Every industry is competitive, even hyper-competitive.
Context is everything – if your business has revenue greater than $100 million, the approach to increasing demand generation differs from those achieving $1 million or $100,000 in revenue in a year.
The Growth Levers
What are the top ways to accelerate your business’s organic (non-paid advertising) demand generation today?
1. Testing, Research, Testing – evidence-based decision making. As businesses grow, so does their budget for testing and research. Finding better ways to build a bigger and better online audience of near-perfect buyers becomes more critical. At all stages of business growth, using the proper growth framework and attracting more ideal buyers is core business.
2. Focus and consistency. Focus isn’t just about choosing one thing to work on at a specific time. Early-stage business success is finding a niche in the market and heavily investing in one critical organic social media channel, capturing more attention and engagement to sell more. As the business grows, the standard approach is to move to an adjacent niche and widen the core social media channel(s). Twitter remains the king of organic niche growth.
3. Test your offers. Organic social media growth relies on lead magnets to get people into the business ecosystem. Niche down and hyper-personalise your lead magnets.
4. Velocity and attention: To win at organic social media – grow more followers, sell more it is vital to increase the velocity of posts – per hour, day and week. If you want ideal buyer attention, increase the velocity of publishing more posts.
Things we can learn from.
Testing and researching: rebranding the problem(s) your business solves can put it in a consideration set of one – no competitors. Jasmine Bina, the founder of USA-based Concept Bureau, provides these examples from her recent THE 14 NEW RULES OF BRAND STRATEGY.
- EVRYMAN reframed their business problem of therapy from “finding yourself” to “creating yourself.”
- Cofertility rebranded the problem of fertility from “egg freezing and donation” to “touching human lives” to make their product newly relevant.
Jasmine says – Immediately, their rebranded advertising, messaging and positioning saw a considerable uptick, while the company’s culture evolved toward a singular vision that guided every decision toward a common goal – think clearly about your branding because sometimes there is something much bigger than the product.
At the heart of Jasmine’s approach is the need to differentiate every business and clearly articulate your WHY. The vital question to answer is why your ideal buyers should only buy from your business rather than competitors.
I have seen boards, leadership and specialists find this vital sentence infuriating.
Your ideal buyers want to know in under eight seconds – why they should keep reading your website.
The solutions lie between segmentation, differentiation, positioning and product and service offerings.
Love is great. Hate is useful. Indifference kills.
Jasmine says it best – “Most brands have the problem of user indifference. People may think you have a nice enough brand, but that doesn’t compel them to convert. Don’t get mired in a quest to gently move indifferent people down the (sales) funnel.
Your goal should be to create so much tension that your brand really turns on your lovers or really turns off your haters but leaves no room for indifference. Chasing indifferent users will run your company into the ground.
It is a gaping opportunity.
Differentiation continues – having great products and services without revealing the behind-the-scenes experiences, insights, and performance are significant lost opportunities.
Take, for example, a business that delivers online growth generation tools. Simply saying it provides X, Y and Z has little impact. Verifying with explainer videos proof of performance with screenshots that verify beyond doubt the ROI turns the game around.
Provide your potential buyers with an advanced test drive of your products and services experience before they decide – your business will likely convert more into revenue.
Strategy – at board, leadership or revenue operations is constantly questioning and investigating why people and buyers think, act and believe the way they do and the impact on revenue.
The best strategies have one thing in common: they deeply understand their buyers. It changes and improves how a business thinks, acts, communicates, and accelerates demand generation today.
How does your business accelerate demand today?
Regards
David
