Demand marketers are becoming more common in today’s B2B marketing. But what is a demand marketer?
First, we need to define the two halves of this word: demand and marketer.
What is demand generation/demand marketing?
Demand generation covers all the activities that get customers excited about a company’s products and services.
Demand generation can help you:
- Reach new markets
- Promote different products and features
- Generate engagement in new audiences
- Reengage existing customers
The goal of these activities is to generate excitement about a brand and maintain that excitement as you nurture a lead all the way through the customer pipeline.
What is a marketer?
A marketer is a person who identifies a set of potential customers who should be interested in your company’s offering. From there, they educate the potential buyer about the problems they have. Then they reveal that their product or service solves one or more the issues the potential customers are having.
What is a demand marketer?
So, what is a demand marketer specifically? When we combine these definitions, we learn that a demand marketer is one that generates buzz at top of the marketing funnel among audiences that have the problem that your offering solves.
A demand marketer:
- Understands their audience
- Knows where to find them
- Gets the audience involved
- Integrates marketing efforts across teams and platforms
- Measures results through data
What makes them different from a regular marketer?
A regular marketer focuses on the entire funnel from capture to conversion, a demand marketer focuses on the top of the funnel and even above it.
They’re looking for those that would be interested in the offering, and start nurturing from there.
How do you do this? Here are some of our favorite places to get an early jump on demand generation:
- Purchasing contacts from third-party lead generation and campaign engagement data
- Social media — find people in your target audience on social media, contact them, and start exposing them to your brand
- Become an inbound expert — create great content and optimize for search so that leads find their way to you
What are some good tactics for becoming a demand marketer?
You don’t just become a demand marketer by wanting to be one. Here are some tactics that you can use to become an effective demand marketer.
Create Multiple Buyer Personas
If your offering is any good, you won’t have just one type of person interested in buying it. You need to create several buying personas, which will allow you to target and segment your audience into groups.
The process for creating demand for each of these personas will be a little different.
You can base your buyer personas off your current customers. Look into some of the following characteristics to create your brand buyer personas:
- Job title
- Age
- Income
- Industry
- Day to day job tasks
- Needs/wants (at work for B2B)
- Problems
- Social media channels they use
- Their content format preferences
Fill out this short list about some of your current customers and use it to find out who else you should target.
Provide personalized content for each group
Based on the personas you created above, now think about which types of content will resonate with each group.
You don’t even need to create brand new content for each group. It might just mean that you tweak the language and angling of each piece of content so that it appeals to each persona.
This means:
- Look for specific words that are used to describe a process in a persona’s industry
- Tweak headlines and copy to fit specific problems
- Change the format of the content to fit channel and buyer persona preferences
These are just a few of the ways you can tweak content to better fit your buyer personas.
Connect and Create With Influencers
I recommend looking both inside your company and outside. You want to find influencers whose vision aligns with your brand.
This means you should look inside your company for those that can be influencers AND look externally for others who could be influencers.
This blend will mean that many voices will be talking about your brand, which is exactly what you want. Nobody wants to hear just from those that work at the company, and a brand logo is less engaging than the human faces behind it. Becoming a demand marketer isn’t easy. You are the one-man hype crew for your brand. You’re in charge of creating all the buzz about your company, to leads, potential leads, and current buyers.
But the tips in the post will help you get started on your journey to becoming a better demand marketer and creating content that will both entice and excite your audience.
Let us know what you think:
- Do you consider yourself a demand marketer?
- How do you focus on the top of the funnel?
- What are your favorite demand gen channels?
