Demand Generation Funnel: How Can Software Startups Grow in a Crowded Market?
Demand for goods and services is the basic economic premise around which the entire world trading system revolves.
Countries trade with each other based on demand for their own goods and services, and different countries meet that demand with their own supply.
This same principle can also be applied to marketing: if there is demand for your product and service in the market, you can create a marketing plan to monetize that demand.
For startups, demand is of course key to their survival, as without demand goods and services cannot be sold or marketed and, as a result, businesses will fail.
One sector that has enjoyed growing demand is the software industry country b2b b2c email list , with data from Statista indicating that demand will reach $608.7 billion by 2022.
Moreover, according to these statistics , around 305 million new companies are founded every year, of which 1.35 million are technology-based. This underlines the fact that the general demand for software is confirmed by the large number of technology-based start-ups.
Of course, high demand for any product or service is often accompanied by high competition, as businesses compete for customers in a crowded marketplace.
So when established multinational software companies like IBM or Microsoft are already monopolizing the market, how can a startup generate demand for its new software?
The answer is to create a demand generation funnel. This is a funnel that will create user interest in your software product and help you build a healthy pipeline of qualified leads.
But how exactly can a demand generation funnel help your software startup? Let’s find out…
What is a demand generation funnel?
Demand generation is a process of creating interest and awareness about your product or services. The demand generation funnel is a detailed channel that defines activities that help stimulate user interest in your business.
According to Gartner , "A strong demand generation program builds brand awareness and authority, and produces thoughtful, engaging content that generates interest and cultivates leads."
It’s a broad term that affects multiple points of sale throughout a customer’s journey. Demand generation is not a superficial term like Lead Generation from AHSS ; which only focuses on increasing the number of leads. Instead, a demand generation funnel emphasizes building a long-term relationship with potential customers to motivate them to keep coming back and making repeat purchases.
This graphical presentation will help you understand how demand generation behaves:
Fountain
Why Your Software Startup Needs a Demand Generation Funnel?
As a software startup, your target audience is likely to be other businesses (B2B). As mentioned above, there are already thousands of SaaS companies out there, so unless you offer something truly unique, it will be difficult to convince other companies that your product is worth investing in.
Therefore, demand generation is important for software startups to find the right strategies and to build brand awareness.
Raise awareness of a need.
Demand generation helps to create “awareness of a need” as it gives you different opportunities to inform potential users why they need your product. For example, you can create content that targets your potential customer’s pain points using mediums such as the company blog, cold emails, or social media posts. These can be used to tell potential customers how your software product can solve their particular problems.
Here check out this blog post from CloudTalk: