Demand Creation: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need
What if you could proactively engage your future customers even before they realize they need what you have to offer? Solve problems they don’t even yet know exist? Position your brand as a leader in its field using foresight and innovation? With demand creation, it’s possible.
Today, in crowded B2B landscapes, demand creation enables companies to stop waiting for customers to come to them and use a combination of strategic approaches to create a steady influx of new interest. As marketing and sales teams work to convert leads already in the sales pipeline, demand creation efforts identify market gaps and opportunities, pursue them, and generate new interest for the future.
This guide will explore the ins and outs of effective demand creation—what it is, why it works, and how to do it—and walk step-by-step through the process of designing a demand creation strategy that works for your unique business.
Quick Takeaways:
- Demand creation presents solutions and addresses problems that customers don’t yet recognize.
- It’s different from demand generation, which focuses on existing demand and solutions.
- The key to effective demand creation is understanding customer pain points and aligning future solutions with resolving them.
- Demand creation doesn’t have to mean developing totally new products—it can also happen through improving and evolving existing offerings.
- Internal innovation skills and culture are essential for successful demand creation.
What is Demand Creation?
Demand creation is the innovative process of presenting solutions to potential buyers that they may not yet know they need, and marketing to pain points they’re experiencing but may not yet recognize. In other words, with demand creation, you’re staying a step ahead of your customers, understanding them thoroughly and following market trends to identify not only what they need now, but what they’ll need in the future.
Unlike demand generation, which addresses existing pain points with existing solutions, demand creation forays into the unknown, looking at what’s next on the horizon for industry trends, emerging technology, and customer needs and demands.
This requires a certain level of foresight and innovation that not every organization is capable of, making effective demand creation a differentiator in crowded B2B markets. Apple is one of the best examples of demand creation excellence.
As Apple has introduced new products to the market—including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple Watch—they have been reliably criticized at first (see the poor iPhone reviews below), only to become some of the most popular (and in several cases, nearly ubiquitous) technologies in our society.
What Apple has been continually good at—and why they remain a formidable market leader in consumer electronics—is understanding what customers will want before the customers themselves understand it.
This is no small feat. As mentioned, it requires a strong commitment to innovation and the creative minds to implement it on an ongoing basis.
The Core of Demand Creation: Pain Point Marketing
Implementing a demand creation strategy requires understanding current customer pain points as well as predicting those that will emerge in the future. Pain points are the problems customers experience that lead them to seek solutions, and knowing how to touch on them with your marketing messages and product/service offerings is the surest way to drive demand and growth.
The image below is a simplified but effective demonstration of the difference between pain points and solutions:
The concept may seem simple, but many businesses fail to understand the concept in practice. They jump right to solution marketing—talking about the products/services and their features—rather than focusing on what problems and pain points they address.
Ultimately, it’s those very problems and pain points that customers care about most. Generally, they’re not attached to a specific brand or solution, but just want to ensure their problem is resolved. That’s why the companies best able to talk about and address pain points usually win over competitors.
It’s this nuanced skill that lies at the heart of demand creation. When you understand customer pain points and needs—those that exist now and are emerging for the future—you’re better able to engage customers and deliver the best solution.
5 Key Components of Demand Creation
- Identify Pain Points and Create a Value Proposition
Spend time researching, exploring, and documenting your customer pain points. Use these insights to create highly-aligned value propositions that resonate with your customers and demonstrate your keen understanding of their needs.
The Value Proposition Canvas is a valuable tool you can use to guide your teams through this process.
Stay Ahead of Industry Trends
Staying on top of industry trends and current events is one of the best ways to predict your customers’ future needs and demands. Look at how your industry is evolving, new technologies that are emerging, and future capabilities your customers will need to obtain in order to succeed.
Then, you can develop solutions to address them before they become critical to your customers, and be first movers on bringing these solutions to market.
Look for Ways to Make Existing Solutions Better
Demand creation doesn’t have to be about creating totally new products or services—you can update existing offerings to meet evolving customer needs. Apple is again one of the best examples of this. The iPhone has evolved over decades now, continually presenting new features, capabilities, sizes, models, and an array of customizable options.
Adopt a continuous improvement mindset for your current offerings, constantly looking for ways to make them better and more relevant, thus avoiding stagnation and driving new demand creation as your solutions get better over time.
Leverage Customer Feedback
Your customers might not yet know what they’ll want and need in the future—but their insights can help you uncover it. Implement feedback loops for your products and services (i.e. check-in calls, surveys, reviews, rating systems, etc.) so you can understand what’s driving the most value and what needs some improvement, as well as identify new opportunities for future demand creation.
Foster an Internal Culture of Innovation
The importance of innovation for effective demand creation cannot be overstated. And while innovation does come more naturally to some people, teams, and companies than others, it’s a skill that can be learned and developed over time. That’s why it’s essential to prioritize innovation skills when you recruit new talent and offer the training, education, and professional development opportunities needed for your existing employees to get better at innovating.
Welcome creative mindsets, encourage idea sharing, and ensure that even ideas that are not ultimately utilized or implemented are still appreciated with acknowledgment and feedback.
Over to You
Demand creation can set your brand apart, driving sustained growth and positioning your company as a leader and innovator. By understanding and addressing emerging pain points, staying ahead of industry trends, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation within your organization, you can drive greater value for current and future customers and achieve sustainable growth.
Ready to launch a winning demand creation strategy for your business? Televerde can help. Contact us today to learn more about our leading marketing and sales solutions.
