Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Starts With Understanding Two Key Strategies

B2B marketers know that if they’re going to drive sustainable sales and keep generating revenue over the long-term, the full sales funnel needs attending to.

But how you spin all the plates and ensure your funnel is generating a steady supply of leads that eventually convert and come back for more can be tricky.

That’s why you need a strategy, and not just any old strategy but one that rests on the twin pillars of growth marketing and demand generation. 

Demand generation, as the name suggests, is the old-school idea of cultivating interest, curiosity and general awareness of your product or service.

Growth marketing is a slightly more nebulous term and has the entire funnel covered, top to bottom, ensuring that your sales and marketing campaigns are not only capturing attention but making clients come back time and again, and advocating for you among their peers.

Below, we examine how these two strategies complement each other and how you can use them to stay across the entire sales funnel.

Demand Generation

The term really speaks for itself: it’s all about driving demand at the top and middle of the funnel – that is, at the informational and research parts of the buyer’s journey.

But by driving demand, what do we mean?

Demand generation tends to be an inbound marketing strategy, one which rests on building brand awareness, trust and authority among potential leads using gated content, SEO, webinars, and social media posts.

The pinnacle of the demand generation journey is becoming a thought leader in the sector in which you operate.

This requires pushing out a steady flow of educational content, webinars and case studies that position you as an authority and guru in the field in which you ply your trade. 

The most effective way of doing this is often to partner with a content syndication platform like Headley Media, which has a network of 300+ websites across 60 countries where it can publish your thought leadership content.

Growth Marketing

A more holistic and generally more full-funnel strategy that complements demand generation is growth marketing.

This is a strategy that, in the long run, will drive business and impact the bottom line more than any other marketing strategy – doing so by bringing repeat business and allowing you to upsell among your existing customer base.

Where demand generation draws on old-school inbound marketing tactics, a growth marketing strategy requires a much more innovative approach, often using tactics drawn from the growth ‘hack’ playbook to win and retain clients.

Unfortunately, there is no tried-and-tested growth marketing approach – it requires patience and an experimental spirit to get right.

Data Driven

As an experimental strategy, growth marketing is necessarily an iterative one.

While you can’t expect your growth marketing strategy to be perfect on first rollout, it’s really advisable to ensure you have the right tools in place to capture the data from the campaign. That way you know what you're right and, just as importantly, what didn’t work so well.

It’s all about launching balloons and seeing which of them fly, using metrics like clicks, conversions, and signups to give you important, data-driven, insights into which elements of your campaign performed well.

Conclusion

B2B sales are unlike B2C. 

Sales cycles are often protracted, trust and authority are essential, and the number of stakeholders involved in a buying decision can be legion.

A strategy informed by the principles of demand generation and growth marketing is the best way of covering all the bases of B2B sales.