B2B marketing is overly concerned with measurement and attribution, presenting and pretending to be more science than art. Everyone wants to believe that it is a science. Investors, boards, and executives expect marketing growth to be measurable, predictable, and forecastable.
Marketing, however, is not a hard science. Experiments are not reproducible, and playbooks are not entirely portable between firms. While benchmarks and leading indicators help us make decisions, the elements that can influence outcomes are unique to each firm, category, and audience.
More disturbing than the measurement preoccupation are the actions it has resulted in. Believing that B2B digital marketing is different from general marketing drives us to take actions that contradict marketing theories.
Obsession with generating leads.
Marketing is a long-term activity, but it has evolved to include short-term responsibilities. To satisfy leadership, everything must be viewable on a dashboard within a quarter, especially in sales-driven firms. So-called “vanity metrics” like as site traffic and ad interaction are no longer adequate. Marketing needs to demonstrate ROI rapidly.
For a variety of reasons, lead generation is currently one of the most common techniques used by B2B marketing teams to meet this pressure. It is tangible and may be used to convey an effective marketing tale. It also provides a fairly simple attribution path to income, keeping sales teams pleased (at least initially).
And when a strategy serves your goal, you really commit to it. Marketers invest a large portion of their expenditures on lead generation, but the results hide a concerning change that has occurred over time.
At its core, lead generation should be about attracting people who are interested in your solution, category, or the pain point you treat, in that order. The level of intent associated with each of these leads varies substantially and turns into income at very varied rates. To keep things simple, we’ll group them into the following categories:
- Brand interest — bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
- Category interest falls in the middle of the funnel (MOFU).
- Interest in pain points is at the top of the funnel (TOFU).
Unsurprisingly, the number of people at the bottom of the funnel is the smallest, highest converting, and most sought after by salespeople. Getting to that level demands a significant amount of promotion.
However, the majority of the marketing money is currently being directed toward top-of-funnel efforts to fulfill volume demand, accumulating leads and expecting to transfer them to the bottom of the funnel through nurturing activities.
This gets us to the marketing fundamentals gap. This approach of acquiring leads at the top and sending them down is mechanical and ignores how brand awareness evolves into active demand. It also establishes budget allocations to avoid this from occurring.
The Demand Generation Curve
Demand generation is primarily about brand awareness rather than demand. There is a new marketing narrative that says we create demand, but this is wrong.
Demand and needs, in general, must exist among the buyers. Our job is to raise awareness of our solution as the greatest alternative for meeting that need. This happens over time and increases in many ways, forming the “demand generation curve,” as we call it at our agency.
- Brand recognition. The most basic type of brand awareness is recognizing your logo, which comes from seeing it frequently and in the correct places to leave a lasting impression.
- Brand awareness. Understanding is far more vital than recognition; it means knowing not just who you are, but also what you do and for whom. This can only be achieved by successfully delivering your message to your target audience, which is frequently the most difficult aspect of marketing.
- Brand recall. Seed your message enough times, and you’ll soon become a top-of-mind example of a remedy to your pain problem, also known as the “consideration set.” Brands that find themselves here are more likely to experience consistent inbound demand.
- Brand preferences. Increase affinity enough over time, and you’ll attain the most coveted position: the brand is perceived as the true leader in the buyer’s mind. Few make it here, but those who do dominate the category.
Brand awareness evolves over time as your target audience’s understanding and affinity for your brand grows. However, because we are focused on lead generation, we strive to bring people into a funnel when they are still in the early stages of this curve, if at all.
Much as we’d like to believe otherwise, this journey cannot be completed in a few weeks or months using an email drip campaign — and industry lead-to-revenue rates back this up.
If you aren’t raising awareness, who is?
With all of the emphasis on producing leads, the effort to educate and persuade the audience is increasingly shifting to sales, which is a losing strategy. If sales contacts a prospect after a consideration set has been formed, earning their trust is a difficult task.
The more effective solution is to raise awareness well before the prospect enters the market. And the unpleasant truth is that it does not occur neatly within marketing dashboards. It happens by continuously and persistently delivering relevant messages that are convincing and memorable to your target audience.
