B2B Marketers, We Need To Talk About Lead Generation

I talk to dozens of B2B marketers every month in my work and I always start our first conversations by asking, among other things, what their goals are.

Almost inevitably, they'll start with "I just care about generating leads."

Sigh.

Let's start with this: every B2B business needs to generate leads.

Ostensibly, leads are one of the ways we get customers. That's how money comes in. No money, no business. And in general, companies rely on the activities of marketing to help get many of those leads. I don't know a single B2B company that would say nah, we don't need customers.

So we can probably all agree that sure, one of our objectives is to generate leads. But this is where it starts to go a bit awry.

Lead generation is an outcome. Not just an objective. And achieving that outcome relies on a comprehensive marketing strategy.

So today, we're going to cover four important truths of lead generation so we can all keep it in proper context.

#1. Marketing is a system.

Marketing is dependent on a whole, healthy business in order to have impact and success. And within marketing itself, there's an interdependent set of disciplines that need to work together, not in isolation.

For example, marketing itself isn't enough to make a software company successful. That company needs a customer to sell to (the market itself) and a software product that they want to buy and use, which requires money and engineering resources. That product needs to be priced appropriately and positioned in such a way that it clearly solves a problem for the target customer. They may also need salespeople to help sell it, support people to keep customers happy, a financial organization to make the money move around properly, and the basics of operating within trade laws, employment laws...you see where I'm going.

Within marketing itself, we also have a system at work. Disciplines like brand, communications, media and advertising, and operations come together with their own sets of embedded tactics that make them function. Brand relies on communications and media to get the message out to the world. Advertising relies on great creative, powerful distribution, and strong positioning. Effective communication relies on relevant and credible channels, clear messaging, and a strong brand reputation. Each element is only as strong as the weakest one in the system.

When we do a number of those things well, and in concert as part of a well-designed marketing strategy, leads are a result of all of the parts of the engine working together.

#2. Demand generation is a strategic job, not a tactical one.

There are only ever a finite number of people who are "in market" at any given time, or actively looking for the kind of solution you provide. And in a B2B world where we often have bigger-ticket purchases (say, an annual contract for accounting services) and a long time between them, that "in market" moment for any one customer is infrequent at best.

That means that creating demand relies on all of the parts of marketing in order to reach and capture the interest of those customers who are not yet in market.

We have to make sure they know we exist and what we're about (hi, brand marketing), they have to know what we do and why we do it better than other people (hey, positioning), and we need to reach as many of them as possible with various types of messaging, media, and information. Consistently. Over quite a long period of time.

See why it's silly to ask your single digital ad campaign and your whitepaper download to do that job all by itself?

Which brings me to...

#3. Tactics can never get all of the blame...or all of the credit.

Because marketing is a system, and lead generation is an outcome of the system working well, no single tactic can be entirely accountable for its success or failure.

That's why I get a fistful of (more) grey hair every time someone wants to know whether blue buttons work better than green, or whether they should use a square video or a horizontal one to "get more leads".

Those granular, fine-tuning optimizations are rarely if ever the problem. If you're doing well already, sure. You might eke out another .02% conversion on your monthly report with the tiny stuff.

If demand gen isn't delivering and growing consistently, however, the place to start is with fundamental questions:

• Do we know who our customers are and where to find them? What they care about? What's similar about them, what's different about them, what makes them tick?
• Do people know our brand in the first place, or are we total strangers to them?
• Do they know what we do and what's special about us?
• Is our product or service compelling and solving a real problem?
• Is our messaging crystal clear? Are we getting that message out in multiple ways?
• Is the content we're asking these audiences to read, watch, or interact with interesting? Distinctive? Something that's useful or fun or unique to us somehow?

More often than not, the problem lives in one of those questions, and not the granular details. Even if it's working? It's not likely it's a single brilliant campaign that's done it, but rather the campaign as a conduit that builds on the long tail of brand building and value creation that's come before.

But there's one more thing to remember.

#4. Marketing - including lead generation - is a long game.

There is no easy button to generate leads. No instant, just-add-water fix that will magically make the opportunities flood in the front door.

Building a business and a brand takes time. Consistency. Trust and credibility. Growth comes from reaching more people, doing the work to educate and soften the market, and out of those efforts, capturing more customers. That's a long-term effort.

Most marketing I see that fails does so because the marketers behind it decided that if a wheelbarrow of leads doesn't pour in during the first 30 days they've run a campaign, it's "not working", and they're unwilling to dig deeper, blaming the campaign itself. What's more likely? They didn't build the foundation first, and so the tactical lead generation efforts aren't rooted to anything. They're just desperate pleas for email addresses with some thin, self-serving content as bait (we'll talk about why a contact capture is not a sales-ready lead another day).

Moreover, if you aren't continually and systematically building more awareness and brand credibility in the broader market, sooner or later you're going to exhaust the small amount of in-market customers that are ready to respond, and you'll eventually run out of fuel for the engine.

That's why marketing is a long-term discipline, not just a string of short-term campaigns strung together, and why doing fewer things and doing them better is a far more lucrative strategy in the long run. The market doesn't jump to become "leads" for you just because you desperately need revenue.

As we go here at B2B Content Lab, we'll certainly talk tactics, and we'll get into some of those more optimization-level things you should think about.

But all of the best laid tactics are useless without a strong strategic foundation, and when it comes to lead generation, it's even more vital.

Let's make 2021 the year we put demand generation in proper context, design sound strategy before we turn to slapdash tactics, and stop asking our content and campaigns to do the impossible.