What is Demand Creation?
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Demand creation is a process that fuels the revenue pipeline so the sales team can meet or exceed their quotas. In other words, it takes your big idea — the creative appeal of your brand — and turns it into sales.
That sounds a lot like demand generation, which often gets confused with lead generation. To end the confusion, marketers need a term for the holistic process of generating demand. Even though demand generation is the more commonly accepted term, we like to think of it as demand creation.
Demand Creation as a Marketing Discipline
When it comes down to it, there are four basic stages of demand creation:
- Identify the right audience.
Gather the data you need in order to connect with prospective customers. This can be done through persona research, voice of customer research, competitive research, focus groups and other research methodology. - Attract the audience.
Once you know who your audience is, attract them to your brand through content marketing, digital marketing, print advertising, SEO, emails and other lead generation tactics. - Engage the audience.
Give your audience an easy way to respond to your ads, emails and other communications! Believe it or not, some large B2B companies still launch marketing campaigns without calls to action. Your audience should be able to simply click a button or call a number to raise their hand — and you should have the systems in place to ensure a prompt response. - Manage the demand.
Make sure you have a solid plan for effectively managing the demand you’ve created in order to close sales, grow customer relationships and realize revenue. At MX, our lead management specialists carry out this plan. They handle all nurturing, sales enablement and lead recycling / reconstitution activities in order to bring about sales. It takes both a strong demand creation discipline and proactive lead management process to accelerate revenue growth.
It’s All About Metrics
At its core, demand creation is a data-driven marketing discipline. Driving pipeline growth is just as important as proving influence on revenue growth. To this end, you should be able to measure every aspect of your demand creation efforts — from the quality and quantity of your data to the amount of traffic from your syndicated content. And if you can’t measure these things, you’re not really creating demand.
Want to learn more about the impact this holistic view of demand creation could have on your business? Get in touch!
