Most common demand generation Challenges and how to overcome them.

When it comes to generating demand, expanding a business involves striking a balance between envisioning big and managing costs. Organic growth will only carry your business so far.

So, if you want to expand and accelerate your business, you must start investing in smart demand-generating initiatives. Demand generation is frequently put on the back burner for many SMEs due to the expense, complexity, and potential for failure.

However, inaction is almost as harmful as taking the wrong action because it gives rivals a chance to gain an advantage in the marketplace.

What are the Main Challenges in Demand Generation?

To assist you in overcoming this and developing a viable growth strategy, we've examined the most prevalent challenges business face in demand generation and how you can overcome them.

Not Engaging Customers Enough

Most businesses serve a small number of distinct customer segments. Even speaking to one audience can be challenging, let alone speaking to several personalities and their various experiences.

The behaviours of the decision-makers that brands aim to reach and how those buyers approach problem-solving should be identified using intent data.

Customer journey mapping and customer profiling must transcend marketing to become cross-departmental initiatives with well-defined roles, responsibilities, and supporting documentation.

Producing Exceptional Educational Content

It takes much more than subject-matter experts banging away at a keyboard to produce content. It calls for a group of multimedia specialists who can spread campaign messaging across various channels pertinent to the complete buying experience.

This is one of the most crucial challenges in demand generation. The success of content marketing inside a demand generation campaign depends on context, says Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio and a former vice president of Marketo.

According to Miller, "You need to adapt the material for each stage in the buying cycle in addition to having separate content for each buyer job."

The ability to personalize content for the whole client journey and command of multimedia is necessary for overcoming the quality content barrier.

The tailored services provided by Growth Jockey will help your business achieve its goals by personalizing your business strategy.

Lead Source Management

According to HubSpot's 2017 State of Inbound Report, marketing professionals today most frequently cite generating traffic and leads as a hurdle.

Top-of-funnel lead sources at many high-demand businesses include numerous paid and owned sources, making management time-consuming.

While manually managing and tracking numerous distinct lead sources individually is technically possible, it is neither practical nor efficient.

It takes a lot of time and resources to manually compare how your events, webinars, contact centres, and outside lead generation vendors contribute to a 360-degree perspective of top-of-funnel performance.

This is the main reason that lead source management is one of the significant challenges faced in demand generation.

Marketers can get a clear picture of performance by implementing systems that centralize lead source management and automate top-of-funnel activities.

Keeping the Customer's Perspective in Mind

At its core, B2B demand generation is a customer-focused discipline. Your company is unlikely to achieve the desired results if your strategy and efforts are not based on the buyer's journey.

It's uncommon for B2B marketers to be ignorant about the major stages of the customer journey, pain points, critical demographics, or firmographics of their target market.

However, if consumer personas and the buyer journey aren't the focal points of their work, marketers suffer.

In an interview with Forbes, SAS's EVP and CMO Randy Guard said, "You will build a brand that gives higher value by structuring your content, your approach, your marketing, and your sales around a deeper understanding of the consumer."

Demand marketing teams will continue to have challenges in keeping the customer's perspective.

But those companies that foster a culture of customer-centricity are most likely to receive major rewards for their efforts, and this strategy can also turn into an advantage in demand generation if used in the right way.

What are the Important Factors that you Should Know Before Making a Demand Generation Strategy?

Whereas demand generation aims to increase brand awareness and authority so that potential customers consistently enter the purchase funnel, lead generation focuses on converting an engaged audience into leads through direct outreach.

Let's look at five essential steps curated by Growth Jockey for developing a successful B2B demand generation strategy.

Raising Awareness

Brand awareness is essential for a consistent flow of quality leads in today's competitive marketing and sales landscape. And contrary to popular belief, gaining the interest of a potential buyer is not the same as building brand awareness.

A true and long-lasting brand awareness strategy leaves potential buyers with a lasting, positive impression of a company and increases their likelihood of trusting that company.

Create a Content Strategy

Building industry expertise, along with brand awareness, is an important component of consistent demand generation. Industry expertise implies that your brand is viewed as an authority in its sector from the moment a potential customer interacts with it.

Invest in Partner Marketing

Digital marketing is now even more important because of the recent rapid shift from in-person to virtual company contacts.

It appears likely that more frequent digital connections will continue, even as organizations start to prioritize secure, in-person encounters with clients and employees.

Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns might be challenging to handle on your own, but businesses need to spread their message online. Your company may be able to access a curated, prescreened audience through a partnership with a third-party provider.

How to Excel in Demand Generation Strategy?

There are four techniques to significantly increase buyer engagement if you are thinking about how to overcome challenges in demand generation.

CSOs must create prospecting policies that allow salespeople to continually create pipelines by sending pertinent, timely communications to specific contacts across a variety of channels.

Target Several Stakeholders

Multi-threading is the simultaneous use of touches (threads) to initiate communication or advance the sales process.

Multi-threading involves informing, influencing, and finally engaging with all significant stakeholders in a normal buying process, as opposed to single-threading, where a company develops opportunities based on one or two relationships (a single thread).

By 2026, B2B firms will beat their rivals by 30% if they integrate their commercial strategy and take advantage of multithreaded commercial engagements.

Recognize your Buyer

A customer-centric company places the customer at the centre of everything they do.

The sales and marketing team's methodology, core activities, organization, KPIs, content, communications, and technology may and should be built on a solid understanding of the buyer.

It's a straightforward yet effective method that can fundamentally alter a business's capacity to meet its revenue goals.

CSOs must create prospecting policies that allow salespeople to continually create pipelines by sending pertinent, timely communications to specific contacts across a variety of channels.

Create Value Driven Insights

Communicate value by transforming prospect-centric personas, market analysis, industry trends, and customer knowledge into compelling, concise statements that can be used in sales discussions.

When contacting prospects, sellers must be able to create messaging that is both captivating and somewhat personalized.

Sales leaders must offer guidance that sellers may utilize to rapidly put together pertinent call and mail scripts that convey value and boost engagement with important prospects to evaluate the efficacy of the message.

It's crucial to have a feedback loop to monitor how well these insights are working.

Execute and Evaluate Messaging Insights at Scale

Use messaging tools and insights to empower salespeople to swiftly put together pertinent call and email scripts that add value and boost engagement with important prospects. It is crucial to create coaching manuals, selling tools, certifications, and exercises around this.

Conclusion

Demand generation can be advantageous for all businesses, but SMEs face common challenges in demand generation.

If you are wondering how to excel at demand generation strategy, then you must know that your investment must be carefully targeted, have an immediate impact, but also stimulate long-term growth.

It is incredibly challenging to implement this kind of change internally with limited funds and resources, so it is crucial to consider if you need an external support team or an internal team.

We at Growth Jockey will assist you in overcoming all the commercial challenges associated with generating demand.

Before implementing tools, processes, and systems into your businesses that generate continuing value, we will first listen to your goals. Most importantly, as our partnership develops, we will adjust your plan to maximize your return.

At Growth Jockey, we are dedicated to generating demand for your business through tailored strategies that effectively address the crucial challenges faced by our clients across diverse industries. Regardless of the size of your company, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now tap into the advantages of advanced demand generation techniques. Take the decisive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by contacting us today!