If you’re here, generating new business opportunities is probably important to you. Your firm lives or dies by how much business you can build.
But unless you work for a large organization, you may not have the luxury of a huge marketing budget, or a department dedicated to business development. The responsibility for winning your next customer rests squarely on your shoulders.
Conventional wisdom might tell you that direct sales is the best way to land new business. And we’re certainly not saying it doesn’t work. It’s a classic time-in, results-out approach.
But there’s another method that’s better for busy professionals like you: demand generation.
What’s demand generation, and how is it different from direct sales?
Let’s set the stage with a couple of definitions.
Direct sales
Direct Sales refers to strategies where the sales team (or, in this case, maybe just you) reaches directly out to potential customers. Some examples of direct sales tactics include cold-calling, selling at trade shows, and one-to-one email campaigns. Direct sales takes a “push” approach to sales: find your audience and push your offering towards them.
Demand generation
Demand generationfocuses on creating awareness, interest and demand for your offering in order to “pull” in customers. Key aspects include building relationships with your audience and creating trust in your product or service. This is done through community-building activities like thought leadership and content marketing, partnerships and collaborations, social media marketing and more.
You might be more familiar with direct sales tactics. They’re classics for a reason.
And direct sales is effective. But it’s also demanding, and time-intensive. Making calls, setting up meetings, attending events: all that takes time and effort. If your day is already packed, your limited availability will harm your sales goals. Direct selling isn’t easy, either; it requires a specific set of skills and training that you might not possess. (There’s a reason that dedicated sales roles exist, after all). Lastly, while the hard sell might work in some industries, it’s practically radioactive in others.
To overcome these hurdles, sales leaders are increasingly turning towards the more modern and flexible approach of demand generation.
Why is demand generation good for SME owners and leaders?
For organizations with limited time and resources, demand generation presents several advantages.
It’s cost-effective, for one. Demand generation tactics like social media and content creation often have lower upfront costs than rolling out extensive sales campaigns. It’s scalable, for another: you can start small and ramp up as your business grows. It’s also flexible—you can choose tactics that fit your available capacity and budget.
You might be thinking that demand generation will take longer to achieve sales.
While it is true that demand generation tends to have a longer lead cycle, we’d like to offer up a new perspective. Not all of your efforts will have immediate payoffs… because they don’t need to.
Demand generation is a long-term strategy that tends to result in more high-quality leads over time. One of its advantages is that it always keeps the door open. Direct selling is based on moments of “yes or no.” By contrast, if your interaction is based on ongoing conversations, you can stay top-of-mind for your customers even if they’re not ready to commit to a sale yet.
The moment they see a need for your services—and the more they trust you, the more likely they will—you’ll be at the ready.
In today’s selling environment, where information is always available and consumers have a plethora of choices, trust is the differentiator for success. Trust cements customer relationships and influences buying decisions. Win your audience’s trust, and the many people who have come to know and like you will, at some point, turn to you for your services, or recommend you to someone else, or invite you to speak to an audience of people looking for someone with your expertise.
Each lead you nurture represents dozens of additional leads, all of which will already be more receptive because someone they trust is recommending you.
Demand generation allows you to sustainably build trust on a large scale with only a modest investment of effort. One of the best ways of doing this? Thought leadership.
How to use thought leadership for demand generation
To be a thought leader is to establish yourself or your business as a trusted authority in your domain. It involves constantly sharing your knowledge and expertise with your audience. The idea is to provide value by showcasing your forward-thinking insights, addressing industry challenges and shaping discussions in your industry. This can take the form of LinkedIn posts, white papers, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and more.
The beauty of thought leadership is that it’s always a one-to-many scenario. One piece of content can generate thousands of clicks, comments, and reshares on social media. With a little engagement, you can turn the resulting discussions into new connections or follows.
Moreover, since a lot of thought leadership content is evergreen, you can use it to keep engaging new people indefinitely without any real extra effort. The more content you publish, the more of these permanent touchpoints you create, and the more opportunities there are for people to connect with you. Not to mention that the more unique content you have on your website, the better your SEO ranking, and the more likely you are to pop up in web searches related to your field.
You won’t necessarily be able to attribute every win to a specific conversation or piece of content. But be assured: the ROI of your thought leadership efforts, although nebulous, can be massive.
Having a robust portfolio of thought leadership content, coupled with a disciplined publication schedule and good customer engagement habits, makes for a demand engine that strengthens and sustains itself over time. A little effort for a lot of payoff? That’s a pretty good deal.
What’s next? Setting yourself up for thought leadership
If you’re interested in establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry, we’ve put together a couple of guides to get you started. Looking for more specific assistance? You’ve come to the right place. At Community & Company, we can help you define your content marketing strategy and get you connected to a network of talented writers and creatives to amplify your efforts. Reach out to us, and let’s talk about your next steps and goals on the road to getting more inbound sales from content.
