What is a Demand Generation Funnel
The demand generation funnel exists at the top of your sales funnel, to focus on inbound marketing that builds brand awareness for your company and product offerings. Building awareness and capturing high-quality leads are the first demand generation goals after product-market fit has been determined. This is where your demand generation marketing team will conduct research to set up a marketing strategy for high conversion rates from lead generation, based on SEO performance metrics and other KPIs for your target audience. A successful demand generation strategy will involve identifying the key buyer personas and customer journeys at each stage of the marketing funnel.
Awareness and interest are traditional top of the funnel areas where the demand generation marketing team establishes their marketing efforts. Messaging at this stage of the funnel will optimize for capturing the attention of potential customers beginning a buyer’s journey, often by targeting pain points that the company products can solve for them.
Demand Generation Funnel vs Sales Funnel
Traditionally, the Marketing and Sales funnels are somewhat siloed, with the marketing team falling off after generating MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and allowing sales teams to pick up the customer journey from that point. More recently, demand generation marketing teams are working closely with the sales teams, product marketing teams and customer service teams past the bottom of the funnel, to create demand and increase retention after sales are closed. This type of marketing cycle functions in a flywheel format rather than a funnel format (refer to this article for more information on a B2B SaaS demand generation flywheel). With this format, demand is created and captured for new products that build on the original product, as well as upselling into paid features on existing products. Customer acquisition also travels down a path into brand evangelism from already paying customers, which leads to new customers who are more ready to buy (with a strong trust-base already built-in).
Demand generation campaigns that take post-close follow-up into consideration can open up new demand funnels with touchpoints in both SEO and account-based marketing tactics. Reviewing metrics for past marketing campaigns and strategically retargeting potential customers can also be implemented into a demand generation strategy, to increase close rates for sales teams.
Access Welcome’s Demand Generation library to learn more about B2B demand generation, and explore demand gen best practices including MarTech tools for building your best tech stack.
