B2B Demand Generation Means “Know Your Customer”
Demand generation has become a very popular phrase in B2B content marketing circles. Find out the original intention behind this concept and why knowing your customers is critical to applying it successfully.
My first real boss, and probably my greatest mentor, had a strong aversion to buzzwords and jargon. She helped me appreciate the need for plain language in the business world, especially in marketing content.
So, I’ve never been a fan of trendy “marketing-speak.” In the B2B marketing world, not to mention the rest of my life, I’m a firm believer in writing to express, not to impress.
So, I’ve been feeling a bit cranky this week. The phrase “demand generation” has been turning up in my inbox an inordinate number of times lately.
Gaining the Interest of Potential Customers
When people use this term properly, they mean gaining the interest of potential customers and moving them closer to buying your product. To generate demand for a B2B brand, marketers need to understand their target audience, and then create engaging content that resonates with their business needs.
Demand generation targets decision makers who are still in the awareness phase of a purchasing process. Prospects have a general idea about a business situation or problem, but they’re?not familiar with your brand, or how your product can meet their company’s needs or solve their problems.
Your target audience for demand generation is either at the broad mouth of your funnel or even oblivious to it. That’s why another of my former bosses dismissed demand generation as “missionary selling,” which he didn’t mean as a complement.
More Comfortable Spending Money on Nurturing Leads
Like a lot of B2B marketing leaders, he was more comfortable spending money on nurturing leads, building brand reputation and word-of-mouth marketing. He thought efforts to try to create demand among buyers with limited awareness were costly, time-consuming, took too much sales effort, and created customer resentment.
He wasn’t alone. Many executives believe that tactics like nurturing existing leads involve less risk, less cost and less effort than targeting people who’ve never heard of their brands. Frankly, some others don’t fully appreciate the distinction between brand versus lead generation in the first place.
In their 2023 Content Marketing for Demand Generation research report, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) quotes a B2B technology marketer saying, “We can’t get the resources/budget to create programs to teach businesses why the challenge our solution solves even exists. They only want to spend money on people who are already Googling for products to solve it.”
Confusion and Resistance to Demand Generation
Some of this confusion and resistance has to do with the term “demand generation” itself. It arose first in B2B marketing circles in the 1990s, and then made its way into the B2C lexicon.
So, demand generation is a comparatively new marketing term. Like a lot of catchy phrases, it tends to be overused and even misused.
Since management tends to view everything we do in marketing as generating demand for our brands, the term can seem vague, undefined or even superfluous. I believe that ambiguity accounts for the confusion between lead generation and demand generation, for example.
Ten Marketers Would Give a Dozen Conflicting Opinions
I think it would be interesting to hold a focus group with ten marketers and ask them to define the terms “demand generation,” “lead generation,” “customer acquisition” and “brand awareness.” If I were a betting man, I’d wager those ten marketers would give us at least a dozen conflicting opinions on every one of those definitions.
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Marketers have raised some other concerns about demand generation. One of the main objections is that it seems to emphasize a basic need for a product or service instead of building long-term, trust-based business relationships between B2B brands and client companies.
Other B2B content creators think that demand generation stresses the top end of the marketing funnel at the expense of later phases. They believe this creates a disconnect between abstract content that attracts attention and messaging to support the rest of the sales cycle.
Transactional Mentality, Not Loyalty and Trust
Thinking in terms of demand generation can lead to a transactional mentality rather than a mindset based on loyalty and trust. Personally, the phrase “generating demand” reminds me of Charlie Chaplin on the relentless assembly line in his classic satire Modern Times.
Demand generation critics are calling for a return to the better-understood concept of the marketing mix. They advocate a more holistic perspective that refocuses on the traditional principles of product, price, place and promotion.
For instance, in that CMI report I mentioned, 84% of those surveyed thought content marketing was the most effective strategy for demand generation. The top content types they identified for the early stages of the buyer’s journey were podcasts, blog posts and videos, in that order, which is consistent with other data.?
Excellent Quality, Moderate Success
Yet, there were also some puzzling responses in the study. For example, 66% of those surveyed rated the overall quality of their marketing content as either good or excellent. Yet, 79% of respondents said their content was only moderately or minimally successful.
The solution to this paradox between quality and results seems to lie in the answers respondents gave about customer research. Their top two challenges were knowing a customer’s current stage in the buyer’s journey and gaining insights into what customers need at each stage of that journey.
Lost Track of Fundamental Principle
So, getting back to the original intent behind demand generation, marketers or their bosses seem to have lost track of a fundamental principle. I’ll repeat what I said at the outset of this edition, “Marketers need to understand their target audience, and then create engaging content that resonates with their business needs.”
Creating B2B marketing content that drives results takes three things, thorough research, effective storytelling, and an engaging style. The research is the foundation on which brands have to build a demand generation strategy.
Otherwise, you’re telling a beautifully crafted story to which nobody in your audience can relate. Before focusing on “demand generation,” we need to remind ourselves of a much older, time-tested marketing adage, “know your customer.”
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