The 5 Stages of Demand Generation Marketing

Have you ever wondered how to turn more of those leads into loyal affiliate marketing customers? Well, that’s where demand generation marketing comes into play. It’s all about crafting a solid strategy to attract those potential customers and convert them into paying ones.

But hold on a second! Before we build that winning strategy, let’s ensure we’re on the same page about demand generation marketing.

What Is Demand Generation Marketing?

So, imagine you’re at a marketplace. Potential buyers are wandering around, checking out different stalls. Your job is to catch their eye, engage with them, and lead them towards making a purchase. It’s like being a friendly guide, helping them navigate the affiliate market.

To succeed at this, you’ve got to pay attention to what each shopper needs at every step of their journey. This will keep them interested and build their trust in your offerings as they progress.

Demand generation marketing is about spotting potential customers and nurturing them until they’re ready to buy from you.

If you and your team are struggling with this, maybe it’s time to brainstorm and develop a solid demand-generation marketing strategy. Need a hand with that?

How Is Demand Generation Marketing Different From Lead Generation and Inbound Marketing?

Many people make the mistake of assuming demand generation marketing, lead generation, and inbound marketing are the same. However, they are three different things.

Demand generation is targeted marketing to convert a prospect into a paying customer.

VS.

Lead generation is creating interest in your brand and its products and services.

VS.

Inbound marketing is the process of appealing to potential customers so that they become curious enough to visit your affiliate marketing website and check out your core product or service. You use content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and branding.

Lead generation and inbound marketing are two ways to accomplish demand generation marketing. In other words, demand generation marketing is what you want to do, and lead generation and inbound marketing are how you do it.

Priorities for a Demand Generation Marketer

If you’re doing demand generation marketing, then you should focus on the following areas:

1. A Visible and Attractive Website That Converts

You must prioritize SEO and design to build a visible and attractive affiliate marketing website. Optimizing your website’s written content will help it be more visible in search engine result pages (SERPs). Designing a visually pleasing website will help you appeal to more people and generate more leads.

It’s not enough for your website to be visible and attractive. It must also offer opportunities for conversion. Put another way, your website must have places that encourage visitors to give you their contact details in exchange for something else.

For example, you can offer someone a discount code or an eBook and ask them for their email address to claim these. After all, what use is it to boost your website traffic if you can’t keep in touch with your website visitors after they leave? Keeping in touch with these leads helps you send them information and encourage them to convert.

A poorly designed affiliate marketing website that isn’t optimized and lacks conversion opportunities results in churn. You don’t want to lose potential customers, so make sure you take the time to invest in an effective website.

2. Buyer Persona and Buyer Journey

To appeal to your leads, you must first create a buyer persona. This will help you understand your target audience and their pain points.

Taking time to sketch a buyer persona will also help you understand what content they enjoy consuming. This will allow you to produce affiliate marketing content that they will enjoy.

Understanding the buyer’s persona and journey is crucial. This will help you offer potential buyers the right content for each journey stage.

Once you understand buyer persona and journey, you will be better equipped to make a memorable impression for your brand. If you can make an unforgettable impression, you will remain at the top of your mind among your target audience.

3. A Strategy for Retaining Customers

Many brands assume their work is done once a lead becomes a paying customer. On the contrary, abandoning someone as soon as they become a customer might result in that customer going to your competitor.

It is essential to ensure that this customer feels valued long after they start buying your core product or service. Not only will this encourage brand loyalty, but it will also result in them recommending you to their family and friends. And, as we know, word-of-mouth advertising is more effective than any traditional advertisement you could put out.

How to Do Demand Generation Marketing

Effective demand-generation marketing has 5 key stages:

1) Lead generation.

2) Inbound marketing.

3) Sales enablement.

4) Customer retention.

5) Evaluation.

Let’s talk about each of these stages:

1) Lead Generation

As we said before, lead generation creates curiosity about your affiliate marketing brand. To generate this curiosity, you must make brand awareness a priority. The more people hear about your brand, the more likely they will come to your affiliate marketing website for more information.

How do you use brand awareness to drive leads to your website?

a) Establishing Thought Leadership

People who recognize you as an industry thought leader trust you to educate them. Ultimately, people who trust you are more likely to become paying customers.

You can establish thought leadership by writing informative blog posts, producing valuable eBooks, or hosting an engaging podcast. If you’re in the B2B industry, you can consider writing a white paper to establish your reputation as a thought leader.

b) Maintaining an Active Social Media Presence

Never underestimate the power of social media to engage with your target audience. Engaging with your social media followers helps them feel seen and heard. Once these people connect with you on social media, they will likely head to your affiliate marketing website to learn more about you.

c) Using a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet requires your audience to opt in or provide contact details in exchange for something of value to them. We’ve already discussed how to do this with discount codes and eBooks. You can apply the same principle to other forms of content marketing to reel in people interested in your brand.

2) Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing uses various types of content marketing to get people curious about your brand and draw them to your website. Let’s talk about how you can do this.

a) Blogging

Blogging is a great way to share valuable content with your target audience and position yourself as a thought leader. If people read quality content from you, they will become curious about what you do. And when someone becomes curious about your brand, where is the first place they will go? Your website.

One way to increase the visibility of your blog posts is to write for SEO. By optimizing your content, you are increasing the likelihood that your blog will be visible in search engines. With a highly-optimized blog, when someone types a topic related to your blog posts in a search engine, your content will pop up in the SERPs.

Another way to boost the visibility of your blog content is by guest blogging. When you partner with another thought leader to write blog posts on their site, you can include quality backlinks to your affiliate marketing website. This will earn you traffic from their site back to yours.

b) Gated Content

Gated content is like a lead magnet. It offers your audience a preview of the rest of the content. Then, if your readers want to access the rest of the content, they need to make some form of payment.

Believe it or not, people usually pay for gated content without money. For example, we’ve talked about how you can ask for contact information in return for your eBook.

You may think your gated content is an opportunity to earn money. Even so, gated content works as well as it does because it’s free. If you decide to ignore our advice and charge for your gated content anyway, chances are high that one of your competitors has similar content for free. If this is the case, you will lose prospective customers to this competitor.

You can use a CTA or pop-up message on your social media or affiliate marketing website to reach people with this gated content. If you can offer genuine value in the preview, curiosity will drive your audience to give you their contact details so you can access the rest of your content.

c) Paid Advertisements

Paid advertisements are the most traditional inbound marketing tool. They are pretty simple to use. All you need to do is decide where to advertise. Some brands love Google Ads, while others prefer social media ads. Either way, your advertisement should drive people to your affiliate marketing website.

With a good advertisement, you can pique the curiosity of your target audience and draw them to your website for more information.

3) Sales Enablement

Eventually, a prospect you have reeled in using inbound marketing will land on your affiliate marketing website. You must encourage them to buy your core product or service when this happens. You can do this in the following ways:

a) Testimonials

Testimonials or reviews from clients you’ve worked with are an excellent way to encourage someone still on the fence about your brand. For this reason, it’s important to feature these prominently on your affiliate marketing website.

b) Case Studies

Case studies are a great B2B content marketing strategy because they give your brand social proof. Once you work with a client, you can get their permission to produce a case study. This is an effective way to show a potential client how you’ve helped previous clients solve their business problems.

c) White Papers

Like case studies, white papers showcase how your business solution works. However, they focus on the more technical aspects of your product or service and the problem it solves.

4) Customer Retention

It’s essential to make the sale, but retaining your affiliate marketing customers is even more critical. Happy customers will gain a sense of brand loyalty and be your best brand ambassadors. Here’s how to keep your customers happy:

a) Customer Appreciation Programs

Offering your customers freebies like branded gifts, discount coupons, or invitations to brand events shows them that you value their business. A customer who feels appreciated is more likely to stay with you instead of going to check out the competition.

b) Email Marketing

Email marketing is an effective way to keep in touch with leads after they convert into customers. You can use email marketing to share how different parts of your product or service work, giving a new customer confidence in using your product. You can also send emails to keep customers up to date on new developments or special offers you are running.

c) Feedback

Soliciting feedback from your current customers is very important. Not only does it show that you value their opinion, but it also allows you to address issues they are having with your product. Feedback can help you improve this product, thus ensuring your affiliate marketing customers are happier.

5) Evaluation

Evaluating your demand generation marketing strategy is just as important as implementing it. To assess your results, you need to establish your KPIs beforehand. You can use the following as KPIs:

a) Website Traffic

Has your affiliate marketing website traffic increased since you launched your demand generation marketing?

b) Downloads

How many people have downloaded your lead magnet?

c) Signups

How many people have signed up for your email newsletter?

Demand generation marketing can be tricky. Finding a formula that works involves some level of trial and error. Evaluating your affiliate marketing content strategy will tell you what has worked in the past and what needs tweaking next time.

Demand generation marketing can seem complicated at first. However, if you follow the five steps outlined above, you will quickly develop an effective strategy.