Demand Generation has been a vital marketing phenomenon. Maximum B2B marketers have acknowledged it as their foremost priority. Being dynamic in nature, it keeps on evolving over a period. As B2B demand generation is becoming tedious every other day, marketers are falling into process pitfalls and hampering their extensive marketing efforts.
However, let’s not worry; here, we have mentioned the most encountered demand generation pitfalls you should be able to escape en route to marketing success.
B2B Demand Generation Pitfalls
Demand generation is a function of B2B customer segmentation, several marketing platforms, and data retrieval methods. As a result, certain stages occur where marketers can commit errors. Hence, to make the demand generation process more streamlined and freer of loopholes, be cautious about the pitfalls mentioned below:
1) Not Acknowledging Existing Database
B2B demand generation largely depends on data procurement. Although many businesses collect first-party data through campaigns, many are still ignorant about organizing their own database. The data must be relevant, precise, and updated, and companies should frequently regulate the CRM database.
It is often tedious for organizations to spare resources and time to coordinate data as marketing personnel is engaged in other crucial tasks. The cost of a neglected or poorly managed database is enormous; hence businesses should source precise and accessible customer data from reliable B2B data providers.
2) Not Evaluating Ideal Customer Personas
Being unaware of target personas can be among the worst demand generation mistakes for the business. Without acknowledging the target audience and their requisites, it becomes challenging for organizations to generate personalized marketing campaigns and cater to the prospects.
With organized customer data and segmentation, targeting potential prospects becomes easier. Evaluate audience statistics to check whether you are engaging by asking pertinent questions and not only the obvious ones. Keep tracing the significant sales frequently to learn the key areas that led to the transaction.
Assess the insights that help you engage with and understand your audience, recognize seasonal trends and process breakdowns, evaluate your efforts, and update the strategies. It is crucial to keep assessing target personas, as the audience’s requirements are dynamic and keep changing. This will ultimately help you strengthen your B2B demand generation solutions.
3) Not Using a Lead Scoring Approach
Although leads play a crucial role in demand generation, not every acquired lead necessarily converts. Most leads demand sufficient nurturing before climbing up the sales funnel. Lead scoring helps differentiate between the ready leads and those not.
Less or no use of lead scoring is among the major B2B demand generation challenges. Lead scores provide valuable insights into which leads are more likely to convert. Besides, personalized marketing campaigns can be created and implemented based on lead scores.
4) Not Using Demand Generation Content Marketing Strategy
The customer journey in the current digital era begins with an internet search. Content is the only feasible way to secure high rankings in terms of research and digital exploration. Hence, a content marketing strategy that can fetch demand must be implemented.
What is significant to understand is that no random content on your site can garner an audience. It takes a well-curated and all-inclusive content marketing strategy to engage an audience, assist high ranking in a search engine, increase demand, and ultimately reap higher sales.
A brand-promoting demand-generating content should involve exclusive and limited-time offers, user-generated insights, collaboration with content makers and bloggers, podcasts, e-books, and other interest-triggering stuff.
5) Emphasizing Many Tasks
Digital dynamics is a function of multiple marketing channels, such as email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing. For demand generation, it becomes challenging to focus on all dimensions of digital marketing concurrently. Still, if the organization decides to practice, it’ll be one of the most significant B2B demand generation pitfalls.
Hence, it is recommended to support marketing strategies with a specific right resource at the time. For instance, if you generate maximum leads through social media marketing, you must focus your resources here more than any other demand generation channel. Besides, analyze regular performance and prioritize platforms more likely to generate optimum demand.
6) Not Knowing Your Audience
Organizations unaware of their target audience are more likely to meet dead-ends and might land all their marketing efforts in vain. A properly personalized B2B demand generation campaign cannot be designed without prior knowledge of prospects. Hence, segment the campaign data to spot potential customers once the campaign data is organized.
Several B2B marketers have observed that not acknowledging and categorizing audience data has led to losing campaigning and marketing budgets. It takes time and expertise to segment your prioritized audience; however, you can know about them by their way of engaging with your content and website.
Also Read: 7 Pillars of Successful Demand Generation
Try understanding the pages that have garnered more traffic, keep tracking the position of your leads down the sales funnel, and keep checking how often the pricing links on the sites are clicked. Moreover, these days, the audience’s behavior can be tracked using suitable analytics tools.
7) Refraining from Offering Free Stuff
This is among the most general B2B demand generation mistakes. The demand generation process requires luring in potential customers in the first place. This often involves availing of certain lucrative offers to attract potential prospects. Anything free or off the price label is more likely to pull and kick-start engagement with the audience.
It has been observed that after getting considerable free stuff, the chances of the audience becoming regular paying customers increase substantially. Based on the prospects’ data, you can determine what stuff can be catered to free of cost to accrue a larger audience pool.
Most SaaS companies offer free stuff and part of services to create an initial chunk of the audience.
8) Not Evaluating Metrics
It is recommended to build a strategic approach to assess demand generation metrics. Keeping track of strategy metrics is crucial to understand whether your demand generation campaigns are actively working.
The frequent evaluation of suitable marketing metrics helps you attain your business goals and upheld higher demand for your services in the market.
Revenue, market share, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are among the major marketing metrics most B2B marketers evaluate for effective campaigns.
9) Inappropriate Call to Action (CTA)
Despite having well-crafted content and an engaging landing page, your efforts might not fetch the expected traction without a promising CTA. You are not the only one trying to bait the leads; many enterprises are striving for the same. Therefore, along with your advertisements, blog posts, landing pages, and newsletters, try incorporating the most appealing CTA to catch the eye of your audience. Don’t let customers search hard across the web to contact you.
Your prompt CTA should convince the audience about the immediate actions they need to take after checking your solutions and services, such as filling out the customer form or downloading a brochure.
10) Poor Execution of Account-based Marketing (ABM) Strategies
Account-based Marketing is a comprehensive B2B strategy that thrives on data, technology, and combined efforts of sales and marketing personnel. With so much emphasis on which prospects to target, most B2B marketers observe that their ABM efforts are becoming incompetent to track and engage the right policy-makers from the target accounts.
To facilitate the proper execution of B2B account-based marketing strategies, marketers should channel data from various sources, generate a marketing plan to engage with decision-makers, ensure the authenticity of lead data, and frequently evaluate ABM program performance.
Bottomline
Demand generation is undoubtedly crucial for capturing and nurturing leads. Falling prey to demand generation pitfalls can bring things to a standstill and jeopardize your marketing efforts. In some instances, it may also lead to the loss of potential leads, marketing budget, and damage to brand value. Hence, devise B2B demand generation strategies flexible enough to dodge or skip the pitfalls as and when encountered to ensure the smooth execution of marketing campaigns.