You Ask, I Answer: Demand Generation Tips?

In this episode, Chris asks, what are your suggestions for improving demand generation, especially for a B2B brand? Well, let's start by talking about what demand generation means because there's a lot of confusion, particularly in B2B marketing, uh, between demand generation and lead generation. A lot of folks use those terms interchangeably, and they are not the same thing. Demand generation does what it says it does, it increases demand for products and services. Lead generation, again, does what it says it does.

It generates more leads if you're doing it right. So how do you create more demand? Not more leads, but more demand. Demand comes essentially in three or four flavors, right? There's people who know that they have a problem, they know there's a solution, and they know that you are one of those solutions.

That's branded demand, right? You see this and you measure this with things like branded organic search. How many people are searching for, say trust insights by name, if they're searching for trust insights or Katie Robert or Christopher Penn by name? They know they have a problem. They know there's a solution, and they know that we are potentially one of the solutions for that problem.

So that's branded demand. It's the best kind of demand, right? And you build that demand by the by its very name. It's brand. It's all about brand.

And brand, my favorite definition of brand is from Zay Frank, way back in 2006. Um, who said that brand is the emotional aftertaste of a series of experiences. Which I love that brand is the emotional aftertaste of a series of experiences. And he goes on to point out that's why you can sell grandma's cookies and not old people's cookies. They're the same thing, but one has an emotional aftertaste and the other one kind of doesn't.

What emotional aftertaste does your brand convey? Right? Trust Insights, for example, it's it's our company. Literally in the name is the idea of building trust. We want people to feel comfortable.

We want people to feel safe, feel like they're making a good decision, feel reassured, feel that we put the truth, trust, truth, same thing, um, ahead of what's common in analytics, which is an awful lot of people sort of handing executives and stakeholders answers that they want to hear. Now, sometimes, I will be totally honest, sometimes that makes us not the most popular people in the room, right? When the executive says, I want to see this number always going up and to the right. And like, well, I got bad news for you. It went down to the right.

But it's truthful. And so our brand, the emotional aftertaste we are going after is that feeling of trust, right? That reassurance. There are plenty of brands in B2B and B2C that have an emotional aftertaste to them to them. Sometimes it's not very good, but it's there.

Uh, an example of a brand that leaves a very strong emotional aftertaste, Harley Davidson, right? I just got to say the name, and you know what that brand feels like that evokes an emotional response, an emotional aftertaste to you. Um if I say McDonald's, well, that may inspire some kind of reaction. If I say Google Cloud, right, or AWS, those evoke some kinds of emotional reactions. That's brand, right?

And brand is demand. Brand is demand. I can't say that enough times. Brand is demand because at that layer of demand generation, that's how people know to find you. That's how people know to trust you to start the process of lead generation, right?

You can't have lead generation if you have no demand. If there's nobody's interested in you and nobody knows who you are, you cannot generate leads. I mean, you can, but they're not going to be very good quality. Compare that with a name or brand that is trusted or that is a sure thing, and you will have a much easier time generating leads. Another uh B2B example.

Back in the 80s, and I probably goes further back than that, but there's this aphorism in B2B. Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM, right? In fact, I probably didn't even need to say the brand for folks who've like me got a little more gray hair. You probably remember that aphorism floating around your business. Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM, right?

That's brand. So that's the first type of demand generation. The second type is we go up that thing. I have a problem, I know there's a solution, I know that this brand is a solution. Well, the second one is I know there's a solution, but I don't know who or what.

That's unbranded demand, right? There's no brand attached to that demand, but you know there's a solution out there. If I'm trying to do regression analysis, I know there's a library out there that does the type of regression I'm looking for. I gotta go look for it, gotta go find it. Maybe I'll ask some friends, maybe ask some colleagues, read some reviews on Reddit, whatever the case may be.

Unbranded demand, which we often measure with unbranded search, but it also is social media conversations and academic publications and QA forums. Unbranded demand is that second layer. How do you create unbranded demand? You somebody knows they have a problem, but they don't understand the solution. So you educate, you educate, you become an educator, and by the way, that builds your brand to help people understand.

Oh, I'm I'm dealing with uh being blacklisted in my email marketing. Oh, it's because I didn't set up any of my deliverability protocols. Okay, who fixes it? Who does that? Who can fix that for me?

I don't want to fix it myself. Who does that for me? Right? That's unbranded demand. And then the third layer is you may not know that you have a problem.

You may know something's wrong, but you may not be able to elucidate on what the problem is. You just know something's wrong. Hey, our web analytics numbers are down 40% this month, right? It can you feel like uh I don't know what to do about this. Like, what does this mean?

What should we do? What's wrong? That's the start of demand generation. Problem, those those problems begin the creation of demand, right? That pain, that discomfort, that uh uh ill at ease, that dis-ease becomes eventually demand.

So the question you have to tackle is which of these three layers of demand, right? The creation of raw demand itself with problem identification, unbranded demand, where your customers are looking for a solution, they were trying to even figure out what the solution should be, and then branded demand that you are the solution. Which of these things is your problem? The further away you get from the lead, right, the less control you have over it. So for example, HubSpot for years spent like 10 years on hundreds of millions of dollars building the unbranded term inbound marketing.

There was a problem. Marketers were struggling to build demand, uh they're struggling to get results. And HubSpot's like, okay, well, we're gonna go and create a new category. We're gonna create an unbranded brand, right? A non-specific brand, inbound marketing, which of course they own.

And after 10 years and 100 million dollars, they successfully owned that category. They've built unbranded and branded demand at the same time. Now, if you don't have 10 years and 100 million dollars, it's probably not the best approach to take. But the further away you get from lead generation, the less control you have and the more expensive it gets. Because you are trying to essentially highlight to people, yeah, you actually do have a problem.

And the problem is your emails aren't getting through, or your problem is you're not being found in Google, or the problem is uh your leads are down. And here's the solution, and then here's how we implement the solution. So, which of those three layers is your demand weakest in? And can you fix it? Do you have the resources, the budget, the time to fix it?

Because sometimes you don't have the time, right? If your VP is breathing down your neck, like, hey, it's uh you know, it's a month left in the quarter, uh, and we're our lead numbers are off 40%. What are you gonna do? You don't have time for a 10-year brand campaign, right? Because you gotta make your quarterly numbers.

So those are my suggestions. Figure out which layer of the brand and demand sort of matrix uh you're weakest in, and then fix what you can fix, right? Just start digging in, start building your brand, start building unbranded demand, and then start helping customers understand that they do, in fact, uh have a problem uh if they actually do. Uh, really good question. We could have spent a whole bunch of time on this, and maybe we will another time, because I think it's important that we understand that A, lead generation and demand generation are not the same thing, and B the three different levels of demand have three totally different implementations for building and creating that demand.

Anyway, thanks for watching. I'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.