Customer Research 🔎 Demand Gen 📈

Dear Trencher,

The most popular advice when it comes to using customer research to enhance your demand generation campaigns is to talk to your customers and ask them questions. That's fine but…

The problem with this approach is that you're one step away from failure if you don't ask the right questions. Speaking of the right questions, they include:

• What’s happening in the business that motivates prospects to look for your products?

• What attracts their attention to your products?

• How are they going to research other solutions like yours?

If you don't consider these questions, you may never get the full picture of the buying journey. You'll only get part of it.

After this first step, you need to find out who's involved in the buying process - and who's not:

• What are their major concerns?

• At what stage do they join the buying committee?

• What justification do you provide for product purchase and how?

Then comes the value. Provide solutions that stand out from the competition and make sure your customers notice that difference.

Next step - the channels!

Sorry to break it to you, but this question can be improved.

Look, if you want to have practical insights, you should rather ask yourself:

• What platforms or websites do they generally visit?

• What are the newsletters they read?

• What social media do they use?

• Who do they follow and why?

• And even more, what comments do they drop on the posts of the people they follow?

These are tons of insights that you can actually check and use to create a map of informational needs. It is a document that gives you an understanding of the different topic clusters and questions that your target audience is genuinely interested in.

How to refine demand capture?

Some people usually compare demand generation to demand capture. But these are two different stages. Andrei explained it well when he said “You first need to create demand and then capture it”.

Actually, if you only focus on demand gen without taking demand capture into account, you can’t make any accurate predictions.

Why?

First, because nothing is predictable in this industry; you can’t just be running an activity and predict the exact number of opportunities or amount of revenue it will generate on a monthly basis.

Secondly, you can’t control the quality of inbound opportunities. In other words, you never know who will reach out or not. So even if you have opportunities that get an ABM consultancy, there might be low-quality opportunities that don’t fit your ICP.

That said, you need to capture demand by:

1. Leveraging high-intent channels

Here, you can check and watch the episode we recorded with Justin — we shared how to leverage insights from the digital crowd on LinkedIn retargeting.

2. Creating dedicated content hubs

This can be articles, case studies, testimonials — different content hubs each related to a specific part of your ABM service.

Thanks to this content hub you can actually see who engages with the content and how much time they spend on that particular content. For example, if a person checked your GTM program, this indicates that they’re interested in a “go to market” strategy.

Obviously, this won’t give you a 100% success rate, but these are just strategies you can put in place to capture demand and activate some of your accounts.

You can also share some materials such as your product benefits, social proof, case studies, etc. that will be considered as a call to action — the goal being to showcase your product or solution.

In the same vein, content hubs also provide intent known as engagement signals.

3. Leveraging engagement and intent signals

Track engagement on LinkedIn, connect with people who are regularly engaged and look for high intent on your website.

4. Timely personalized campaigns — personalized outreach

Another way to capture demand is to remove friction from the buying experience.

So, prior to generating more opportunities and interest in your products, it’s super important to reduce friction from the buying process.

Truth is, buyers don't say this very often, but they endure a lot of annoying practices from several companies such as:

1. Hiding the price — some companies do not bother to put it on the pricing page or do not have it at all;

2. They force clients to repeat the process of responding to questions all over again;

3. Their sales want to engage with customers too early;

4. No buying intent — just because someone joins the webinar or downloads one of your ebooks doesn’t mean they want to buy from you;

5. Not defining the right criteria for the MQL before sending them to the sales team;

6. Sales not being able to answer questions about the product;

7. Not giving much information or description about the product on their website;

8. Making customers wait.

So, you should avoid these (tons of) friction points. Your goal is to help buyers have a smooth and frictionless experience, and it just takes 2 points to get to that level:

1. Providing the right answers to questions they have at every specific stage; and

2. Reaching out easily, quickly, and smoothly.

Unless you reduce friction, you are definitely going to generate a lot of demand that will be wasted.

NEW BLOG POST ON TRENCHES BLOG

In this article, we’ll walk you through the nitty gritty of lead gen and demand gen.

But not only that, we’ll also draw on Cognism’s experience to guide you through the steps you need to take to make a smooth transition from lead generation to demand generation.

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Marketing's secret weapon to driving more leads 🤫

QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

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

• Hi! Who in the organization is typically responsible for mapping the Buyer Journey? Who else gets involved? What are their roles?

• Hey guys, I’m looking for someone who has successfully implemented Conversions API and/or Conversion Leads optimizations for Meta advertising. The idea is to compare setup, tests, and learnings to ensure full efficiency.

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO