🕵🏻‍♂️ Launching a demand gen program?

Dear Trencher,

In this newsletter, we’ll show you how to launch a demand generation program at a B2B company that sells high ACV products.

Let’s start first with the definition of demand generation.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is a marketing tactic whose ultimate goal is to build brand awareness and accelerate business growth by creating and capturing demand for a specific product.

It helps you stand out in competitive markets while educating your target audience on needs that they may not have seen, and on how your product can help them.

6 Key Steps to Launch and Scale a Demand Generation Program in a B2B Company

Demand gen is not just a mix of organic and paid tactics. It’s a long process that starts with:

STAGE 1: Positioning

This first stage is a huge part of a demand generation strategy.

Why?

Because at its core, demand generation is all about who your audience is: who do you want to be known by, and what do you want to be known for?

But the thing with companies that sell high ACV products is that they don’t really need a large number of customers.

Yes, you read that right. They don’t need tons of clients. All they need are the right customers.

That ultimately leads them to align with their sales and executive teams on their ideal customer profile ICP and the target segments they’re going after. That implies that their internal teams have to work hand in hand in order to identify where the bottleneck stands.

Team alignment — ring a bell?

Because after all, the end goal of demand gen is to generate demand that will lead to inbound opportunities and pipeline and sales.

Next, you have to figure out what your unique value proposition is for your target audience and what you want to be recognized for:

1. Do you help companies get better ROI?

2. Do you want to help them generate opportunities with for example 20% of their target accounts?

In a nutshell, it’s very important to create content that stands out, but to reach that level you need to have a unique point of view or a unique perspective in your industry.

That leads us to the second key step to launch demand generation at a B2B company with high ACV.

STAGE 2: Define key awareness and demand creation activities and channels

This stage consists of creating a plan, including the two following major parts:

First step: Define the activities and the channels

This is a twofold process. First, you need to be active on the channels where your customers are, and second, you need to organize and execute the activities that capture their attention and interest.

You’ll also need to have a calendar of regular marketing activities (it might be webinars, workshops, boot camps, or B2B marketing summits that you do daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) that you can use to educate your buyers.

Most importantly, make sure your audience does not forget about you by sharing content on a regular basis.

Second step: Optimize your content for your audience — whether it is on LinkedIn or Twitter, your target audience should be captured.

Beyond content creation, what really matters is how you proactively engage with your audience.

And this is where many B2B companies get it wrong. They usually think they need 50 different tactics to grow their business when really, they just need to do some experiments and find out which activities generate the most revenue and focus their efforts there.

STAGE 3: Prioritize content

As you experiment and determine what content works for you — or not — starting from creating awareness, you’ll have to identify expansion and upselling opportunities.

That said, make sure your customers have a great experience with your product and that they are getting the expected results. Ultimately, you’ll have to identify the upgrading opportunities to document your case studies.

However, in case your customers are enjoying your product but are not willing to join customer interviews and recommend you, here’s what you can do:

• Determine some areas you need to improve on;

• Have an honest conversation with them and let them see what is in it for them.

STAGE 4: Align revenue teams on content, activities, and responsibilities to influence the buying process

The goal here is to influence the buying process, right from awareness creation to closing the deal.

For that, you need to :

1. Align all your teams, whether it is executives, management team, SDRs, content team, etc., on the exact same cause of your campaign

2. Define the main activities, the channels, and the content that should be used at each stage — altogether — so that everyone knows what is expected from them and what their responsibilities are.

Make sure each team involved in the process understands what they are there for.

STAGE 5: Create stand-alone reports for your demand gen campaigns

All campaigns should not be measured the same way. I hate to be the one to break it down to you but you can’t set up the same metrics and targets for all your campaigns.

You have to tie a specific campaign to its related revenue; that is how you can clearly see the MQLs and where they are coming from.

So, track the right audience. You may also track target accounts on LinkedIn, the number of sales conversations, the number of discovery calls, the number of opportunities, and the pipeline value that is coming from a specific activity — but also media invites that are correlated with the quality of your content.

But how to measure all of these? The answer is in the 6th and last key step to launch demand generation at a b2b company with high ACV.

STAGE 6: Blended tracking

Blended tracking is one of the most effective approaches to tracking resources through:

• Self-attribution — how did they hear about you?

• Digital Analytics — channels that were identified in the digital analytics (Google Analytics, email software, etc.);

• Customer interviews — collect more insights about how customers identify you.

These 6 stages are obviously important but there are other tactics you can take advantage of to amplify your demand gen programs.

How to use customer research to amplify demand generation programs?

Here, you should know how to incorporate customer research and how to leverage the insights you get from it.

Some people might tell you to talk to your customers, and ask them questions, yay!

But the hitch with this approach is that many people do not ask the right questions such as:

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

• What attracts their attention to your products?

• How are they going to research solutions like yours?

When you don’t think about these categories of questions, you may never get the entire picture of the buying journey. You’ll barely get a part of it.

The next thing is to know who is involved in the buying process:

• 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, as we’ve mentioned above. You should provide solutions that are different from the ones of the competition and your customers should be able to notice that difference.

After that, the channels! One of the most inappropriate questions B2B marketers ask their customers is: Hey! What channel did you use to discover our product?

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

In order to have practical insights, you should rather ask yourself:

• What platforms, websites, or newsletters do they generally check?

• 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?

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

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO