Demand generation: a roadmap to success

Shoppers are no longer swayed by email campaigns or mainstream advertising. Instead, they expect personalised experiences that feel authentic. 

This shift in consumer expectations has led to brands changing their marketing approach. 

“Everything we do is about awareness – making sure our brand is top of mind to people in market, or they click on our links in searches,” explains Victoria Clarke, director of marketing services with Specsavers. 

Beyond mass-market campaigns

For decades, marketing strategies have focused on lead generation. These outbound marketing activities target large numbers of potential customers intending to convert them into qualified leads, then sales. 

But the Covid-19 pandemic and proposed changes to online privacy regulations have driven a shift towards demand generation, a marketing strategy that emphasises customer awareness and brand reputation. Unlike lead generation, it targets a smaller group of potential customers long before they might be looking to purchase. 

Both B2B and B2C are moving from lead gen to demand gen, according to Julie Lock, UK and Ireland marketing director at HubSpot. “Today’s buyers are savvier and won’t necessarily respond to mass-market campaigns. That means we’ve seen a swing towards campaigns that engage people and create positive feelings around brands,” she says. 

Demonstrate core values and expertise

For Specsavers, this means marketing activity over different channels and using relevant content, says Clarke. “Our channel mix has changed considerably. We used to be broadcast-led but now we do a lot more social, PR and industry engagement, which helps us to be seen as experts in our sector. We’re also showing how we live our core values,” she says. 

One of the Specsavers core values is patient advocacy. For instance, the company works with charities to provide optometry services to homeless people and runs a free ‘ask an optician’ service on its Facebook page, says Clarke. “We started both services during the pandemic and have continued them because we’re passionate about improving access to services. This helps us to do that and to live those values, not just talk about them.” 

Adventure travel company WeRoad has moved to demand generation by focusing on social media content that inspires its customer base of 20-something adventure-seekers. “Many marketers became obsessed with the number of leads and blasted people with emails until the potential customer either made a purchase or asked to be removed from the list,” says Fabio Bin, WeRoad’s CMO. “Over the years, lead gen became an easy way to get in touch with potential customers. But in the online era, demand gen makes people aware of your product and brand and shows how your services could at some point be relevant for them.”

The point about demand generation is that it accounts for the fact that today’s consumers are well-informed. They will have done their research and have a shortlist of suppliers before they make a purchasing decision. Demand marketing helps companies to get on those shortlists by making potential customers aware of a brand’s values and relevance when they are ready to make a purchase. 

“If demand generation is putting up signs and giving samples to drive buzz that gets people to come to your market stand, lead generation is asking everyone at the market for information so you can sell them a product they may not even want,” Lock explains. 

Use communities to engage consumers

WeRoad has thrown its marketing efforts behind Instagram, gaining 1.9 million followers since 2017. The company’s Instagram page is filled with inspiring travel photography and usually doesn’t include a sales pitch, says Bin. “We aren’t selling trips on our Instagram page. We’re providing content that people value, speaking to them in their language about things they care about,” he says. “Once you attract people, when they are considering a trip, you are there.” 

WeRoad’s social media followers are treated as a community and the company sets up groups and chats that help followers to connect and advise one another. “People ask for tips on what to see or do in particular places, or who is going to be at an event,” he says. “Our view is that travel is, for our customers, a way to meet new people. Our marketing is an extension of that.”  

Although this type of marketing may work well, its success isn’t easy to measure. WeRoad uses engagement metrics to evaluate its demand-generation results, while many companies use a combination of these metrics with traditional conversion rates, says Lock. “You might run a social media campaign that gives everyone a fuzzy feeling about your brand, but you’ll use lead generation to nurture those interested customers through the process. It’s not lead gen or demand gen, it’s using both together.” 

Finding prospects for the sales team used to be easy. All marketers had to do was find a way to capture a prospect’s email address and simply pass it over. 

But while that may have made the marketer’s job easy, it was a terrible experience for the people they were trying to sell to. Andrew Wray, chief revenue officer at software firm Toggl, recalls a time when reading an educational ebook online, for instance, led to a barrage of unwanted sales calls and emails. “It was a disheartening and brand-damaging experience for all involved,” he says.

Not only is this approach potentially harmful, it’s also incredibly ineffective. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market to make a purchase at any one time and can’t be persuaded to do so until they are ready. 

So how do you go about making them ready? The key, says Wray, is to focus on brand building. “The goal is to offer these ‘out-of-market’ buyers value-adding experiences so that when they are ready to make a purchase, your brand is both front of mind and front of the queue.”

Tell stories to keep people listening 

Brand storytelling is central to this strategy. Marketers must use engaging content to build compelling user journeys. Adam Camm, customer experience programme director at Software AG, explains: “Marketing’s role is to nurture the customer journey from prospect to advocate through the appropriate channels that have content relevant to each stage of that journey.”

This approach addresses the ‘customer life cycle’. In his book, Fanatical Prospecting, sales performance leader Jeb Blount says that converting a cold prospect can involve up to 50 touchpoints, while a ‘warm’ inbound lead might need 12 touches and even motivating an inactive customer can take three.

“You stay relevant by telling a compelling story throughout the funnel and balancing demand with the brand,” says Lisa Vecchio, marketing vice-president at Aircall.

Have you got something to say?

Andy Davis is director of growth at web analytics firm Hotjar. He says that relying on generic email nurture flows is a common mistake that B2B brands make in demand gen. “You should avoid extended automated email sequences and focus on sharing valuable content when you have it ready. That could be a new report or an event series.”

As well as making sure your storytelling is high quality, it’s important that those stories are relevant to your customer. Saying the same thing to everyone will have less impact than tailoring the message to the recipient. This is where segmentation, which requires understanding who you’re talking to and where they are on the customer journey, is useful. 

“The ‘spray and pray’ approach isn’t meaningful and can even end up backfiring,” says Vecchio.

Going beyond email

Email is just one part of a B2B demand-generation campaign. Encountering a brand in different settings builds familiarity and trust. This is one of the reasons why storytelling initiatives should span multiple channels.

“Since the B2B buying journey isn’t linear, it needs touchpoints across the channels – the array of web, SEO, email, organic and paid ads and content partnerships helps to precisely measure and steer your campaign,” says Konstanze Just, who focuses on growth and lifestyle marketing at LinkedIn. “And, this makes the budget go further.”

One final important shift in mindset for marketers who want to build successful demand-gen engines is to expand who they want on the journey. Nurturing a solitary account contact is not enough. 

Camm sums it up neatly: “Enterprise sales aren’t decided by one person. Intent is indicated when multiple account contacts engage with you.”

For years, marketing professionals have made third-party cookies a key ingredient in their marketing mix. The ability to track website visitors, collect their data and then target ads as they browse the internet has proved invaluable in attracting potential customers and getting sales over the line. 

But consumers and regulators have grown sceptical of the privacy controls used in such data collection. For customers, ads that follow them round the web are annoying at best and creepy and invasive at worst. Plus, privacy experts have long raised concerns about how much information is gathered and how it's used. For instance, one UK police force faced criticism for inadvertently using a third-party tracking pixel that allowed Facebook to deliver targeted ads to victims of crime.

The future of third-party cookies

Although Google has abandoned plans to block third-party cookies on the Chrome browser, the company's revised cookie policy still represents a significant change, according to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Moreover, because Google's new policy will likely give consumers the option to block cookies, it could mean that marketing strategies based on this third-party data will become less effective. After all, it's no secret that consumers are increasingly concerned about data privacy – a KPMG study, for instance, found that 86% of adults say they are worried about their online data privacy. 

But Annabel Kaye, director of consulting firm KoffeeKlatch, insists that data privacy regulation and proposed private sector initiatives shouldn't pose any problems for brands that are transparent about their data collection.

Given the importance of third-party cookies to many marketing strategies, it's unlikely that firms will abandon them completely. However, the Google episode may be enough to motivate some marketing teams to look for an alternative. For many, this will include a combination of first-party cookies – those placed and tracked by your own website, on your own website – and third-party intent data. 

Detailed insights from intent data

Intent data can be created internally, using your own website data. But it is more often bought in from an expert third party, such as publishers, who work with intent data specialists to create targeted content on behalf of brands. 

Unlike website analytics, intent data is a broad set of data about user interactions with your website, social media campaigns and email marketing. This data can be collected, analysed and structured to provide useful insights into what customers want, what challenges they are facing, the language they use and which products and pages are most interesting to them. 

What’s the difference between website data and intent data? For Kaye, it boils down to scale and depth. Rather than just knowing your customer added a sweater to their shopping cart, for instance, intent data means that you’ll know they also watched a YouTube video about a trend or downloaded a guide about a project they’re planning. 

Specialist intent data agencies such as G2 or Bombora use natural-language and deep-learning models to analyse online consumer behaviour and engagement data to build sophisticated models that will predict buying habits. 

The industry has always had intent data, says Kaye: “If you were networking in the 1980s and someone said they were thinking of changing their car, you’d ask questions. Which model are they considering? What's their budget? When will they buy a new car?”  

What has changed with the rise of digital marketing and big data is that modern intent data can be gathered in vast quantities and analysed to produce more detailed and accurate insights than ever before. This allows marketing campaigns to be both more efficient and more targeted.  

For marketing teams, it is critical to ensure that any supplier of third-party intent data is compliant with GDPR and transparent in its data collection. “As a marketer, I want to work out where and when you might spend money with me. But as a consumer, I think my information is private and you should go away,” says Kaye. “If you want to be a trusted brand, the solution is to be transparent, work with partners who are transparent and ensure that users understand what data is collected and how to turn it on or off.” 

If your marketing team is trying to find ways to cut back, you’re not alone. Less than a quarter of CMOs (24%) say they have sufficient budget to execute their 2024 strategy, according to Gartner’s most recent CMO spend survey. 

As a result, many brands are ditching partnerships with external agencies and publishers and instead attempting to tackle demand generation themselves. While this may seem wise, it could also be a false economy. Jessica-Jane Winquist, marketing and communications manager at AML Hub, says it’s all too easy for things to go wrong when companies go DIY. 

“We've all heard that you can't do everything and do it well. But that doesn't stop businesses from trying to keep everything in house to save money, despite often lacking the expertise. This leads to a split in focus, which is detrimental to effective marketing efforts and leads to an overall reduction in results.” 

Because many marketing teams are under-resourced, Winquist believes that teaming up with a publishing partner to drive demand-gen efforts is common sense. The expertise and audience of a strong partner can greatly boost performance when you need it most. 

 

Mark Choueke, author of B2B marketing bestseller Boring2Brave, agrees that working with a relevant media partner is a shortcut to getting in front of your target prospect. “Unless you’re among the 1% of B2B giants like Google, Slack or AWS, your target audience is near impossible to reach without an expertly crafted and paid-for media and distribution strategy.” 

The halo effect

Another major benefit of working with a respected publishing partner is that it confers trust. Brand association can be especially valuable for younger brands, says Anna Tankel, senior growth manager at Collective Benefits – and people buy from brands they trust.

“As a B2B brand, connecting with your audience requires strong partnerships, especially if you’re a newer brand or you're entering ew markets. Building brand awareness from scratch is time-consuming and most brands are up against the clock. A trustworthy content partner with an established audience in your niche area can boost your brand's reputation immediately, helping you to connect with new audiences and generate leads.” 

But how do brands select the right publishing partners to work with and guarantee a decent return on investment? Relevance to your target market, a solid reputation and an audience that will find value in your content are essential considerations. And, it isn’t always about size. A small-circulation newsletter that is read by your target buyers is likely to produce better results than an email going out to a huge database of disengaged people. 

“It all starts with your ideal customer profile,” says Chrissy Krampert, CMO at Jellyvision. “Picking the right publishing partner must begin with a deep understanding of your customer. The perfect insight on the most high-performing page on a well-trafficked website won’t convert unless it's the right page on the right website for your potential customer.” 

Building a genuine partnership

Once you have a clear understanding of who you’re targeting and which publishing partners can help you reach that audience, there’s still some work to do. Success depends on both parties' commitment to going further than the base level of mediocre partnership products that are all too frequently seen.

Brands should consider what the publishing partner can bring to the table in terms of journalistic credibility, access to exclusive first-party data and professional design capabilities. If they can help you to hit on a genuinely interesting news angle, provide expert commentary and statistics to back it up and wrap it all in an attractive package, they’re providing value for money.  

As Choueke explains: “A brand paying £4,000 for the publisher to send a random 'email shot' to its database is the equivalent of flushing the money down the lavatory. Instead, spend your money dreaming up a blisteringly powerful, meaningful campaign that speaks to the day-to-day concerns of a publication's audience, and work with the media owner to construct a genuine partnership. It'll cost you more but you stand the chance to be seen as a credible, authoritative and respected influencer with something key to say about your industry's agenda.”