Hello everyone!
This is already the 4th issue of Growth Systems, and you are 42 reading it. I’m pretty happy to have not missed one so far. Let’s keep going!
Today, we’ll talk about the very niche I’m specializing in: Demand Generation.
To those of you who work in B2B companies, that should interest and help you a lot.
Let’s dive in!
Summary
Demand Generation
Inbound and Outbound
How is Demand Gen the future of marketing?
How can you do it for your B2B company?
1/ What is Demand Generation?
There are two definitions for Demand Generation.
The first says that demand generation is about creating demand for something that people may not even know they need or want yet. Demand Generation comes from generating demand that previously didn’t exist.
The second definition says that demand generation is about focusing on increasing both the quantity and the quality of incoming prospects’ demands. Maybe the demand already exists, or maybe it doesn’t.
The second definition includes the first one, and it’s the one I use.
If that wasn’t clear, don’t worry, we’ll get back to it later.
2/ What are inbound and outbound marketing?
Traditionally, marketing operations are divided into two categories.
🧲 Inbound: when you attract clients through content. Ex: Writing articles, publishing on social media, organizing webinars…
🔊 Outbound: when you push your message to reach clients. Ex: Online advertising, TV, radio, billboards, cold calling…
These definitions are useful to put operations in categories but don’t really help to create strategies. Instead, it’s separating operations into silos, whereas these types of operations are often mixed.
For example, SEO and SEA, or Social media and Ads.
3/ How is Demand Gen the future of B2B marketing?
How do CEOs and CMOs choose their main marketing operation? The answer: speed.
Business leaders will always prioritize short-term results over uncertain long-term strategies.
In terms of speed, the fastest way to get results is always to do Sales operations (cold calling, cold emailing, prospection through social media messaging…).
To do so, marketing is way too often relegated to lead generation for the sales team.
That’s why in B2B marketing:
SEA is more used than SEO
Ebooks are always gated (requiring an email to be downloaded)
Forms are either super-long to get high-quality leads or super-short to get leads in quantity
etc. etc.
Inbound is reduced to producing content for SEO, or gated ebooks to gather emails.
Outbound is reduced to cold emails and messaging, or promoting the gated content.
Here comes the Demand Generation.
By definition, incoming demand is qualified: the prospect is interested.
Using inbound, outbound, ABM* or PLG*, the goal is clear: getting these high-quality leads in quantity.
*we’ll see those in a future issue
How is that the future? Well, it:
Shows clear results fast
Scales by itself over time
Allows a perfect budget management
Sounds too good to be true? Agree.
The downsides are that it requires a solid strategy, a marketing team trusted, some preparations, and consistency.
4/ So how can you do it for your B2B company?
Step 1: Have an optimized demand capture tool (aka a website or social media profile).
It must be easy for interested prospects to contact you.
Step 2: Become a media.
Think of your social media as your own media. Start an organic content strategy, with these goals:
Be remembered (post often where your target clients are, and post stuff worth subscribing to).
Be trusted (post about your very expertise, to help your target clients, while showing some of your results).
That’s it.
These two steps are the very basic of Demand Generation.
You’ll actually have a lot more to do:
Define your target audience and buyer personas.
Create valuable content and offers.
Promote your content through various channels.
Capture leads and follow up with them.
Measure and optimize your strategy.
And each of these steps hides some various more complex ones.
For example:
Promote your content: Choose the right channel, improve your content, rank in SEO, update content, use paid ads to show your content to the right audience, use retargeting to be visible by your ICP, steal someone’s audience…
Capture leads and follow up with them: Improve your conversion rate, build your owned media, nurture your leads, automate your follow up, leverage leads to find decision-makers…
I’m not going into the details today, as I wanted to use this newsletter as an introduction to this topic.
Truth is, I’m working on an online course about it. It’s designed to help scale marketing services, whether you’re a founder, CEO, CMO, project manager, or even a freelancer.
Interested? Reply to this email and I’ll send you the course for free.
Yes, for free. It’s my way of thanking you for your support!
You must be subscribed (if you know someone who could be interested, transfer him/her this email right now).
These are the projects I work on:
an online course to get started in Demand Generation
a podcast about Demand Generation with marketing experts
a consulting offer to help marketing services to scale
Let me know if you’re interested in any of those!
What did you think of today’s issue? I tried to make it shorter, but I struggle to explain complex topics. Tell me your opinion: I need your feedback!
See you in two weeks,
Gaspard