The Art & Science of Demand Generation
What are you doing might not be what you want to do
Demand is an oft used word in marketing. It is thrown around nonchalantly, sometimes disconnected from its actual meaning.
This phenomena began since the evolution of demand generation or demand gen as a wing or silo of marketing. However, there is a big difference between creating and capturing demand.
Demand Gen vs Demand Capture
Marketers usually do demand capture and call it demand gen. Generating demos from incoming web traffic is not demand generation– it’s demand capture. While priming audiences and engaging them in such a way that they visit your website is demand gen.
Brands that come up with better products or another way of doing 'already done' things are essentially tapping into the existing market. The demand is there. They just have to be present with the right message at the right places.
However, real demand generation is hard, unpredictable, and sometimes takes years to figure out.
This generation of demand that never existed is what makes a brand standout. It is usually fuelled by a ton of creativity, tetra-packs of innovation and, many a times, new technology. But how do you do it?
One of the simplest way of doing this is to recognize pain points nobody thought existed.
Understanding the Art and Science of Demand Generation
On closer inspection, demand generation generally involves one of the following cases
Creating original demand, or
Manipulating an existing demand
A thorough understanding of the product and the market is needed to learn which one is more relevant for your brand. Most of the time it is a mixture of both.
Creating original demand
In this case, the audience doesn’t know what the product does or why they need it. If the product or service is solving a pain point, chances may be that the audience doesn’t even know that the pain point exists.
This is usually how most of products enter a market. Salesforce, Figma, washing machines and so on - the hallmark of such products is that they are pioneering a category and are built on highly innovative fundamentals.
An example is MS Excel. When Microsoft started fiddling with spreadsheets, no one knew they would be using one eventually in the future.
At this point, nobody knew that they needed a solution like Excel. They had alternatives and they were comfortable with it. No one was complaining. But then Microsoft started pushing these smart calculating sheets. The first version of Excel for the Macintosh was released in 1985, and the first Windows version in 1987. 1
And alongside they started building a flywheel to push these to the market. What they were essentially doing was creating a demand in the market.
MSExcel helped Microsoft achieve its position as a leading PC software developer. Even in the face of few competing softwares from Lotus, Microsoft maintained its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so.
Here’s an ad they ran in 1990 to market MSExcel
How to create original demand?
Well the answer is something very simple– educate, educate, educate.
Creating demand is all about how well you can educate your customers or target group about what your product does. Even the above ad by Microsoft is essentially educating the viewers how Excel can make them fast and smarter at preparing reports. The script of the ad creates a problem or pain-point with time constraint and makes the protagonist solve it with his weapon of choice - MSExcel.
So if you think that your product is a novelty and you need to build demand - start educating your audience.
But before you put in all your effort in the education process, identify the target group who would eventually become your early adopters. Once you have done this ICP (ideal customer persona) exercise, start building your product education strategies.
How to educate an audience?
Educating an audience is not a simple or quick process. It’s an uphill battle and will need ingenuity from time to time to actually crack it up. Usually this marketing motion is same as product marketing in its acquisition stage.
At this point, your aim is to put the word in your target groups ears that a product like yours exists and it is helping people.
Some of the ways in which you can achieve this education
Send out social posts and emails to your audience.
Run ads with information about your product and its value proposition.
Work with an influencer that your audience rallies around and siphon product education through them.
Send out press releases.
Work with newsletters and affiliates who are popular with your TG.
Find out where your ICP or audience hangs out or spends their time and capture that digital space with relevant, contextual and engaging product marketing content.
Manipulating an existing demand
The next most important way of demand generation is manipulating an existing demand.
In the case of MSExcel, think of how GoogleDocs built a massive flywheel to manipulate the existing demand for MSExcel. It provided all the features of MSExcel at no cost with a GSuite subscription which many folks were anyways buying.
Demand manipulation might also involve some form of demand capture. Most of the time if you have created a product which isn’t a radical change from the existing ones in the market, you will mostly have to compete with existing players for your share of the demand capture. This entails consuming the existing demand as is. For this, start understanding the existing demands in the market and creating a strategy to tap it. Ear mark various channels which are demand-positive for your brand or product.
SEO is a great example of a channel where you can perform demand manipulation. You can write content on a keyword your audience searches for and connect it with the solution your product offers. The more connected the keyword is to your pain point, the better will be the persuasion.
There is so much more to demand gen and capture. Hope this piece helps you to undertake your own journey into the depths of these concepts and apply them for your brand.
Would request you to add resources in the comment which you think might help other readers.
Regards,
Yours market-editor.
The History of Microsoft - 1987 https://web.archive.org/web/20100927044515/http://channel9.msdn.com/series/history/the-history-of-microsoft-1987