A Step By Step Guide To Creating A Demand Gen Engine For B2B Businesses

In one of the previous editions of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter, we discussed in detail the 'GTM Flywheel for new-age B2B businesses' (the article received a great response with 750+ views).

And 'Demand Gen and Capture Engine' was one of the components of the flywheel. In this edition, let us dive deep into building a demand generation engine for your B2B business. We shall look at demand capture in a later edition.

What is demand generation and how is it different from demand capture?

Understanding the difference between demand generation and capture is fundamental to designing any GTM or marketing strategy.

Demand capture is the mechanism of making the discoverability of your business easy when someone is looking to buy your offering (or the category of products or services you offer).

For example, if a prospect heard about your product in an event that generated an interest in her to explore further, she is likely to search your company name or the name of the product on Google. When she does that, you need to make sure that your company's page appears in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) at the top. This is demand capture.

Demand generation, on the other hand, is the entry gate - the point where awareness about your business is created. It can be a single exercise or a combination of multiple activities that led to it. While demand capture focuses on capturing prospects who are in the market to buy what you offer (say 2% of your SAM or Serviceable Available Market), demand gen is about creating interest among the remaining 98% in evaluating your products or services.

Why is it required to invest in demand generation?

Broadly speaking, following are the major reasons why you would want to build a demand generation program for your B2B business:

• In this era of dark social, most of the research B2B buyers do happen before they become a lead. According to Fronetics.com, buyers are?57%?of the way down the sales path by the time they engage with a brand’s website. Hence if you focus on demand capture methods alone, you are likely to miss out on a huge chunk of your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
• Software-based attribution data is misleading. While these tools give most of the credit to channels that can be tracked, in reality. the demand gets created at a much earlier stage (this is discussed in detail in the article Why B2B Revenue Attribution Is Broken And How To Fix It).
• To improve conversions from SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) or SAL (Sales Accepted Leads) to opportunity or deal wins, prospects have to be educated enough about your company and offerings even before they talk to sales. Handling most of your prospects' objections using demand gen efforts improves conversion and increases sales velocity.
• Many demand capture channels (with a few exceptions) are focused on the short term. At the same time, demand gen techniques take time to establish but have a compounding and long-lasting impact.

Above all these, demand generation helps to establish trust and credibility. Instead of your website copy saying 'we are #1', you showcasing your expertise using demand gen channels is a much more trustworthy way of winning customers.

My 9-step framework for designing a demand gen engine

Let's get to the core of the topic.

According to me, here are the 9 steps involved in building a demand generation engine that consistently delivers revenue growth over the long term:

1. Defining goals and outcomes
2. Getting management buy-in and ensuring alignment
3. Understanding where your ICP hangs out
4. Defining content pillars (or categories) for your ICP
5. Devising a content marketing strategy
6. Team building and work allocation
7. Building the right tech stack
8. Putting the demand gen program into action
9. Measuring outcomes and finetuning the program

Let us break down each of these.

1. Defining goals and outcomes

This is the very first step. What do you want your demand gen program to achieve? To find out, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the primary goals of the demand gen function? Is it to increase the pipeline? Is it for the purpose of improving brand awareness? Do you wish to increase sales velocity with it? How about metrics like burn multiple and cash runway?
• How long do you expect to take to meet the goals and outcomes? Is it 6 months, 1 year, or even longer?
• How willing are you to invest the time and resources required to achieve the goals?

These questions will not only help to identify the goals of the demand gen engine, but they will also keep a check on whether you are ready to plan and implement a full-fledged demand gen program.

2. Getting management buy-in and ensuring alignment

This is probably the most important step. Implementing a successful demand gen program requires buy-in not just from your marketing leadership, but other stakeholders (especially sales and customer success) as well.

The fact is that a vast majority of leaders are not wired to think with a demand gen mindset. Even today, to many, scaling revenue means spending more money on paid ads and hiring more SDRs (Sales Development Representatives).

So, focusing on demand gen requires a significant shift in mindset by all the stakeholders involved. You can use the following anchors to convince everyone of the relevance of a demand gen program:

• Long-term impact on revenue
• The compounding effect and scalability
• Enhanced brand visibility
• Benefit of attracting better talent
• More value per dollar spent

You can easily add more to the above depending on the nature of your business and how you design your demand gen engine (goals, tactics, people, etc). But you definitely need to have your C-suite and leadership aligned with your idea of leveraging demand gen for the purposes of:

• Budget approvals
• Hiring the right people
• Implementing the right way of measuring outcomes
• Obtaining support from employees other than marketers and salespeople (especially key leaders like BU Heads, C-suite executives, HR professionals, etc)

Many a time, a demand gen program can be effectively implemented only when there is a top-down approach. This means that your CEO, founders, and department heads (and sometimes even investors and board members) have to believe in the benefits of the program, and then use their respective teams to execute it on the ground.

3. Understanding where your ICP hangs out

Let us get more tactical now. To create demand, first you need to know which channels to use. You need to know the following about your ideal customers:

• Where they spend time the most (both online and offline) - social media platforms, industry events, networking groups?
• Which sources do they trust the most - communities, review websites, influencers?

Now, how do you find this info? Following are a few ways:

• Use a tool like SparkToro to find where topics related to your niche are discussed the most. It will give you a list of social accounts people discussing a particular topic (say robots) follow, websites they visit, podcasts they listen to, etc.
• Go to RightRelevance.com. Search using a relevant keyword in your domain. Now, go to the influencers tab to find the individual as well as organizational influencers in your space (you can even consider using a specialized influencer marketing tool like Upfluence).
• Use an intent intelligence tool like Demandbase to view the list of websites your target accounts visit (using an expensive tool like Demandbase or any other intent intelligence tool like Terminus or 6sense is not recommended for this purpose alone. If you already have access to any of them, leverage it to dig out the info).
• Look at popular communities your prospects are most active in. These can be usually found by using a Google Search. For instance, if you wish to target HR professionals, use a search term like 'most popular HR communities online' to curate a list of forums they are active on.
• Identify a social media platform where your prospects spend the most time. For B2B, this is usually LinkedIn. You could also experiment with TikTok, Quora, or Reddit depending on the nature of your offerings.
• List out leading industry events your prospects attend. These can be in-person as well as online events.

Once you follow these steps, you should have a well-curated list of channels and specific websites/platforms your prospects hang out on.

4. Defining content pillars (or categories) for your ICP

This in a way overlaps with the next step in the framework - designing the content marketing strategy. But I have called this out separately to list down all the possible ways in which you can define content pillars and topic clusters for your demand gen program.

But, why is it required to have content pillars in the first place?

Well, firstly, it helps to make your demand generation efforts more organized and in control. You would want all those who contribute to focus on topics and content that are relevant to your business. In addition, you need all the content and campaigns to reflect a consistent POV (Point Of View).

The following figure illustrates the different ways in which you could create content pillars for your demand gen program.

Essentially, any content you create would fall into either of the 5 pillar categories. Once you have these defined, it is much easier to implement a demand gen program at scale.

5. Devising a content marketing strategy

I discuss in detail the 11-step framework for defining a content marketing strategy for demand gen in the following article:

How To Define A Content Marketing Strategy Focused On Demand Generation

Though I have covered all the points in detail in it, let me discuss the most important one here again - channels and content types.

Here, we need to understand that there is no 'one size fits all' approach. But in general, following are the channels and content types you could leverage for demand generation:

1. Podcasts (hosting your own as well as appearing on others').
2. Newsletters (on platforms like Substack, beehiiv, or LinkedIn).
3. Thought leadership-oriented webinars and other online events.
4. Talks and speaking sessions at conferences and events.
5. Organic social posts (focused on educating and helping your prospects).
6. Books and journals.
7. Video series (live or on-demand)
8. Whitepapers, ebooks, templates, playbooks, etc. (except those salesy ones of course).

As I have explained on multiple occasions before, there is a thin line between demand generation and demand capture many a time when it comes to channel and content types. For example, SEO is usually considered a demand capture channel. However, it can help create demand by helping to stay on top of the mind of those who are not ready to buy today (this is where educational content comes in).

With this in mind, you can even use a blog as a demand gen channel. At the same time, not all blog posts are aimed at (or suited for) demand gen.

6. Team building and work allocation

Though many people contribute, demand generation is a marketing function. The marketing team is responsible for strategizing, orchestrating, and executing the program.

However, there is no universal structure to a demand gen team. Different organizations build it in different ways. In fact, the idea of having demand generation as a separate team/initiative itself is new to 99% of marketers and leaders. Also, there are certain other practical challenges in terms of maintaining a dedicated team for demand gen.

Given these, a shared resource model can be adopted where a few resources (say email marketers) can work on demand generation as well as demand capture activities.

With that, let us look at a sample demand gen team structure that could work for small to mid-size organizations:

As mentioned before, there is no globally accepted structure for a demand gen function. You should only take the above as a reference to build yours. If you have any queries about this, please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a DM.

7. Building the right tech stack

We spoke about the importance of having the right tech stack for your GTM efforts. It's equally relevant for demand gen.

When it comes to demand generation, the structure of the tech stack would depend on the channels you use. Given below is a sample tech stack for some of the most common content and channel types used for demand gen:

Since demand generation is a broad area, the complete tech stack might be much larger than this. For example, if you want to make internal content sharing easy, you could consider using a content management system like Seismic.

But the tech stack given above should help you get started.

8. Putting the demand gen program into action

Practically speaking, this could potentially be the most difficult of all the steps - implementing the demand gen program the right way.

The challenges with respect to executing a demand gen program stem from the following:

• Demand gen programs take time to show results.
• Not all demand gen efforts are easily measurable (for example, the revenue generated from podcasts might be difficult to estimate - unless you follow the Mixed Attribution Model I discuss in the B2B revenue attribution article).
• Demand gen programs are not easily scalable in the initial stages (unlike PPC advertising where you could increase your ad spend to get more leads).

Assuming we overcome the above roadblocks, given below are some of the best practices you could follow to get your demand gen engine moving smoothly:

• Don't try to do everything at once - when you start your demand gen efforts, focus on 2-3 channels/initiatives and aim to make them a success. Once they start generating results, scale them and invest some time and effort in the new ones.
• Make sure your efforts are not disjoint or broken - there are two things that come into play here - consistency of positioning & messaging, and consistency of executing your plans. Both are equally important (I have not covered positioning and messaging in this article since it has already been covered as a separate element of the GTM flywheel. Please refer the article for more details).
• Repurpose as much as you can - It's not always about quality. Quantity also helps, no matter what we say. So repurpose your podcast episodes into audio/video snippets. Transcribe those episodes and convert them into blog posts/social media posts. There is a lot like this you could do to increase the volume of the content you create. It will help you do more with less.
• Have a demand gen calendar in place - just like you have a content marketing calendar, have a plan and schedule for your demand gen efforts as well. This will help you keep up with the intended pace (especially in situations where demand gen could take a backseat when there are more business-critical events - say a product launch).
• Make sure your demand capture engine is ready - as you create demand, you need to have a strong demand capture engine to handle all the demand that comes in. Don't have a crappy website that takes ages to load. And don't have landing pages or a website copy that is not consistent with the views you shared on demand gen channels.

9. Measuring outcomes and finetuning the program

This usually is the last step of most of my frameworks. And this involves two steps - defining metrics and KPIs in line with the goals defined in step #1, and taking action based on the insights you observe from your measurement efforts.

Given below are some of the metrics you could use to measure the success of your demand gen program:

• Pipeline or opportunity value created
• Revenue generated
• Sales velocity (SQL to opportunity, opportunity to closed won, etc)
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• ACV (Average Contract Value).

You can measure these along dimensions such as lead source (channel), region, product/service, etc. to analyze which channels and initiatives are contributing to business growth the most.

When it comes to finetuning, it is about looking at the results of your demand gen activities and making changes to the engine to improve it further. You can do this along the following elements:

• Choice of channels and content types
• Measurement mechanisms
• Positioning and messaging
• Quality as well as the volume of the content you are creating

Finetuning your demand gen engine is a continuous process. You could even have periodic cadences to track and analyze progress.

Final words

Planning and implementing a demand gen strategy is not something that can be covered in a single article. It was not possible to get into every tiny bit of detail. But the 9-step framework will help you make the first leap and act as the foundation of your demand generation efforts. However, if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.

That wraps up what I wanted to cover today. Hope this was a useful read.

As always, until we meet next time, happy learning!