🕵🏻‍♂️ B2B demand gen strategy

Hey ,

For many marketers out there, demand generation is just about running ads with ungated content and occasional thought leadership posts, podcasts, and blog articles.

While these activities should be added to your demand gen mix, they are by no means the complete demand strategy.

In fact, demand gen is more of an ongoing, long-term activity designed to raise awareness and generate real demand for your product or service. Here are some fundamental objectives of demand generation:

• Increase the volume of inbound opportunities;

• Warm up target accounts to make it easier for salespeople to get in touch;

• Shorten the sales cycle and drastically increase your win rate.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share with you demand gen key pillars.

Let’s get right into it.

Demand gen strategy and its key pillars

B2B demand generation is like a demand waterfall that has 3 pillars:

1. Awareness and demand generation activities.

2. Content distribution

3. Demand capturing

Let’s break down each of these 3 pillars.

1. Awareness and demand generation activities.

To develop a successful demand generation strategy, you first need to define how your customers are searching, learning, and buying.

Then, you define the activities that can create awareness and demand on a consistent basis. These include:

• 1:few partnership webinars and market research with niche associations or communities;

• podcast interviews with target accounts;

• Content co-creation with target accounts;

• personalized content hubs for buyer’s enablement and further nurturing;

• Targeting accounts with top-performing content to boost awareness;

• Retargeting accounts with detailed case studies/use cases to identify engaged accounts for nurturing and demand capturing;

• Well-researched guest posts on the blogs/newsletters/communities your target accounts are following;

• Blog posts focused on solving specific challenges/answering questions your buyers have instead of generic writing for a high-volume keyword;

• Proactive content distribution;

• Niche-focused events to boost awareness and establish a relationship;

• A newsletter that covers a specific topic in-depth instead of pitches and corporate press releases.

All these activities can be categorized and put into 4 pillars.

2. Content distribution

Unless you are a well-known brand that consistently produces top-notch content that your audience longs for, you need to have a proactive distribution plan. Under no circumstances should you limit your content distribution plan to ads alone.

Here are 3 content distribution tactics you can start using today.

1. Build your own audience that you can connect with directly and easily. No middleman.

Email newsletters, Whatsapp/Telegram channels, slack communities, and social media, are some of the core assets that allow you to connect with your audience directly and not depend on other platforms.

2. Borrowed audience

Find non-competitive companies that also sell to your audience and run co-marketing campaigns. This can be done through:

• Educational webinars

• Mentions and link exchange

• Featuring each other on podcasts, etc.

3. Involve your sales team in your content distribution plan

This tactic works like a charm because your sales team is already in contact with your target accounts. A posteriori, they know them (or at least, they should).

And by taking part in content distribution, your sales teams position themselves as trusted advisors, not as SDRs that no one generally wants to talk to.

3. Demand capturing

Traditionally, demand capturing in B2B marketing means

• Running direct ads related to your product (e.g. Ad promoting email marketing software to people who search on Google for this keyword).

• Optimizing landing pages for the same keyword.

• Running a retargeting campaign promoting a demo or free trial to people who visited the website.

While these tactics are wildly used for low ACV B2B products with a short sales cycle, they generate miserable returns for complex high ACV products with a long sales cycle.

For complex high ACV products with a long sales cycle, you capture demand at the stage where buyers show a significant engagement and interest in your product but made no final decision.

Maybe they’re doing some more research, evaluating your competitors, checking your use cases, or trying to figure out if your product is the right fit for their needs at this particular time.

So, instead of pushing them to book a demo call, set up an engagement threshold and track their engagement across your website and other channels. This will help you identify the accounts that demonstrate high interest in your product.

Here’s a practical example of an engagement threshold:

• an account spent 30 minutes on your website reading a case study;

• then they checked your pricing page;

• afterward, they signed up for a product webinar;

• in total, they visited your website 5 times in the last 30 days.

Then you proceed with warming up and activating the engaged accounts with these account-based marketing tactics and promoting relevant case studies or customer stories.

Here is a video where we explain in detail the process of tracking account engagement.

Another way you can capture demand is through a buyer enablement program.

Buyer Enablement program

This is a solution-based content hub to capture demand from warm prospects. Here’s an example of an ABM content hub.

Content hubs come with 2 fantastic benefits.

1. Buyer enablement.

Keep in mind that most of the time, your sales team will be speaking to champions, not decision-makers.

That said, they will receive questions about:

• Budget Justification and ROI

• Vertical use cases and results they can expect

• Migration, security, and onboarding

• The risks of choosing you as a vendor

So it's wise to include answers to all these questions in your content.

2. Intent insights.

You'll see who engaged with your content, how often, and what exactly they checked out. This information is extremely valuable for accurate and timely follow-up.

To accelerate demand capturing you need to have a buyer enablement program -content hubs that include buyer-focused content + ongoing nurturing.

Follow this process, and your sales team will never complain about the pipeline and marketing-sourced revenue again.

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QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

Dear , your help is needed. If you can answer any of the questions below, please click on the link and share your ideas.

• Hi Team, may I ask if there are any examples of content collaboration? I've been thinking about getting quotes and interviews. Are there any others that have worked for you? Additionally, what is your outreach message? How are you transitioning them from content collaboration to moving to the next buying stage?

• Hello, I am looking to set up a full-funnel LinkedIn campaign. Does anyone have a sample journey for each stage of the funnel, type of content, and format that resonates? And any tips on how to set it up properly?

• I want to build a database with landing pages and showcase their performance, like the conversion rate. Who is open for a 2-min interview related to their campaigns' performance?

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO