A Comprehensive List of the Best Demand Generation Tools of 2023

Many misconceptions surround the usefulness of demand generation tools: The most common one being that these tools are just quick fixes or stopgap marketing measures to generate product demand. As the marketing space gets saturated with overwhelming content, demand generation seeks more creative ways to inject brand curiosity among customers. But with so many tools in the market, it’s easy to feel clueless about where to start. In this blog, we delve into the different phases and tools of demand generation and how they can maximize your revenue.  

What is Demand Generation?

Demand generation refers to a collection of marketing strategies aimed at delivering long-term brand engagement. It leverages lead generation and demand capture to push potential customers further along the sales funnel, making the phenomenon a powerhouse of marketing as well as revenue creation. 

The commonly used processes under demand generation include:

• Blogging
• Webinars and podcasts
• Visual and written content
• PR campaigns
• Search engine optimization (SEO) of websites
• Influencer marketing

ALSO READ: Is Inbound Marketing the Strategy You Need to Boost Sales?

The Three Phases of Demand Generation

Before getting started with demand generation tools, let’s check out the three crucial phases of the process:

1. Brand Activation or Engagement

Brand activation means your ideal buyer persona will instantly think of your product as a solution to specific problems. Constant addressing of the pain points of customers will add authentic value to the buying experience, boosting the product’s competitive advantage.   

2. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate is the percentage of your contacts who have successfully moved from their current stage in the sales funnel to the next. This lucid solution-driven communication has a website design that’s easy to navigate enhances CRO. Checking your social media handles and primary website will provide you with the required information to optimize your conversion rates. Here are some avenues that help boost your CRO:

• Sign-up forms
• Landing pages
• Email sign-up and email marketing campaigns
• Pricing 
• Live chatbots 

3. Discoverability or Awareness

The trick to great demand generation strategies is to capitalize on users’ awareness of their problems and link it with your specific product or service. This phase represents the spectrum of brand awareness, where users map their pain points in conjunction with what you have to offer. 

Conversion Optimization Demand Generation Tools

The CRO is the most fundamental result-driving aspect of demand generation tools. Here are some conversion optimization tools:

Hotjar

To tailor a perfect user journey, mapping their real-time website behavior is of utmost importance. Hotjar’s heat-mapping tool provides detailed reports on the clicking behavior of your website followers, enabling you to modify your call to action (CTA) and link placements accordingly.

Smartlook

This CRO-optimizing tool with a pre-installed code snippet automates session recordings of website visits. Smartlook’s genius lies in the final analysis of recordings that automatically takes in all the historical data for consideration to seamlessly define behavioral heat maps and marketing funnels.

Lead Routing and Scheduling Demand Generation Tools

Here are a couple of tools to route and schedule leads and keep track of customers’ changing demands:

HubSpot Sales Hub

It is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that integrates teams and departments with customer data to centralize lead optimization strategies. Sales Hub comes with deep insights into generating richer leads and optimizing schedules to produce robust sales analytics.  

LeanData

Keep detailed track of changes in lead behavior with the coordinated hub of LeanData. It is a no-code software solution that helps in routing, matching, engaging, and integrating leads with sellers across platforms. 

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Content Marketing Tools for Demand Generation

Here are some content-specific demand generation tools to direct the user toward the final act of buying:

Wordable

Wordable caters to content presentation and formatting—retaining HTML elements, skipped spaces, extra line breaks, etc. It also integrates Google Docs with CRMs to enhance collaboration. 

Zoho Social

This is a one-stop content marketing tool that keeps track of your brand’s social media performance. Zoho’s flexible scheduling, comprehensive content calendar, and prebuilt engagement analytics help you stay tuned with what’s trending. 

SEO Tools for Demand Generation

Semrush

Semrush’s specialty is tracking your competitors’ and your keyword strategies. It also runs successive SEO audits for your website or blog. Used by small and large enterprises alike, Semrush reports a 45% increase in user engagement with its SEO-optimization strategies.

Hootsuite

A centralized space to manage and optimize your ad campaigns with the help of a versatile dashboard. Alongside SEO-optimized content, Hootsuite provides actionable social media marketing insights and lead-nurturing strategies. 

Reporting Tools for Demand Generation

Your set of demand generation tools isn’t complete without software systems that efficiently report on what is driving traffic and what isn’t. Here are a few popular demand generation tools in use today:

Google Analytics

Typically used to measure website traffic, you can leverage Google Analytics to monitor a campaign’s effectiveness and set lead-conversion goals. Such crucial information not only enhances your demand generation strategies but also equips you with smart indicators of what is currently selling or trending. 

Matomo, Heap, and Fathom are some of the popular alternatives to Google Analytics.

Demand Generation Tips and Best Practices

1. Offer Free Trials

Free trials ensure customer acquisition in the early stages of the marketing funnel. It allows consumers to de-risk their purchases and glimpse the potential user experience. However, one needs to make an intelligent choice between free trials and demos, as they both differ in success rates, time, and effectiveness.

2. Create User Personas

User personas give you the perfect touchpoints to start a comprehensive demand generation campaign by scrutinizing the needs, motivations, pain points, and frustrations of the end user. Market-segmented research is key to forging realistic and accurate user personas. 

3. Aim for Thought Leadership

Users always welcome moves that add value to their buying decisions. Authentic thought leadership content is a great booster of brand credibility as it nurtures an emotional engagement with customers. This is why at least 49% of decision-makers rate thought leadership as being effective in influencing their purchase decisions.

4. Find that Dream Location

Search engine results are a critical demand generation tool that enhances brand awareness. For a business, being among the first five Internet search results is the dream location—with good reason. According to a 2021 Zero Limit report, the first five results attract over 67% of all clicks on search engines. Only a consistent SEO strategy will steadily keep you at the top of search queries.  

5. Use the Right Tools

Demand generation tools bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams to nurture leads and maintain strong inbound strategies. A balanced set of such tools promotes the most suitable practices in line with demand generation metrics.  

6. Analyze Potential Generation Channels

Check out how each customer segment behaves in the online environment—social media, shopping websites, clicks, reactions, and comments—to find potential demand generation channels. It depends on user demographics, gender, the financial condition of customer segments, etc. 

ALSO READ: 9 Important Steps to Create the Structure of a Digital Marketing Plan

7. Consider Collaborations

An intelligent brand positioning strategy is finding the right partners to share a marketing goal. Collaborations, if done correctly, become storehouses of a high return on investment and lead engagement, apart from building brand authority. Demand generation is amplified when users find a trustworthy association offering to meet their needs.

The success of demand generation strategies depends on how efficiently they incorporate all the touchpoints of a buyer’s journey, making it an indispensable part of digital marketing campaigns. These latest digital marketing courses offered by Emeritus will help you to perfectly grasp all the fundamentals of demand generation and apply them to improve sales. 

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