The B2B buyer journey has changed, and marketers must change with it. While the traditional funnel model is a good place to start, the inbound marketing theory of pushing prospects neatly towards a purchase with lead nurturing content doesn’t match the reality.
If you have ever been in a buyer’s shoes, you know that the journey to making a purchase can follow a long and winding road. We’ve never been “nurtured” step by step after an ebook download with weeks of automated emails until a purchase. Have you?
The buyer journey could look any variation of this:
Further complicating things, according to Gartner, the number of people involved in a B2B purchase ten years ago were 5. Today it ranges from 11 to 20.
What this all means is that the previous models that go heavy on lead generation are over. B2B marketers need to invest more in content that builds awareness and affinity with your brand over the long term, and only invest in performance marketing that captures high-intent, qualified leads.
SHIFTING FROM LEAD GEN TO DEMAND GEN
Lead generation is set up to capture contact details from a form on your website. This is key to converting buyers. However, lead gen by itself is not enough to provide quality leads to sales, as it relies on gated content without considering the intent of the user. So, they tend to be low-intent, not yet in-market and just want to educate themselves. The conversion rate of these leads is very low, forcing sales to waste time on them, and further dividing marketing and sales.
Attempts to ‘nurture’ leads through email campaigns and phone calls have undermined lead gen’s effectiveness. Buyers today know they are going to be contacted if they download a piece of content, so they are less and less likely to do so.
Demand generation offers content freely without asking for contact details, imparting value and keeping a brand top-of-mind, and ensures websites are optimised for conversions when buyers come into market. Lead generation is still an important part of demand generation, but only during the demand capture phase, focused on capturing details of high-intent users only.
Demand gen helps sales teams gradually shift from pure-play sales to consultative solution design. Prospects are no longer downloading a brochure or datasheet; they are getting much further down the traditional funnel before talking to sales. And with much more highly qualified leads, the role of SDRs becomes less about selling and more about helping.
Stimulate interest in buyers who have never heard of you, while making it easier to convert those buyers when they are ready to buy.
BUILDING YOUR DEMAND GEN PROGRAMME
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Audience research
Go heavy on customer research. It will pay off.
Once you know your ideal customer profile (ICP), split it out into personas based on their pain points and goals and align messaging that resonates with each of them. This is key for creating content from the customer perspective, and avoids superficial content obviously written by a marketing team.
The issue with a lot of B2B content is it leads with what the business wants to say. Marketers spend a lot of time immersed in the product; when that happens, content leads with features and not enough on the problem is solves. Deep pain point analysis will help you to frame your content from the point of view of your target audience.
2. Consider demand creation & capture strategies
An evolution from top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel. If we work on the assumption that 95% of buyers are not in the market for your services today, demand creation refers to building awareness of both a problem and a solution, creating affinity with your brand so that when they are in-market, you are top of their list. Demand capture is the process of converting high-intent buyers who are ready to buy.
Demand creation content
- Educational blog articles and videos, targeting topical keywords
- In-feed LinkedIn posts that focus on awareness and engagement, not traffic
- Podcasts
- Live events
- Webinars
- Paid social to distribute in-feed posts
Demand capture content
- User friendly website
- High intent forms such as demo requests, talk to sales, discovery calls, free trials or consultations
- Conversion focused articles using buying intent keywords such as “marketing services, products, cost”
- Case studies
- Demo videos
- Paid Google ads
3. Get your demand capture infrastructure in place
However tempting it is to dive right into driving traffic, if there’s nowhere for potential buyers to go and buy from you, it will be like catching water with a sieve.
Build your demand gen engine from the ground up.
- Start with demand capture, and design your website to make it easy for buyers to make a purchase.
- Choose your CRM and CMS, something like HubSpot is popular with marketers as it offers both and can integrate with Salesforce.
- Build and publish your bottom of the funnel content, such as case studies, service pages and contact forms.
4. Define your content relevance
Content is the power behind demand gen, driving awareness, credibility, conversion and loyalty. With an understanding of your ICP and their pain points, you can create content that is educational and entertaining, driving affinity with your brand and increasing the likelihood that they will come to you when they are ready to buy.
First you need a point of view. What is the strategic narrative of your business that you want your audience to remember your for? It could be purpose driven such as “green investments make money and benefit society” or benefit driven, such as “data should reflect reality, not justify spend”.
Then write down multiple actionable points of view based on pain point analysis that ladder up to your strategic narrative.
All of your content should be speaking to at least one of your audience pain points, and offering an original point of view.
5. Choose your best marketing channels
Unless you have unlimited resource and budget to spend building up a presence on multiple social channels, email and your website, get good at one or two channels before you diversify into others.
The reality is most companies don’t have the time or resources to run a podcast, a newsletter, webinars, LinkedIn presence, a blog and in-person events.
For B2B companies, building on LinkedIn and SEO content is the simplest and most effective way to begin. But it’s also possible to gain traction through YouTube, live and virtual events and, to a lesser extent, email.
6. Approach to paid channels
The way LinkedIn is going, building a company page through organic posts is a waste of time. It’s in LinkedIn’s interest and bank balance to prioritise sponsored posts, so you need to get comfortable with using budget to boost posts regularly.
For demand creation, this means in-feed sponsored ads that do not drive users to your website. This can be uncomfortable for some marketers who are measured on traffic, but the idea is to increase awareness and credibility.
In terms of SEO, you will want to make sure you are top of the rankings for your high purchase intent branded keywords, such as “Winshaw pricing”. If not, you can use Google Ads to get yourself up there.
7. Demand gen metrics
There are plenty of metrics that make us feel good but don’t provide a direct line of attribution to revenue. Traffic, clicks, impressions, likes and shares are still good indicators of potential business, but this is correlation rather than direct causation.
In demand gen, the key metrics of success are:
- High-intent marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- MQL to Opportunity conversion rate
- Deals created in pipeline
- Marketing-generated revenue
- Cost per acquisition (CPA – the average cost of winning one paying customer)
- Demand gen cycle (time from MQL to customer)
SUSTAINING DEMAND GENERATION
Reuse, repurpose & recycle
It takes a lot of work to create and distribute content. And yet it lives and dies in a short space of time. The aim is to get your content in front of the right people, but it’s highly unlikely you will reach your full audience with one campaign.
The beauty of digital content is how easy it is to post more than once, and to edit and repurpose for another channel. For example, take a podcast episode and chop it up into short videos, promoting to different personas based on the insights.
An easy project that will boost search rankings and offer an opportunity to repost is updating old content on your blog. Prices may be out of date, terminology and keywords may have changed.
Adopt a blended strategy
When your demand generation programme is up and running, it can be supplemented with other strategies in order to reach the full spectrum of driving awareness, credibility, conversion and loyalty.
The most effective of these are ABM and proprietary events, especially for driving loyalty and expanding existing client accounts.
A blended strategy means you can act as a force multiplier, each strategy feeding into one another. For example:
- The ICP research you do for demand generation will inform your account research for ABM, as well as the invitees for your events.
- Demand gen content can drive people to sign up for the event.
- ABM outreach can drive clients and prospects registrations for the event.
- Events can host demand capture content such as live demos.
- Event insights can be repurposed for evergreen demand creation content.
Brand building
Demand generation doesn’t just have to all be about performance marketing. Quality content that speaks to customer challenges with a user-friendly website will help build your profile within your industry and among potential recruits will build your reputation as an authority.
Famously, Binet and Field proved that the most effective use of budget should be 60% to long-term branding and 40% to short-term activation. This same split can be applied to demand creation and capture.
DEMAND GENERATION ALIGNS MARKETING AND SALES
For demand generation to work properly, sales and marketing must work together. The old lead generation attribution models that credit a qualified lead to inbound or outbound, marketing or sales, is over. A demand generation programme brings the two together, on the understanding that there are so many touchpoints in the B2B buyer journey, you cannot attribute a new customer to one department.
It’s not a marketing or sales win, it’s a company win.
That said, the adjustment takes work. Your sales team needs to understand that enquiries will be more qualified, coming from a more educated and informed buyer. This requires a more mature sales engagement, reflecting the expertise level and stage of the journey that the enquiry comes in at. An SDR doesn’t need to go through all the features and benefits again. But also they shouldn’t jump straight to a proposal.
Sales will have to consider the different personalities they will encounter. Some hand raisers just want the price, some want more hand holding. Should you charge for an initial engagement, such as an audit or research, or offer it as part of the sales process? Longer term benefits mean you could delay the charging, but these will be judged case by case.
All of this calls for competent and confident SDRs, backed by a golden combination of a product team with commercial skills, and a commercial team with product technical knowledge.
Marketing teams need to critically assess where they invest their budget – demand creation vs capture – how they use data to justify their spend, and take ownership over how they qualify leads for sales.
