🕵🏻‍♂️ Launching and scaling a B2B demand gen program

Demand generation is now a buzzword. Lots of marketers talk about it and share case studies. But many B2B companies still wonder how they can implement it, especially when they have a high ACV and long sales cycle.

In this newsletter, we’ll show you the framework of a demand generation program at a B2B company that sells high ACV products.

Specifically, you’ll learn the 6 stages of launching and scaling B2B demand gen programs and how to use customer research to amplify demand gen programs.

Let's dive into it!

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 they may not have seen, and on how your product can help them.

But how do I launch a successful demand gen program? Glad you asked!

6 stages of launching and scaling B2B demand gen program

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 step is a huge part of a demand gen strategy.

Why?

Because knowing your audience can make all the difference: who do you want to be known by and what for?

The truth is, with high ACV, you don’t need a lot of clients, you just need the right clients.

And that ultimately leads you to align with your sales and executive teams on your ideal customer profile ICP and the target segments you’re going after. That implies that your internal teams have to work hand in hand in order to identify where the bottlenecks are. 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. Or do you want to help them generate opportunities with for example 20% of their target accounts?

So it's very important to create content that stands out, and to reach that level you need to have a unique point of view or a unique perspective in your industry.

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 thing: Define the activities and the channels

You need to be active on the channels where your customers are and run activities that capture their attention.

You'll also need to have a calendar of regular marketing activities (it might be webinars, workshops, bootcamps, or B2B marketing summits that you do daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) where you can communicate with and educate your buyers.

But most importantly, make sure your audience does not forget about you by sharing content.

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

It's not just about creating content, it's all about how you engage proactively with your audience.

Some mistakes that B2B companies make is to think that they need 50 different tactics to grow their business but it's just about getting to know the activities that generate revenue and excel at these activities. Obviously, you'll have to experiment and see what works for you but this is a whole process. As nothing works out of the blue.

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.

“And that's typically what the Full Funnel strategy stands for: creating awareness, generating the demand, and then capturing that demand”. Andrei Zinkevich, co-founder at FullFunnel.io

That said, make sure your customers have a successful 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.

As you may have already guessed, B2B demand gen is not all about promoting your content on a social basis but you need to have different types of content for specific goals.

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

The whole point here is to influence the buying process, from the top funnel awareness creation down to closing deals.

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 — all together — 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 the demand gen campaigns

All campaigns should not be measured the same way. Obviously, you can't set the same metrics and targets anyhow. You have to tie a specific campaign to its related revenue.

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?

Stage 6: Blended tracking

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

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

• Digital Analytics — the 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 gen programs?

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

But the hitch with this approach is that:

1. What kind of questions are you asking your customers?

2. Do you ask yourself relevant 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 types of questions, you may never get the entire picture of the buying journey; just 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.

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

This is not the right way.

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

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

• What social 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. The latter 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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Adechina D. ODJO