What is demand generation content? And how to write it
Today’s B2B content is expected to meet a lot of different needs. It has to be well written for the humans reading it, optimised precisely for the algorithms ranking it, all while creating trust, affinity, and inbound leads.
The problem: Algorithm ranking factors are becoming more complex and customers are tired of bland content. 🥱
So how do you create content that ranks well on Google, solves your buyers' problems, and creates affinity with your brand?
Enter; demand generation content. Demand gen content is designed to be highly optimised for buyer personas, AI bots, and inbound marketing.
This guide shares the benefits of using demand gen content, what it’s used for, and our *exact* method on how to write it.
Let’s dive in. 🏊♀️
Pssst. If you want to learn more on this topic, we have created an in-depth PDF ‘Content and the Art of Demand Generation’ - you can instantly download it here.
What is demand generation content?
Demand generation content is content carefully crafted to meet the needs of your ideal customers. B2B businesses use demand gen content to demonstrate credibility, rank in Google, and generate high-quality inbound enquiries.
The goal is to create content that your buyers want to read - this needs to add value by solving their challenges by offering free guidance, insight, or tips. Opting for this content marketing approach helps create awareness and affinity with your company, narrative, and where you see the industry going.
Every B2B business - from SMEs to Enterprises - needs demand gen content. In fact, with demand gen content, you’ll be able to solve two of the biggest marketing challenges:
Rank on page 1 on Google. Google rewards those that consistently put out high quality information - often on the first page - for targeted keywords. In fact, consistent publication of engaging content is Google’s top ranking factor. You can increase your chances by ensuring keywords are in titles, meta titles, by showing niche expertise and backlinks too.
Generate inbound leads. Instead of spending thousands on PPC advertising, let your customers come to you by creating persona-based content that helps to solve their key pain points. The more you are seen as providing valuable information and insight to your audience it builds trust and credibility, which means you could be top of mind for when your audience is ready to buy.
👉To summarise: Demand gen content acts as a magnet to appeal to today’s considered B2B buyers. It provides high-quality relevant information that is valuable and insanely helpful.
📕Read more about demand generation in our ultimate guide to demand generation article.
What is demand gen content used for?
Not surprisingly, demand gen content is often used as part of an overarching demand generation strategy to help you increase website traffic, improve conversions, and provide measurable results.
This is because your demand generation strategy usually spans multiple touchpoints and campaigns, and content plays a pivotal role in its success.
Demand gen content supports every step of your demand gen strategy, from the awareness stage - with top of the funnel thought leadership, and the middle of the funnel educational content - through to highly optimised bottom of the funnel content. Essentially, it provides information to each prospect’s unique pain points, readiness to buy, and where they are in the sales cycle.
Furthermore, it supports lead nurture campaigns, social media strategies, PR, website conversion and more. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed without it. 😮
What are the benefits of demand gen content?
We’ve already touched on the key benefits of using demand gen content, but here’s our view on the most important ones:
Improve search engine rankings: It’s becoming increasingly difficult for your website product content to rank well organically. Google prioritises high quality educational content.
Reduce PPC costs. A well-optimised piece of demand gen content can be worth £5000 a month in PPC costs. The best part? Once you’ve invested in the initial piece of content it can rank well for years to come giving you an incredible ROI over the long-term.
Create brand affinity. Demand gen content doesn’t try to sell. It shines a spotlight on a challenge your audience faces, explains why that problem matters enough to invest in a solution, and why you’re the right choice.
Demonstrate credibility. Content grounded in research demonstrates credibility and builds a relationship with a prospective customer.
Create trust. Demand gen content combines education and brand storytelling to teach buyers about problems they aren’t aware of - and how to solve them. Creating trust.
Generate demand. Of course, the ultimate goal for demand gen content is to create demand. Instead of passing your sales team leads from gated content, your buyers come to you when they’re ready to buy.
In a nutshell, demand gen content provides a balanced approach to generate demand by educating potential customers about the problems you solve.
Now that we understand the benefits, let’s explore the different types of demand gen content you can create.
Types of demand generation content
While this isn’t a definitive list, we’ve rounded up the top content types that we have personally seen generate incredible results.
Blog articles
One of the most effective pieces of demand gen content is blog articles. Once you understand how to write demand gen blog articles (hint it involves a strategic approach, tonnes of research, and a compelling angle) it is possible to rank organically on page one with multiple blogs.
eBooks
eBooks are often cited as one of the most effective content types. According to Buzzsumo, on average they gain 229 engagements [shares, likes, comments, upvotes, Facebook reactions, pins etc.]
Webinars
Webinars can be great for demand generation and are most effective in the middle of the funnel to educate buyers on the problems your solution solves.
💡Just don’t be tempted to use these as sales pitches - it’s a major turn-off for those looking for guidance but instead wasting 30-60 minutes being sold to when they are unlikely to be ready to buy.
Lead nurture emails
Lead nurture emails can take your audience all the way through the sales cycle from awareness to consideration and purchase.
💡 Making these as personal as possible is crucial.
Organic social posts
Posting on LinkedIn is one of the best free ways to capture and create demand in the feed people are already engaging on.
💡 Instead of pointing off to external links, the key here is to provide the information on the feed where they are already browsing.
Video
Video is one of the fastest-growing content types today. Explainer videos are a brilliant approach to demand gen. They don’t have to be super polished either.
💡 Being human and relatable is far more important.
Case studies
One of the best ways to convert potential customers is through the experience of other customers.
💡You can include them on your website, share them on a sales deck, or include them as part of lead nurture campaigns.
Next, let’s explore the key components of high-quality demand generation content.
Components of good demand generation content
Good demand generation content has several key components, while this list isn’t conclusive we find the best performing demand gen content must be:
Fully optimised for Google (and other search engines) through keyword research, copy length, keyword density, meta title descriptions, and more. (As a side note, while optimising for Google is key, always write for the reader first).
Aligned to buyer personas and pain points with each piece aligned to a very specific persona and pain point.
Part of a content cluster strategy linking to an overarching topic and linked back to a pillar page as part of a content cluster strategy.
High quality and written well for the humans reading it - as well as the algorithms ranking it.
Educational by demonstrating insight on the audience's problems and challenges and how they can be solved.
Full funnel. By this we mean each piece of content should be aligned to a stage of the funnel - unless it’s long enough to take you all the way through the funnel or is a lead nurture series.
Offers a unique angle by offering a unique view or opinion on a topic. This is especially important for hard to rank for topics.
10x optimised for SEO, related to the above, if your chosen topic has a lot of competition or is head to rank for, then make sure that your piece is 10x better than all the top search results.
Some of these may be more important than others. This depends on your goals and objectives, how difficult your chosen topic is to rank for and how competitive your category is.
Now that we know what the key components of good demand gen content are we’ll go through our *exact* demand generation writing method.
How to write a piece of demand gen content (our *exact* writing method)
To help you craft your own demand generation content, we’ve outlined below our exact writing method we go through every time we create B2B demand generation content:
🧩Refer to strategy: Each piece of content should form part of an overarching content strategy. Before diving into writing it can be worth checking your strategy to make sure your brief is aligned.
💻Create your brief: We always start with a content brief, which includes all key information such as audience, pain points, keywords, objectives, funnel stage, and key messages. Share for review and input.
🕵️Research: Find facts and data points, look into research studies, and source hard-to-find examples. Also check who is ranking for your chosen topic, to find a unique angle and how to stand a chance to compete.
📞Interview subject matter experts: Find unique angles, stories, and expert opinions to add weight and key insight to your piece.
📝Content outline: Next create your content outline, include any H tags to your subtitles so that you ensure you embed the right amount of keywords, and start to add any call-out boxes, and any links you’d like to embed. Share for review and input.
🕵️Research again: Check your outline against the top 10 ranking articles for your chosen long-tail keyword and see how you can improve yours. We use Frase.io to help us with this!
✍️Full write-up: Armed with all your research, insight, and a solid outline you can start your first draft.
👀Check swipe file: We keep a ‘swipe file’ which contains any well-written intros, titles, connecting phrases, or conclusions to help improve the flow, direction and tone of our writing.
📊 Optimise full write-up: Check that the word count, keyword density, and any other significant parameters are good enough to outperform any competing pieces.
👓Full edit and review: At this point (before sharing) check for spelling, grammar and punctuation. Grammarly is great for this. As is ProWritingAid. Make any edits. Refer to your swipe file if you need inspiration.
🔗Add internal links: Once you’re happy with your first draft go back through and add in any relevant internal links. Make sure you get a link in above the fold.
👉Share first draft: Share your first draft for review and input - your subject matter expert is great for this to make sure that you haven’t taken anything out of context, or to add more insight to the piece.
As you can see, a LOT goes into creating high-quality demand gen content. While it can take time to do it right, ranking no. 1 in Google and generating demand is well worth the effort.
Why consistency is key with demand gen content
Good content marketing answers prospects’ biggest questions, solves their major pain points and showcases your brand subtly as experts in your field. All of this means when they are ready to buy, they naturally think of your business.
But you can’t take a piecemeal approach to it. If you want to reap the rewards, long-term consistency is critical.
Consistently communicating helpful information with your target audience is proven to engage audiences and drive sales. We've literally seen this approach generate hundreds of thousands for businesses.
And you don't need a complicated, budget-intensive approach either.
Through a combination of marketing activities - like always posting regularly on social media, sending monthly newsletters, regularly blogging with Search Engine Optimised content, and guest blogging on key media publications sites - you can regularly get in front of your target audience.
Moreover, with the right sales enablement collateral and email templates, you're better placed to then convert new leads.
📖You can read more about creating consistency here.
Wrap up
If you’re not seeing the right results from your current content efforts, it might be time to take things a step further by creating demand generation content.
As we’ve seen there’s no doubt demand generation content has its benefits. With the right approach, you’ll improve search engine rankings, brand affinity, and inbound leads. That’s bound to have an impact on your bottom line.
Whether you’ve been writing content for a while or just starting out, we hope the above guide will help you to improve your content.
Frequently asked questions
Here we answer the most frequently asked questions about demand generation content.
What is demand generation content?
Demand generation content is highly optimised for buyer personas and search engine algorithms.
B2B businesses use this form of content to demonstrate credibility with their ideal customers and generate inbound enquiries.
What is demand generation vs lead generation content?
Demand generation content is usually ungated content, which needs to be high quality in order to convert prospects - opposed to lead generation content, which often relies on being gated.
How can you measure demand generation content?
Demand generation content is ultimately measured by revenue. But you can use positive indicators such as views, time on page, and shares to gauge quality.