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Demand generation is hard at the best of times, but 2023 just hits different.
We don’t need to tell you that budgets are lean, expectations are high, and efficiency is the name of the game. Many of us are still figuring out how to feel about MQLs, lead generation, gating/ungating content, and demand capture. It’s enough to make any marketer’s head spin.
Though we're starting to think more long-term about demand gen, there are still very real near-term goals to hit. And with so many new philosophies to choose from, it can be hard to know the best place to start.
Demand gen is definitely not easy, but it can be less complicated.
As in-house demand generation leaders, and now agency co-founders, we’ve audited, built, and rebuilt countless demand generation programs. Every program has its own unique challenges, - messy data, tech and process debt, company nuances, and even politics.
To navigate all that complexity, we’ve learned that the most effective approach has been to keep how we do demand generation as simple as possible.
Our (not-so-secret) sauce is to think of your demand gen program as a series of 'on ramps' and 'off-ramps.’
On ramps, are what folks often think of when they think of demand generation. These are usually the social / distribution channels (e.g - paid search, paid social, content syndication) where your audience spends their time, as well as the content / messaging you’re sharing with them to create demand.
Often, where marketing efforts can go wrong is by trying to force these channels to be points of conversion, thereby measuring their effectiveness by their lead generation output.
When, in reality, they are best utilized as on-ramps to creating demand.
On the other side of your program are your off-ramps. These are the true conversion points as the paths your audience uses to enter into a buying process. They vary from company to company, but they are commonly the same core methods:
Now, here’s how you can apply this analogy to your own program for better efficiency in 3 steps.
Understanding your on-ramps starts with understanding your audience. Too often in marketing, we use the channels that offer the best targeting, or the ones we use the most ourselves. But to reach your audience you need to understand where your audience is.
Here are some of the ways you can do this:
Now that you know your best channels for reaching your audience, you can begin developing the right content and advertising strategy to increase (or improve) your brand awareness.
It's important to remember that because these channels are meant to reach and engage, conversion is not the immediate goal. Consumption of your messaging and content is. And consumption happens when content reaches your audience, and resonates, leading us to our next step of optimizing your on ramps!
Developing content that resonates starts by knowing what your audience cares about. Audience research will give you insights into what's trending with this audience, as well as formats that will best capture their attention.
In B2B marketing, we tend to be very quick to create content in the formats that best meet our metrics goals, rather than the ones that our audience best engages with. Your audience research should help remove this bias. Look at the types of content that are popular - is it blogs, video channels, podcasts? Is the content short form or long form? Is it text heavy or highly visual? This information will guide how you create your content, but also how you can leverage advertising. For example, if there are popular podcasts in the space, the solution might be to sponsor them rather than compete with them.
The key is knowing enough about your audience to meet them where they are, using formats they are receptive to, and mapping your messaging to topics they care about.
Two very helpful tools to help you do this are the Product Maturity Curve & Demand Curve. Buckle up, we’re going to get into a little bit of marketing theory, but we promise it’s worth it!
If you’ve read books like Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, you’re probably familiar with the Product Adoption Curve.
Understanding where your brand is on this curve is an often under-utilized aspect of developing content that resonates.
For example, *most* early-stage startups find themselves somewhere in the first two sections, targeting the Innovators and Early Adopters, and what resonates with this audience is very different to what gets the Early Majority.
Innovators are looking for cutting-edge solutions to give themselves an edge, and are willing to take risks. They want what’s new because it’s new. The Early Adopters are also looking for an edge, but are looking more for inspiration and examples of use cases that they can see themselves in them.
Compare this to the Early Majority, who want to follow a trail that’s already been blazed. They want to see evidence that this is tried and tested by people they resemble.
As you can see, content that generates demand with each segment of this audience should look & sound very different.
As important as where your audience falls on the Product Adoption Curve, is where they fall on the Demand Generation Curve.
When we talk about creating demand, what we’re really talking about is increasing awareness of our brand until it becomes preferred. What most people don't realize, is that brand awareness is a spectrum. As you increase brand awareness, the level of understanding of what you do increases, until it reaches brand recall, and ultimately, brand preference.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Placing yourself on this curve does require a bit of, sometimes uncomfortable, honesty. If have the luxury of it, quantitative surveys do help. But if you don't, a candid conversation with your sales team, particularly the SDR team, will give you a pretty real idea of where you fall on this curve.
We can’t move on from On Ramps without talking about measurement. Because your goal with these channels isn't to convert your audience, it's to engage them, this means that metrics should focus on the consumption of your content.
This will mean a combination of native metrics - like in-feed consumption and ad click-throughs, as well as traffic to your website as a result. Be very aware though, that referral traffic is getting increasingly getting less visible, so you may see nothing more than an increase in direct traffic from your efforts.
Now that you know, and have optimized your on-ramps - let's take a look at your off-ramps.
A mistake that's often made is thinking that inbound demo requests are the only high-intent conversion points, with the others being competitive sources of pipeline. But in reality, created demand is channeled through all these off-ramps, and they often overlap.
For example, how often has an SDR team been outbounding to an account, only to see a ‘coincidental’ inbound come through? You need have the ability for buyers to convert through the channels they choose - regardless of which team it’ll be attributed to.
Once you know what your off-ramps are, the best thing you can do is optimize these off-ramps for conversion. Make it as easy as possible for your audience to convert through them, and have the right follow-up and engagement strategies in place following those conversions.
Here are some actionable steps you could take to optimize the most common types of off ramps.
The pandemic may have disrupted the events industry, but it’s still very alive in and well in B2B, though some sectors have taken on events in new forms. According to a HBR report, on average, B2B companies spend 29% of their marketing budgets on events, so optimizing this off ramp is key:
If you’ve read this far, we really appreciate you. We hope this was helpful. Demand generation isn’t easy - and we’re not promising any of this as a silver bullet. But, we hope this makes good demand gen feel a little less intimidating to tackle. Regardless of how B2B marketing continues to evolve, we’re all in this together!
Demand generation is hard at the best of times, but 2023 just hits different.
We don’t need to tell you that budgets are lean, expectations are high, and efficiency is the name of the game. Many of us are still figuring out how to feel about MQLs, lead generation, gating/ungating content, and demand capture. It’s enough to make any marketer’s head spin.
Though we're starting to think more long-term about demand gen, there are still very real near-term goals to hit. And with so many new philosophies to choose from, it can be hard to know the best place to start.
Demand gen is definitely not easy, but it can be less complicated.
As in-house demand generation leaders, and now agency co-founders, we’ve audited, built, and rebuilt countless demand generation programs. Every program has its own unique challenges, - messy data, tech and process debt, company nuances, and even politics.
To navigate all that complexity, we’ve learned that the most effective approach has been to keep how we do demand generation as simple as possible.
Our (not-so-secret) sauce is to think of your demand gen program as a series of 'on ramps' and 'off-ramps.’
On ramps, are what folks often think of when they think of demand generation. These are usually the social / distribution channels (e.g - paid search, paid social, content syndication) where your audience spends their time, as well as the content / messaging you’re sharing with them to create demand.
Often, where marketing efforts can go wrong is by trying to force these channels to be points of conversion, thereby measuring their effectiveness by their lead generation output.
When, in reality, they are best utilized as on-ramps to creating demand.
On the other side of your program are your off-ramps. These are the true conversion points as the paths your audience uses to enter into a buying process. They vary from company to company, but they are commonly the same core methods:
Now, here’s how you can apply this analogy to your own program for better efficiency in 3 steps.
Understanding your on-ramps starts with understanding your audience. Too often in marketing, we use the channels that offer the best targeting, or the ones we use the most ourselves. But to reach your audience you need to understand where your audience is.
Here are some of the ways you can do this:
Now that you know your best channels for reaching your audience, you can begin developing the right content and advertising strategy to increase (or improve) your brand awareness.
It's important to remember that because these channels are meant to reach and engage, conversion is not the immediate goal. Consumption of your messaging and content is. And consumption happens when content reaches your audience, and resonates, leading us to our next step of optimizing your on ramps!
Developing content that resonates starts by knowing what your audience cares about. Audience research will give you insights into what's trending with this audience, as well as formats that will best capture their attention.
In B2B marketing, we tend to be very quick to create content in the formats that best meet our metrics goals, rather than the ones that our audience best engages with. Your audience research should help remove this bias. Look at the types of content that are popular - is it blogs, video channels, podcasts? Is the content short form or long form? Is it text heavy or highly visual? This information will guide how you create your content, but also how you can leverage advertising. For example, if there are popular podcasts in the space, the solution might be to sponsor them rather than compete with them.
The key is knowing enough about your audience to meet them where they are, using formats they are receptive to, and mapping your messaging to topics they care about.
Two very helpful tools to help you do this are the Product Maturity Curve & Demand Curve. Buckle up, we’re going to get into a little bit of marketing theory, but we promise it’s worth it!
If you’ve read books like Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, you’re probably familiar with the Product Adoption Curve.
Understanding where your brand is on this curve is an often under-utilized aspect of developing content that resonates.
For example, *most* early-stage startups find themselves somewhere in the first two sections, targeting the Innovators and Early Adopters, and what resonates with this audience is very different to what gets the Early Majority.
Innovators are looking for cutting-edge solutions to give themselves an edge, and are willing to take risks. They want what’s new because it’s new. The Early Adopters are also looking for an edge, but are looking more for inspiration and examples of use cases that they can see themselves in them.
Compare this to the Early Majority, who want to follow a trail that’s already been blazed. They want to see evidence that this is tried and tested by people they resemble.
As you can see, content that generates demand with each segment of this audience should look & sound very different.
As important as where your audience falls on the Product Adoption Curve, is where they fall on the Demand Generation Curve.
When we talk about creating demand, what we’re really talking about is increasing awareness of our brand until it becomes preferred. What most people don't realize, is that brand awareness is a spectrum. As you increase brand awareness, the level of understanding of what you do increases, until it reaches brand recall, and ultimately, brand preference.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Placing yourself on this curve does require a bit of, sometimes uncomfortable, honesty. If have the luxury of it, quantitative surveys do help. But if you don't, a candid conversation with your sales team, particularly the SDR team, will give you a pretty real idea of where you fall on this curve.
We can’t move on from On Ramps without talking about measurement. Because your goal with these channels isn't to convert your audience, it's to engage them, this means that metrics should focus on the consumption of your content.
This will mean a combination of native metrics - like in-feed consumption and ad click-throughs, as well as traffic to your website as a result. Be very aware though, that referral traffic is getting increasingly getting less visible, so you may see nothing more than an increase in direct traffic from your efforts.
Now that you know, and have optimized your on-ramps - let's take a look at your off-ramps.
A mistake that's often made is thinking that inbound demo requests are the only high-intent conversion points, with the others being competitive sources of pipeline. But in reality, created demand is channeled through all these off-ramps, and they often overlap.
For example, how often has an SDR team been outbounding to an account, only to see a ‘coincidental’ inbound come through? You need have the ability for buyers to convert through the channels they choose - regardless of which team it’ll be attributed to.
Once you know what your off-ramps are, the best thing you can do is optimize these off-ramps for conversion. Make it as easy as possible for your audience to convert through them, and have the right follow-up and engagement strategies in place following those conversions.
Here are some actionable steps you could take to optimize the most common types of off ramps.
The pandemic may have disrupted the events industry, but it’s still very alive in and well in B2B, though some sectors have taken on events in new forms. According to a HBR report, on average, B2B companies spend 29% of their marketing budgets on events, so optimizing this off ramp is key:
If you’ve read this far, we really appreciate you. We hope this was helpful. Demand generation isn’t easy - and we’re not promising any of this as a silver bullet. But, we hope this makes good demand gen feel a little less intimidating to tackle. Regardless of how B2B marketing continues to evolve, we’re all in this together!
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