HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE DEMAND GENERATION FUNNEL

Here’s how the demand generation funnel stages work.

The funnel provides a clear and visual representation of the customer journey, making it easier to understand the different stages of the process. This clarity helps teams stay aligned and focused on their objectives, especially when marketing and sales teams combine their goals, messaging, and insights.

Without demand generation campaigns, you may be reaching the right leads but at the wrong time. By tracking a customer’s journey, sales and marketing teams can effectively nurture leads depending on their stage in the funnel. This avoids wasting time putting effort into nurturing and converting leads that either aren’t ready or aren’t interested. After all, lots of leads from your lead generation campaigns don’t necessarily result in lots of conversions.

Step 1: Understand your audience

This is an essential step in any funnel, but especially a demand generation marketing strategy. Without properly understanding your target audience you could just be throwing your efforts down the drain and wasting time, energy, and money chasing a contact that has no interest or need of your service.

Creating a lead scoring model (essential for strong demand and lead generation outcomes) and your ideal customer profile (ICP) by analyzing data from customers acquired already is crucial to this process. B2B demand generation relies heavily on this kind of structured insight.

Lead scoring not only helps categorize your audience but also helps inform where in a journey they may be. Similarly, developing your ICP, with the help of the lead scoring model, will show the type of customers you’re trying to garner the attention of. With both of these locked down, you’ll have a deep understanding of your target buyers, how they typically interact with your content, and their journey from lead to converted customer.

We show you how to refine your ICP with account based marketing data – where we talk about using content engagement data to form more accurate customer profiles.

Step 2: Building awareness (TOFU)

At the top of the funnel (or TOFU for short), your marketing strategy focuses on building awareness around your business. This can be as simple as using content marketing, social media platforms, and SEO optimization to drive traffic to your website. Using interactive content like polls, quizzes, and videos is a great way to build and measure awareness of your business. Keeping these soft-gated, or even removing the gate altogether if you don’t need their information, is a great way to reduce any kind of friction from your demand gen approach.

Most demand generation marketers remove gates altogether to give as much value as freely as possible. And this is a great idea. If you want to produce ungated content, our content creation platform allows you to do this and still uncover audience and customer insights. Turtl's analytics allows you to see engagement metrics at an individual reader level.

Value is key when building awareness. Without promoting your proven value, your business may fall into the back of people’s minds and hinder the ability to create demand. Turtl allows you to give value freely without gating, yet still measure progress against demand gen aims. Find out more about how to use Turtl in your demand generation programs.

Step 3: Generate interest (MOFU)

Your future customers are aware you exist, yay! It’s time to generate interest in your business. Identify the pain points your target accounts have and create content showing the solutions you can provide for their problems.

This is the time for more informative content. Consider long-form blogs, guides, and ebooks on specific pain points, and more social media-led marketing initiatives.

Step 4: Nurturing and proving value (MOFU)

You may be aware of a lead nurturing funnel, and the principle is the same with a demand generation funnel. At this point in the funnel, your leads are aware of your business and have some interest in your product or service. From here, strategic content distribution can deliver assets to the customer to help form their decision before they are nabbed by another company’s funnel.

Create offerings that directly address the pain points and offer solutions to these leads. Think about offering templates or showing case studies of how others solved their issues with your service. These offerings should be highly personalized and useful to help score leads as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – which puts them on the path to becoming sales qualified leads. Proving your value is key.  Great value drivers at this stage include content like cost-saving calculators. A cost savings calculator allows the lead to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to continue without direct input from sales reps.

Step 5: Conversion

At this point, your MQLs should be ready to convert. They may need time in a free trial, or even a demo of your service, but you are certainly in the running to be the choice for their needs. Your value proposition is the most essential part of this final stage. You need to demonstrate your market differentiators and value above your competitors – so be sure to provide proof points like testimonials and case studies. We find that video case studies make particularly compelling social proof.

Step 6: Analyze, refine, repeat

Effective analysis is incredibly important. With a good analytics dashboard, you can see at a granular level how your audience interacts with your content. Using this data you can refine the previous steps into a successful, solid demand generation strategy.

Align goals

When creating your funnel to fuel a successful demand generation strategy, it’s essential to know where you want it to lead. Setting specific goals, rather than loose and generic ones, allows you to refine the funnel and buyer journey in the future. You’ll be able to get an accurate reading of how long your sales cycle will take and help understand progress with prospective customers further.

Is it the right channel?

Choosing the right marketing channels for your marketing will be different for everyone. There’s no reason to post to Instagram if your audience is almost exclusively on LinkedIn.

Granular understanding of your audience

We’ve mentioned this as part of building the funnel in the first place, however, an effective demand generation funnel relies on a solid understanding of your audience. Without lead scoring, audience segmentation, sales alignment, and personalizing content at scale, you are left shooting in the dark – hoping those who need your service will see it. By properly segmenting your audience and understanding their habits by using analytics and research data, you’re demand-generated leads will be more likely to convert.

Curate highly personalizable content

Having a library of content that can be personalized at scale in your back pocket means you’ll never be caught out when a lead is searching for answers to problems. It also means you have a swathe of content ready to go at a moment’s notice for any stage of the funnel – that provides value to your leads.

Preventing churn with full-funnel demand

Sometimes things don’t work out. It happens. This is usually because a customer no longer sees value in your product or your business. Nurturing a relationship with these customers is essential even after conversion. Let your customers feel taken care of, and become a company that cares and wants their clients to get the most out of your service.

Strong connections with your customers and providing value through content even after the conversion can mean the difference between a paying customer and a lost one…

For the best demand gen results, align marketing and sales efforts (marketing and sales alignment is what transforms efforts into outcomes), invest in effective marketing tools, and keep a close eye on marketing spend to ensure every campaign delivers impact.

And look out for opportunities for co marketing campaigns; these can help your demand generation managers and wider marketing team drive more demand, faster. Smart companies and business leaders use collaboration to extend their reach and boost ROI.

Use valuable, educational, and useful demand-gen content to support your current customers. Ebooks, guides, toolkits, and webinars are great ways to re-engage and help them succeed. The point of demand gen activity is to provide value throughout the flywheel without selling to people. 

By using content that surfaces engagement data, you know whether your content is working, and who it’s working for. These insights help you produce impactful content that actually drives pipeline and revenue. Create, capture, and convert demand with content for every stage of the buyer journey, and your demand generation funnel will overflow.