In 2020 and beyond, personalization absolutely can’t be an afterthought. It must encompass your entire B2B marketing strategy.
Fortunately, innovative technology and AI makes it easy to personalize every touchpoint along the buyer journey – including your demand generation strategy.
This is important because 85% of B2B buyers expect brands to personalize the very first touchpoint. If you don’t, they could dismiss your entire company from the running.
Let’s go over some demand generation campaign ideas for you to harness the power of AI and personalize the entire journey from start to finish.
Looking at Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation in 2020
Traditionally, lead generation and demand generation were extremely distinct.
- Your lead generation focused on getting your prospects to submit information about their workplace, job role, needs, and contact information.
- Your demand generation focused on educating visitors and prospects about your company’s products, services, industry, and how you can help them.
Well, the lines have blurred a bit.
Today, buyers complete an estimated 57% to 90% of the buying process online alone without ever contacting someone from a company’s sales team. So, if a prospect doesn’t “convert” into a lead until towards the end of the journey, when exactly do they switch from your demand generation strategy to your lead strategy?
Instead of working out the details, it’s important to focus on educating and empowering your visitors at every stage – whether someone falls into demand gen, lead gen, or active in the sales funnel.
It might sound impossible, but the power of AI-driven technology makes it easy to create a hyper-personalized experience for everyone. If someone is new to your brand, they’ll receive content to learn about the values, mission, and services you offer. If they’re a hot lead, they’ll receive content such as case studies, videos, and more.
5 Demand Generation Campaign Ideas to Personalize the Journey
The right technology and some high-quality content can bring your demand generation campaign ideas to life. Start with these.
1. Ditch Your Lead Forms and Set Content Free
According to Think with Google, B2B buyers spend up to three hours researching from their smartphones every day. About 70% of all B2B searches happen on mobile devices.
The last thing anyone wants to grace their smartphone screen is a clunky lead magnet form asking for personal information.
You invest a ton of money, time, and effort creating high-quality content. Content Marketing Institute estimates the average B2B spends $185k each year on content marketing.
So, why do so many B2Bs hide their best content behind forms?
Demand generation demands free access to information. Instead, set your content free from forms and give your visitors a sample. As they start reading, they can decide if your brand is a good fit and hand over their business email address to download the full piece of content.
Not only does this put visitors in control, but it also means you’ll only collect email addresses from leads who truly want to stay in contact with your brand.
2. Implement Self-Nurturing Landing Pages
Part of successful demand generation involves keeping the conversation flowing.
Unfortunately, traditional landing pages aren’t designed for continuous conversation. Best practices tell us to stick with a single CTA and keep the attention focused on conversion.
But what are you supposed to do for the over 95% of visitors who AREN’T ready to convert into a lead yet? Instead of relying entirely on retargeting later, why not keep the conversation flowing while they’re still on your website?
Self-nurturing landing pages keep the content flowing with personalized recommendations for everyone – whether it’s for a known lead or anonymous visitor. For demand generation, this is revolutionary. Not only can you reduce bounce rates, but you can keep nurturing visitors as long as they stay on your site.
3. Use Strategic Retargeting on LinkedIn
Retargeting on social media can be effective but you need to think strategically. Here’s where access to high-quality content comes into play.
Let’s say someone downloads a highly niche lead magnet or reads a super targeted blog post about non-profits. You can glean some insight about their stage of the buying cycle and needs simply based on the content they consumed.
From there, you can plug the URL into LinkedIn and serve up fresh ideas and content to keep the conversation going. Instead of focusing on converting, focus on empowering and educating for demand generation.
Direct readers back to relevant blogs, eBooks, videos, and other content.
4. Swap Out Your Blog for an Adaptive Content Hub
Like landing pages, traditional blog themes aren’t conducive to the free flow of your best content.
Let’s say someone clicks on an interesting blog post you shared on social media. After they finish reading, what happens? They either have to sort through your broad topic categories to find something or scroll back through your most recent posts.
Of course, you can add relevant post widget plugins and the like to keep visitors on the page, but these aren’t the most effective options available.
Instead, use an adaptive content hub that thrives on AI. Like Netflix, the algorithms will use behavioral data from the visitor’s session AND sessions of previous similar visitors to serve up highly relevant content. Like Amazon, the suggested pieces of content are designed to guide visitors towards conversion as well.
5. Create the Right Types of Content
When your best content is available for all to consume and AI drives content recommendations, you’ll naturally have much better analytics to work with.
Where did someone exit the page? Could you create another relevant post to keep them hooked?
Do you notice any patterns between account-centric content? Can you use this info to develop a new ABM strategy?
Use your analytics to your advantage by creating amazing blog content.
Boost Your Demand Generation Campaign Ideas with the Power of AI
Hushly AI makes it easy to personalize every touchpoint on your website with the power of artificial intelligence. You no longer have to spend time and energy sorting through massive datasets and interpreting results because AI does all the heavy lifting. The secret is in the intent data and behavioral data.
