into how you can use email marketing and where it fits within the demand generation sphere, I think it’s worth it to introduce you to a few statistics…

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, some businesses can get an average return of $38.
• People are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook.
• 72% of consumers would rather receive email than any other source of business communication.
• 61% of consumers are happy to receive promotional emails on a weekly basis, so long as those emails actually deliver value.
• Personalized emails (even the ones which you automate) receive transaction rates that are six times higher than others.

Sources: Emailmonday, Forrester, MarketingSherpa, MarketingLand

In short, email isn’t dead.

Here’s a few best practices that will enable you to succeed with email marketing right off the bat:

• Personalize where possible. It’s going to very quickly become impossible for you to send an email to every one of your prospective customers, but the more personal you can be the higher your response rates and the more frequently people will convert to a paid purchase. As a result, it’s worth learning how to incorporate merge tags and liquid code as soon as possible.
• Automate where possible. Your sales team might be able to, predominantly, email customers and prospective customers manually. But getting people from blog subscriber to sales lead takes a serious effort. My recommendation is to use a email automation tool to help you set up triggered workflows and drip campaigns which automatically turn new prospective customers into sales leads.
• Segment. Let’s say you write on a couple different blog topics (like Wishpond, who writes on more advanced growth marketing stuff as well as social media). It’s far more effective for us to email growth marketing subscribers content which is relevant to them and their business’ goals than it is to email them everything about a new Twitter algorithm.

Here’s a snapshot of a few of Wishpond’s own segments, including our three newsletter segments:

To dive into email marketing, particularly the automation side of it, check out “10 Steps to Email Automation Success.” We also have a resource giving you 19 of our highest-performing email marketing templates.

Demand Generation: Strategies to Engage Existing Customers

You need to keep people engaged with your platform or product to keep the demand for it high. Whatever your product is, it needs to be valuable enough to buyers that they keep coming back.

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Webcast, May 25th: How to Consistently Create High Quality Marketing Content

For software, this is done with several elements (which I’ll go over in this section). But, in general, think of it as based around three primary factors:

1. Education: If your users don’t know how to use your tool or service, they won’t see the value in it. For some software providers, especially, this may mean you need to require people attend a training call.
2. Value: If your users don’t get value from your tool, they won’t re-subscribe the next time they’re prompted.
3. Positive Opinion: If users don’t like you or have a negative experience when they interact with you, they’ll leave far faster than if they have the same experience of the tool but a positive relationship. This is where customer success and customer support work.

Let’s break down a few actionable strategies you can use to better onboard users and keep customer retention high.

Customer Onboarding

The first few weeks (or months, in some industries) are the most worrisome for any business. Once you get people over that hurdle of signing up, you need to ensure their first few experiences with you are positive ones.

This is where user onboarding comes in.

Here’s an example of a questionnaire we’re testing, which would show as soon as people enter our platform.

Information given to us from this questionnaire (it’d be five concurrent forms) allows us to better understand what our users are looking to achieve and frames how we can contact them.

Here’s an example of the video which shows up as soon as someone arrives in our landing page builder. It gives them a 26-minute walkthrough on everything they need to know about our tool:

For more on user onboarding, check out the fantastic resources at UserOnboard.com. You can also check out (and download) the emails we send our new users at “19 Proven Email Marketing Templates We Use to Sell, Nurture, Onboard, and Reach Out.”

Customer Retention

Customer retention is all about ensuring that your customers enjoy their experience with your platform or product. Keeping their demand for your product high is as important as getting them to use it in the first place.

And there’s a few elements of this…

1. A Strong Product:

Nothing else matters if your product or tool sucks. No customer support team is possibly awesome enough to make people happy if they can’t use your software or hate your UX.

Here’s an example from our own landing page builder, with everything visible, large buttons and clear choices:

2. A Strong Brand: This is actually a big one. I know I kind of belittled those corporate marketers who focus only on brand reputation over brand growth, but once you hit a few customers you need to put a bit of time into what they think of you as a company.

I’ll use your tool if it’s awesome, even if I don’t know who you are. But I’m less likely to stick around if you have a bit of downtime, I experience a bug, or I’m disappointed by a new feature.

Users are more likely to forgive their friends than they are a faceless company who has never responded to their emails.

A big part of this can be social media, particularly Instagram. Here’s an example from Hootsuite where they showcase their brand identity:

And here’s an example from Buffer, whose transparency efforts go a long way to create trust with their customers:

3. Customer Support:

This is a no-brainer. Your support team needs to be competent. They need to know your system, know your product. And that doesn’t just include the FAQs.

A good support team has more training sessions than any other team in your company. And don’t just fob this off to your most recent recent college grad. These are the people who have the most contact with your existing users, and the most potential to stop them if they want to leave.

Pay these people.

Note: A huge part of a successful customer support team is communication. If your growth team decides to run a pricing page test, your support guys need to know before it’s run. Otherwise, when they’re approached with someone asking “Yesterday I saw your product as being 49.99. Why is it now 54.99?” they won’t know how to answer. This might seem like a no-brainer, but creating solid lines of communication between product development, marketing, sales and your customer support team isn’t something to skip over.

4. Customer Success:

Whether through mandatory demos, extensive email onboarding, in-platform tool-tips or a comprehensive help center (or all of those things), you need to be showing and telling your users exactly how they can find success with your platform.

They won’t last half an hour if they don’t succeed.

Here’s an example of an automatic chat window which is shown to our platform users as soon as they launch a landing page:

How to Start Rolling with Demand Generation

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Here’s a 7-step walkthrough of actionable steps you can take today to start with demand generation for your new business.

Step 1: Start with a website you love

Start by establishing a website that you want people to see.

Don’t attend a single conference unless you know that the card you hand over has a website URL which you’ll be proud people visit.

Your website is the face of your business online. Don’t go to any parties (including advertising, blogging, PR, anything) until that face is a smiling one.

Step 2: Get rolling with blogging

Even if nobody is reading your content for the first few months, you’re establishing a digital footprint (we could get into domain authority and SEO for years, but I’d recommend you buy SEO for Dummies and go from there instead).

Step 3: Start engaging on social media networks and with online communities in your industry.

The place to start with social media really is a social promotion. There’s no better way to build your Follower list quickly and start generating engagement.

For communities, check out Wikipedia’ list of virtual communities or social networking sites to see what’s relevant to your sector.

Step 4: Start building your list

Add a list-building plugin to your blog. Create content that people might want to subscribe to.

A great strategy for this is to do something similar to Groove’s “Journey to 100k,” where they released a weekly article tracking the strategies they used to they grow.

Step 5: Start creating email-gated content

This is a big part of building your list beyond subscribers. Check out my Complete Guide to Gating your Content for a comprehensive look.

Step 6: Automate

For a while, you can do your outreach manually, but (hopefully) that’ll quickly become impossible.

Use a marketing or email automation platform to make it easier for you to effectively email your subscribers and prospective customers.

Check out “How to Create Email Drip Campaigns to Nurture Leads” for more on automating email.

Step 7: Optimize

Once you’ve started to automate, you officially have a sales funnel in place.

You’re creating content which is driving traffic; you’re collecting lead and contact data from email-gated content or a subscriber list; and you’re emailing that list either with information that encourages them to buy or a prompt to get on a call.

So you need to start thinking about optimizing that funnel.

This is where A/B testing and site optimization comes into play.

For a walkthrough on how we optimize our site and drive reliable growth, take a look at my article “How We Drive Massive Growth by Running Calculated, High-Risk Tests.”

To learn more about how to structure your sales funnel, check out “The Foundational Guide to Your Online Marketing and Sales Funnel.” For a walkthrough on creating a sales funnel focused on content marketing, you can read “A Proven Blueprint for Creating a Sales Funnel with Content.” For optimization, check out “The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization.”

Wrapping it Up

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Hopefully this article has given you a better idea of what demand generation is and how you can use it to grow your business.

It’s a pretty massive topic, but I hope I’ve covered it and illuminated some of the confusion you had.

If you have any questions whatsoever about any of the tactics or strategies you’ve seen in this article, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comment section!

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6 Ways to Outshine the Competition on Pinterest

WHEN it comes to online promotion strategies, many small business owners, marketers and solopreneurs are missing the mark.

They fail to see that there’s another search engine in town – and we’re not talking about Bing or Yahoo.

A lot of people consider Pinterest to be a social networking site. But, when you think about it, social networking isn’t really its most prominent feature. Pinterest is more of a social bookmarking site or more specifically, a visual search engine – considered by some as the second largest search engine behind Google.

And the vast amounts of highly targeted traffic available on Pinterest can rival or exceed a high ranking on Google – especially if you are in certain industries like food, fashion, home and shopping.

But, even if you’re not in a similar niche, Pinterest is still a tremendously valuable source of traffic for businesses of all kinds. There are approximately 100 million active users interacting with the platform daily, and many of them use Pinterest for product research and purchases.

According to Pinterest for Business, 40% of pinners discovered a new product and saved it on the platform while 30% made a purchase after discovering a fashion or home product. And nearly 25% of pinners have discovered and purchased health, fitness, or entertainment products.

What’s even more is that Pinterest can revive your business and help you drive traffic and sales.

DaWanda – an online marketplace for unique handmade products – increased their Pinterest referral traffic by nearly 100%. They generated more sales from Pinterest than with any other social media platforms.

Undoubtedly, there is value to be found in dominating Pinterest. Here are six things you need to know when formulating your killer Pinterest strategy.

1. Understanding the Smart Feed

Prior to the algorithmic change in the Pinterest feed (early fall, 2014) your Pinterest home screen would show the newest pins from people that you followed, first. Simply put, pins were sorted by date from newest to oldest. But, when Pinterest rolled out the new Smart Feed, that all changed. Nowadays, users see their pins sorted based on 3 factors:

• The highest quality pins from people you follow
• Related pins based on what you pin
• Interests you’re following

What does this mean for your Pinterest strategy?

It means that even if you have over 100,000 followers on Pinterest, if your pins aren’t (in Pinterest’s eyes) high quality, aren’t highly targeted, and don’t have high engagement, fewer people will see them. With Smart Feed in place, people are often more likely to find your pins based on a search rather than your pins showing up in their feed.

How do you optimize your pins to ensure all your followers see them?

The best tips are:

• Provide helpful pins – use “how to” in your pin title to tell people you are helping them solve a problem.
• Use beautiful images – Pinterest is a visual search engine and a big factor in people actually pinning your pins is how they appear visually. Make each pin the same size – taller than wider and with at least a 2:3 ratio – and avoid using faces and dark colors (we’ll cover this later).
• Repin popular pins – Pinterest likes to see your boards filled with other popular pins, not just your own pins. These are pins with a high amount of repins.

2. Create High-Quality Pins

We just touched briefly on how to optimize your pins. Now, let’s look at how to create high-quality pins.

For Pinterest to consider your pin to be high quality, it should include:

1. Valuable content
2. High engagement
3. A good pin description

Just having valuable content alone is not enough. Your pin needs a high-quality image that will catch people’s eyes and then a really good description that makes them want to click on it. Once someone has clicked on your pin to visit your site, they need to be rewarded with valuable content – valuable enough to make them want to repin, like, or comment.

Do you want to know what the perfect pin looks like?

An excellent example is Paula Deen’s pin for her cucumber, onion and tomato salad.

Why is this considered the perfect pin?

• There aren’t any faces – pins not having a face in them receive 23% more repins. Pinners like seeing things more than they like seeing faces.
• Contextual background – simple white background images only receive a quarter of the repins. For more repins, choose a background with some contextual elements like the wooden table in Paula’s pin.
• Light and bright – pins that are light perform 20 times better than darker images.

So, if your pins are not ranking well with your followers, does that mean no one will ever see them?

The answer is no. People actually have a high chance of finding your pin by doing a search on Pinterest – or Google. This means you should always use some best-practice SEO techniques when creating your pins.

Follow these tips:

Use Descriptive Words in Your Image Filename

You don’t want to save your images with a filename of random letters and numbers. Instead, use descriptive words that Pinterest and other search engines can understand. For example, save your image as “easy-strawberry-smoothie-recipe.jpg” rather than a generic “IMG_0002.jpg” when uploading it to your website. Descriptive filenames will help Pinterest find your pin when someone searches for it.

Use Relevant Keywords in Your Pin Descriptions

Pinterest looks for keywords in the pin’s description. “Yummy!” might describe your pin, but it doesn’t give Pinterest any information about your pin and therefore, it’s unlikely to help you show up in a search.

Instead, focus on using relevant keywords when describing your pins. An easy way to find these keywords is to use the suggestions when using Pinterest’s own search bar.

For example, here’s what’s suggested when I type blog post.

Another way to find keywords is to use Ubersuggest. You receive a comprehensive list – in alphabetical order – of related keywords.

Don’t Overuse Hashtags

Pinterest hasn’t given any official numbers yet, but according to Pinterest for Business, too many hashtags in your pin descriptions may negatively affect your pin’s ranking. Plus, hashtags on Pinterest don’t have the same integration or popularity as they do on places like Twitter, so it might be wise to avoid them entirely.

3. Appeal to Users’ Interests

One of the best ways to increase engagement on your Pinterest account is by appealing to users’ interests.

Pinterest has their own analytics for business accounts that lets you view your audiences’ demographics as well as their interests. As a business owner, you can start looking at your Pinterest analytics to find out which pins have the most engagement.

From there you can start to build your Pinterest strategy around those top pins that your audience enjoys.

Lowe’s Pinterest account shows that the company understands their customer’s interests. They know their customers aren’t only interested in high-powered drills – they’re also interested in other things like different recipes for grilling food.

Lowe’s even went as far as creating seasonal boards like, Stress Less: Holiday Tips, and Tailgating Fun as a way to reach a broader audience of DIYers and crafty people. And their approach is working – they have 3.4 million followers.

4. Audit Your Pinterest Boards

Periodically audit your boards to see which pins aren’t performing well, and delete them.

This can help with your overall presence on Pinterest since Pinterest will view you as someone with high-quality pins, who receives a lot of repins.

Part of your audit should also include removing entire boards. If they don’t fit with your overall brand, then consider deleting them altogether.

However, you still want to humanize your brand, and having a board or two that shows another side of your brand is something to consider.

Social media strategist Rebekah Radice has many boards around blogging and social media.

But she also has some lifestyle boards like I Love Coffee.

When auditing your pins, also make sure your pins have correct links and that they link back to high-quality content. Having pins link to dead links or expired pages can hurt your raking.

Finally, look at your descriptions, add relevant keywords, and remove hashtags if you notice there are too many.

5. Add A Save (Pin It) Button

Pinterest has recently announced that they are changing their famous “Pin It” button to now be known as the “Save” button – likely in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience.

So, instead of adding a Pin It button, you’ll be adding a Save button.

You can also use a social sharing plugin like SumoMe to create a Save button over images on your blog.

To encourage even more social sharing on Pinterest you can “Pintify” your site. Visit the Pinterest Widget Builder for some ideas.

6. Use Tailwind to Automate

As a busy business owner, having the time to pin and share on social media isn’t always a top priority.

With social sharing automation tools you don’t have to cut back on your marketing strategy. In the case of Pinterest, you can automate your pins with Tailwind.

Tailwind can automatically create a weekly pinning schedule for you based on when people are engaging with your pins. It will offer suggestions on the optimum times to pin, but you can also manually create times as well.

To begin, start pinning 20-30 pins a day and include a mix of your own pins and other people’s pins.

Tailwind also comes with a browser extension. If you’re browsing the web and come across something you want to repin, you can easily add the image to your Tailwind schedule.

If you need analytics, Tailwind provides information on how many new followers you’ve gained and it lets you know how well your pins are engaging your audience – giving you more insight into your Pinterest strategy.

Wrapping It Up

Pinterest has proven itself over the years as a valuable source for generating traffic and sales. But, without a solid strategy, your target audience won’t be exposed to the majority of your pins, especially when taking the Smart Feed into account.

You can help boost the visibility of your Pinterest account by repining often and optimizing your pins. This means creating high-quality images, pinning valuable content, and using relevant keywords in your description.

These measures will increase the quality and relevance of your pins, and can help them show up in other people’s feeds. To further enhance your exposure on Pinterest, implement some best-practice SEO techniques to improve your pins’ search ranking on both Pinterest and Google.

Next, since part of your Pinterest strategy relies on appealing to your audience’s interests, create different Pinterest boards and humanize your brand. Audit your boards at least once a month; make sure all the links are working properly and that your pins are being repined often – a signal of high engagement.

Finally, invest in a social media automation tool to automate the process so you can focus on the more important aspects of running a business.

By following these simple steps, you’re well on your way to Pinterest domination.

Over to you – have you started using Pinterest for your business yet? If not, what are you waiting for?

If you’ve been looking for something simple and effective to kickstart your Pinterest social media marketing, take a look at Pindrill. This is a brand new, artificial intelligence style software for automated social media profits that will do wonders for your Pinterest strategy.

Take a look and get started today!

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