Referrer's Lunch Recap: The New Role of Marketing

It’s no secret that we live and breathe B2B sales and marketing at align.me – which means we keep a close eye on what’s happening in the industry. Over the past couple of years, we’ve noticed an interesting change, where B2B businesses and thought leaders are recognising (or remembering) that branding and positioning are super important, and that demand generation can’t be the only lever for growth.

We had a few questions about this that we wanted answers to. So, we thought, why not make it the subject of our next Referrer’s Lunch? That way, we’ll be able to discuss the issue with those who had helped align.me grow.

To give a little background on why we chose this topic, we turn to respected B2B thinker Jon Miller , who had some interesting data on a recent podcast appearance. He noted that over the last three years, organisations investing a significant portion in demand generation over branding and positioning were the least likely to hit their sales numbers.

It’s a strange revelation to wrap your head around. Conventional wisdom would suggest that the opposite was true: surely those using the approach geared specifically towards generating demand would enjoy more success, right? To answer why this was the case, our Founder and CEO, Hugh Macfarlane , took the helm.

How four statistics are shaping modern B2B marketing

At align.me, we love a good statistic, and our Referrer’s Lunch on the changing face of marketing featured four of them. They were:

1. In 2018, a customer had completed 60% of the Buyer’s Journey before they engaged with a sales force. In other words, customers wanted to do the work of researching and finding a suitable seller by themselves. This is a massive shift in how things have traditionally been done.
2. In only four years to 2022, this number had increased to 80%. Why? It’s hard to go past the ubiquity of the internet and how it’s empowered customers to shape their buying journey by doing their own research. Simply put, they can become an expert in the field without speaking to a salesperson.
3. 95% of your target market is not in-market at any given time. This means a paltry 5% of your target market is actively looking for a solution. But despite this, much of the effort of demand generation is focused on this small piece of the market. A quick caveat on the numbers: they will differ for every business. For example, align.me’s split is probably more like 99/1. But the core point – that most of your target market is not in-market at any given time – holds true.
4. It’s the last statistic that might be the most surprising: 96% of B2B businesses expected the majority of the benefits of their ads to be enjoyed within two weeks. Talk about impatience!

Connecting these figures to the Buyer’s Journey

If you’ve spent any time in the B2B space, you’ll probably be familiar with the Buyer’s Journey. A term that Hugh coined and ratified in his book The Leaky Funnel, it’s the unassailable idea that there’s a journey every buyer goes through before making a purchase.

• For a buyer to choose your product or service, they need to know what you’re offering and prefer it over the competition.
• Before that, there’s the recognition of a need. The buyer understands that they require the solution that you offer.
• And before that, there’s a why: Why does the buyer need the product or service? What problem does the buyer have that needs a solution?
• Before that, they’re interested, but they don’t know there’s a problem that needs to be solved.
• Before that, they don’t know what you do, nor do they particularly care. And unfortunately – particularly if you’re too focused on demand generation – this is where 95% of your focus is at any given time. To use Hugh’s colloquial – but entirely accurate – term, they simply don’t give a rat’s about your business.

So, how do we get these people to become aware of your brand? It’s a difficult proposition. After all, if they’re unaware they have a problem, how can you be expected to market a solution to them? The way to solve that is something called the corkscrew.

The corkscrew method

The corkscrew is all about how to approach branding and positioning.

Imagine you’ve reached the end of the work week and are opening a nice bottle of McLaren Vale Shiraz. Now, if you try to rip the cork out with your corkscrew, things aren’t going to end well. But if you do it gradually, the cork is painlessly eased out.

And that is the key to speaking to this 95% of your market. You need to target them in a way that’s measured and appropriate. It’s not the time to come in with a hard sell and an urgent call to action (demand generation). Instead, you use a softer approach that utilises consistent messaging centred around positioning your brand within your desired market. You do this so that when it comes time for them to engage, they will be more likely to consider you.

Contrast this to the messaging you’d utilise when your buyers are in the market and ready to choose – here, you can be more assertive and focus on more demand-gen-led tactics.

What can we do to position ourselves?

All of this begs the question: what can we do to attract the 95% of buyers when they’re not in-market and ready to engage? As we discovered in the lunch, there are three ways to target them.

• The first is getting positioned in the category. When the buyers move into the market and want to purchase, they need to know about your business and that you belong in the marketplace. This is backed by an interesting statistic: when a customer eventually engages, a massive 83% buy from the first vendor they speak to. So, being correctly positioned is critical to success.
• The second is related to this. When the buyer goes in-market, they should be concept-educated. If you can teach the buyer about the category while you’re positioning yourself, you have the opportunity for your brand to set the buyer’s expectations. Which gives you a handy advantage over your competition.
• Demand capture – really a sub-set of demand generation but worth calling out – is about being found by buyers who you’ve not necessarily positioned with. SEO and search ads are classic demand capture tactics.
• Finally, don’t forget about demand generation. It’s still a valuable tool; with the right messaging, you can convince some of the 95% to be the 5% in-market.

Group discussions

We love getting attendees involved in our Referrer’s Lunches with breakout groups to discuss a few pertinent questions. The first was “How do we sell the delay/patience/focus needed for this approach?” We asked our teams to imagine that they were speaking to a senior executive focused on results. How can you convince them to invest in brand, positioning and giving customers a gentle nudge?

The three big things that we’ve pulled out of the conversations, which have relevance to any industry or organisation, are:

• Start small: select a certain area to move from full-on demand gen to a mixture incorporating positioning tactics. This approach allows you to establish some benchmark data and build a solid business case backed by numbers.
• Be patient: How’s this for a great analogy? One of the groups likened targeting customers to getting a fussy toddler to eat a new food. When doing this, you sometimes need to be patient, attempting to get the child to eat up to six or seven times. The same rule holds true for marketing: it takes repetition of a message before it sticks.
• The two can live in harmony: sometimes, positioning could be considered more important than demand gen. For example, imagine a smaller tech company at the forefront of innovation. Here, branding and positioning are vital parts of being in the market. It’s important to take a long-term view and not invest heavily in dedicated sales resources until you are well enough positioned to leverage your investment effectively. Quite often, wins in this sector were a couple of years in the making – a build-up of all the marketing and taking the customer on a journey.

After that, we challenged attendees to another tricky question: “What’s the impact of outbounding in this environment?” Again, three insights from the groups shone through.

• Getting the balance right: to be effective, you need a balance,?with the split around 70/30.?70% comprises positioning and other inbound tactics, while 30% is outbound.? However, it’s vital that inbound and outbound function as a cohesive whole?– because positioning activity now means that when the outbound occurs, the buyer is more likely to be receptive.
• Look for opportunities to do both: If the chance presents itself, don’t hesitate to consider integrating. Outbound could be used for both positioning content and driving direct sales responses by selectively adding a trigger message to some of the positioning-oriented content sequences.
• Add a branding element: A business’s direct marketing could work harder by adding a positioning element. So even if the customer is a part of the 95% not currently in-market, they still get a perception of the brand from the ad.

The matter of market maturity

In seeking to address the question of ideal focus, market maturity plays an important role.

• For a super-early market, Marketing’s efforts might be mostly focused on helping sales to sell to visionaries (so, sales enablement);
• For the next group – the early pragmatists – the focus might need to shift to creating demand (they need convincing);
• When the market is in full flight, the focus might shift from demand generation to demand capture and competitive strategies;
• And when the market maxes out, brand and position really matter at the expense of most other levers.

Key takeaways

Around 95% of the market isn’t actually in-market at any one time. This means it’s not appropriate to put a hard sell on them with traditional demand generation-based tactics. But we can target this huge audience segment by positioning ourselves correctly within the category – so that when it comes to buying, they think of us first.

96% of B2B businesses expect most of an advertising campaign’s success within two weeks of launch. But that’s not rational or possible, given that most buyers aren’t in-market — and therefore not receptive to demand generation. Then, to be effective, we must balance softer branding and more hard-nosed tactics.

Finally, given that customers complete 80% of the Buyer’s Journey before they engage sales and 83% will buy from the seller they engage with first when they are ready to buy, the content they’re consuming and self-educating themselves with must be our content. Ultimately, success is not about choosing one approach or the other. As we’re seeing across the B2B marketing landscape, it’s a combination of both. And we need to keep this in mind when moving forward.

Thanks to everyone who attended

This Referrer’s Lunch was a huge success, in no small part thanks to the incredibly high calibre of conversation we shared. Our discussions showed that this isn’t an easy topic, and it’s one that’s being wrestled with all around the B2B marketing world.