4 expert predictions for demand generation in 2019

Beyond driving the marketing and sales funnel for your business is accounting for every point in your customers’ journey, from the moment they stumbled on your product or service to becoming a loyal customer.

This includes creating opportunities to make data-driven decisions, aligning your teams and tracking your revenues. The end result of a true demand generation strategy is to improve your company or organization’s growth and most importantly to build long-term customer relationships.

This involves implementing basic demand generation fundamentals such as brand awareness, inbound marketing, sales enablement, automated lead nurturing and client retention.

According to the 2018 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report, 70% of B2B marketers projected that their demand generation budget would increase and 34% projected that spending would grow by more than 20%. The same report also points out the increased aggressive rate of the expectations of supporting revenue growth and also the goals and metrics used by companies to judge marketing impact.

This shows how much demand generation has improved over the years and B2B marketing teams will then understand impact more clearly and how demand generation strategy works to be able to meet their goals.

The expectations for the demand generation in 2019 is quite high, considering the improved stats in 2018. Here are four expert predictions for demand generation in 2019:

1. Deliberate content marketing – Russell Ruffino

The B2B Content Marketing report 2018 shows that 89% of the most successful organizations are extremely committed to content marketing and 62% has a documented content marketing strategy.

The Hype Cycle for digital marketing as shown below demonstrates how content marketing peaked and then slumped, which can be traced back to implementing wrong strategies and less valuable content.

Many businesses today focus on content marketing to get clients and grow their businesses online. This includes creating videos, images and blog posts to match what their brands represent.

While this is great and will help drive traction, Russell Ruffino believes that the entire business should not be built on just content and some businesses are beginning to understand that. Statistics have shown that over $300 Billion will be spent to generate online content in 2019, which is 4X the cost of online ads.

Russell Ruffino predicts that many businesses in 2019 will opt for paid ads, on which content marketing can then be built. Your audience needs to see interesting content that will be valuable to them, not just fluff and loads of content with no clear direction. Demand generation will require more businesses in 2019 to invest in paid ads to help their content reach the right audience.

2. Email newsletters will re-emerge as an important nurturing vehicle – Ann Handley

There are new means of marketing today strong enough to lure marketers away from older platforms like Email. However, with the recent marketing wave, marketing experts like Ann Handley predicts that email newsletters will re-emerge as an important nurturing vehicle in 2019.

She raised vital points on how an email newsletter is the only place where individuals- not algorithms- are in control and how most companies today use email newsletters as a distribution strategy.

It is quite tasking to convince consumers to buy from you, using a B2B email marketing but when done the right way, email marketing is a great way to generate and close more leads. How you design your marketing emails should, however, depend on the niche you operate in and your target audience.

A study by the Radicati group predicts that the number of email users will grow beyond 3 billion people by 2020, which should be convicting enough for businesses to boost their email marketing strategy. Also, 93% of the most successful B2B marketers today practice email marketing and in 2019, more businesses will be deliberate about it while implementing the right strategy to promote their B2B business.

3. Smaller companies will produce content at a cheaper price – Joe Pulizzi

One of the ways smaller firms compete with big companies is by producing content at a cheaper price. Creating content cost time but not money, and small businesses can do that to match up with bigger companies that create high-quality video campaigns and huge social media initiatives which would cost more money and trends.

More established brands and bigger teams are likely to intimidate smaller brands but these smaller brands can outsmart them by demonstrating their expertise through content.

Leslie Carruthers believes that in 2019, smaller companies will focus more on producing content. They can do this by publishing content that already exists such as creating useful FAQs from questions asked in email communications.

They could also use content created by their audience, for example, asking clients to record videos that promote their services while using the company’s solution. This will help smaller companies improve their demand generation to remain in the game in 2019.

4. Creativity over technology by implementing martech automation – Joakim Ditlev

Technology is gradually changing the way we think and inevitably changing what it means to be creative. Many businesses are beginning to understand how this affects them. Technology and creativity must work together in the marketing industry but the focus on creativity should never be taken with levity in order to deliver the best results.

Email marketing, social media, analytics, lead generation and lead nurturing are what makes up martech automation, which is still evolving, with the end goal to increase revenue.

Joakim Ditev predicts that 2019 will be the year where content marketers begin to value creativity over technology, due to the increased competition in the martech industry.

Today’s content marketers are beginning to focus more on campaign automation from a new angle and how their content is perceived by the audience. This will force them to improve their content creation and work on comprehensive campaigns to help engage other businesses and customers in the best way.

Conclusion

Demand generation keeps improving over the years and many businesses are not taking chances. These expert predictions are based on the demand generation trends in previous years and you can make them work perfectly for you in 2019.

The best companies and organizations are the ones ready for new trends, which includes foreseeing and acting on the demand generation trends for the coming year.