Evolution of Demand Generation

I’ve been reaching out to CxOs, VPs, Directors, etc. ever since I began my career. The way we communicate with them is an ever-evolving challenge. 

Back in the day we sent a Chinese menu of our services, since the analytics industry was new(ish) a lot of senior executives were open to conversations. Some organizations only just began to explore how they could go beyond excel and build intelligent dashboards so they were more than happy to open a dialogue. A lot of them were looking for knowledge, as a former boss would call them “knowledge hunters”. But, there’s nothing wrong with that, if that knowledge can eventually turn into business for you! 

Then slowly the field burst and literally everyone was emailing executives with a “menu” of what they could do and they could choose what they want and have a dialogue. The “etc.” came after at least 8 different things that a consulting firm could do for a client, alongside came the names of the biggest marquee clients that worked for us. This too very rapidly got replicated. Cold calling barely ever worked, no one is on their desks any more or the calls get screened by an EA who’ll never ever put your through to them. I believe an experienced EA can actually negotiate trade deals better than most ministers. So the annoying cold calling is officially dead and buried! Anyone tells you otherwise, ask them the last time they bought something over the phone and if the answer wasn’t 2011, find the time machine they came from and go back in time and punch a dictator or change the world.

Now, we are the cusp of a new age in marketing, emails are being blocked out by sophisticated servers, litigations like GDPR are making it even more difficult for us to reaching out to people on their emails even, let alone the phone. The pull strategy is getting pushed into oblivion. The “opt-in” strategy for getting executives to opt for your mails and keeping them opted on is the Herculean challenge that we face. In the early 20s the newspaper ads were the go-to marketing tool, then came the radio, then television which killed the radio star (shameless 80s song plugin), then the pop-ups on our internet explorer, by now you get the spiel. This year we are in an evolutionary phase the mercury of marketing is in retrograde it seems. 

‘Pull’ is slowly becoming the new ‘push’ in sales and marketing, how do you really pull-in a customer while maintaining an effective push strategy is a question which needs an in-depth understanding. 

Content is still Royalty!

To build an effective pull strategy, the first and foremost thing that you need is Content. Without good quality content, you’re toast! Trust me! I’ve been in situations where I’ve run campaigns after campaigns but nothing comes out, then one or two well-researched and thought out articles or white papers come out and they just bring in a surge of good quality leads. Look at the amount of content you consume daily, and think if you have access to so much information, wouldn’t your prospects too? There are blogs dedicated to comparing televisions, headphones, and even ice cream. Content can be in any form, you can have fantastic YouTube videos, podcasts, white-papers, thought notes, etc. & more or less posting content is free. Creating backlinks may cost you but that done effectively is money well spent. 

Native Advertising isn’t for BuzzFeed anymore!

You need it too! How else will you build back-links? This is the easiest way to bring your content at the top of searches across platforms. Neil Patel suggests building a list of bloggers and sites which are in a similar field as your product or solution and writing to them to publish articles or content about you, the idea is to have relevant back-links else it won’t deliver any search results. But getting content published is rather tough so working with native ads and keeping a small portion of your budget can really be helpful to your brand. Further, most of these sites have dedicated readers, for example, I spend at least 40 minutes a day reading Retaildive, Wired, and a few other business-focused sites. Many of us do that and so do our prospects, this can also drive organic site traffic and not just useful for back-links

SEO/SEM, didn’t we do that already?

Well Yes and No, a passive SEO strategy is only as good as your next google search, you’re going to constantly be pushed down in rankings by competition on search engines. Surprisingly a lot of B2B focused companies forget that a simple google search is what can influence decision-makers. Look at your buying pattern, how often has an email or a cold call influenced you to buy something? I just hang up on cold callers, barely read emails and if the emails are too frequent I hit unsubscribe. That's what we all do then why do we expect our buyer personas to be any different? They’re people like us who hate intrusive marketing. SEO/SEM is pretty simple yet quite complex, the right keyword can make it or break it. As a marketer, we need to hunt the best possible keywords to enable our content to be in front of the right people and create the right kind of organic site traffic. Thankfully, we have a lot of free and paid tools to help us do our job, Ubersuggest from Neil Patel, SEMRush, Moz, and Google Keyword Console is an excellent arsenal of tools for most marketers. A quick trick that I learned from a recent course on Pluralsight was to also cross-check them with Bing Search. Bing may not be famous but can actually help you narrow down and refine your keywords.

SEM is a more tactical and on-going activity, we need to make the best use of our budget. Blowing up big bucks on this doesn’t make any sense, the best way is to ensure what you’re presenting resonates the most with your audience and tying back to the first point on “content”, just remember relevant content will bring in people through these ads. Answer key questions on your site about the solution or product you offer, answer why do you need this solution? who needs it? why do you need it? and importantly what is it? The last question actually brings the most traffic, people do want to know for example, as an AI company it becomes imperative to answer questions like what AI does, pretty rudimentary yes, but you can build on it, that’s what SEO is for!

Do we still Email them?

Well, you’ll be wondering if that still needs to be done or not, short answer, and as Stone Cold Steve Austin says, “Hell Yes!” But with CASL, GDPR and other anti-spamming acts how do you prospect on email is a perfectly valid question. The easiest way is to look into your existing database and marketing to them, the content which will create an impact and add value to their work. The “Value Proposition” model is a simple method of creating effective email marketing campaigns. You need to grow your database by getting more and more people to opt-in for your content for which building an effective pull strategy through SEO/SEM and paid advertising can work wonders. This is where you’ve now gotten a somewhat captive audience. How you sail this ship can determine how many prospects remained subscribed and eventually convert. Usually, in marketing we only look at CTR and end it there, that’s actually not a true representation of our work. 

The FTR or the follow-through rate is what we need to report more often, going into finer points lets measure our MQLs or marketing qualified leads percentage and since we can no longer work in silos, measure your SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), and SALs (Sales Approved Leads). Why do we need to care about sales metrics? Simply because how else do we measure success in marketing? We need to bring prospects in and not only that bring the right persona of prospects. BANT isn’t just for inside sales only, its for demand generation and marketing as well. An excellent resource is “Smarketing” by HubSpot, this will really open you to the power of marketing and demand generation.

ABM much?

An excellent way to develop marketing campaigns that are fairly new but worth your time is Account-Based Marketing or ABM. Work closely with sales and develop an ABM approach. This helps you build more focused content for your prospects. ABM isn’t easy, marketers need to research! Yes, your marketing research faculty just did a happy cheer! (mine hated my guts, but let us not dwell on the past). ABM starts simply be researching the target audience’s current focus or problem areas and how can you solve it using your products or solutions. This is the very basic step towards building a deeper more evolved buyer persona. A campaign can be broken to target an individual to bring compelling messages across to them once you’re able to build similar buyer personas and problem statements across accounts.

For example, we broke down the problem of overstocking across fast fashion companies and decided to go after them with a solution mix which included efficient supply chain management, customer feedback analysis, and forecasting. This enables you to even build efficient re-targeting campaigns by enabling you to re-purpose content across similar buyer personas. Further, making you a thought leader in this field. ABM also involves going a step further and delivering physical mailers to personas at times or going to the level of identifying what a particular CxO said in a certain forum and quoting them in your communications. This may sound like a lot of work, but trust me it drives more MQLs and thereby enabling you to deliver impactful campaigns and building an effective integrated marketing campaign tying in all your digital and offline channels together.

#neilpatel #seo #sem #ubersuggest #hubspot #moz #pluralsight #demandgeneration #smarketing #retaildive