You Ask, I Answer: Demand Generation Tips?

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You Ask, I Answer: Demand Generation Tips?

Chris asks, “What are your suggestions for improving demand generation, especially for a B2B brand?”

You Ask, I Answer: Demand Generation Tips?

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Christopher Penn 0:13

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, between demand generation 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 Katy robear, or Christopher Penn by name.

They know they have a problem.

They know this 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, its brand, it’s all about brand, and brand.

My favorite definition of brand is from Jay Frank way back in 2006.

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.

The other one kind of doesn’t.

What emotional aftertaste does your brand convey? Right? Trust Insights, for example, it’s our company.

It 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 ahead of what’s common in analytics, which is an awful lot of people sort of handing executives and stakeholders the 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 his number always going up into the right like, well, I got bad news.

We 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 it to them.

Sometimes it’s not very good.

But it’s they’re 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 and emotional aftertaste to you.

If I say, McDonald’s, well, that may inspire some kind of reaction.

If I say Google Cloud AI 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.

Right? That’s how people know to trust you to 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, and 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 B2B example back in the 80s.

And I’ve probably goes further back than that.

But there was this atheism 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, like me got a little more gray hair.

And you probably remember that a for ism floating around your business.

Nobody ever gets fired.

For Buying IBM.

Right? That’s rent.

So that’s the first type of demand generation.

The

Christopher Penn 5:06

second type is we go up that thing.

I have a problem.

I know this a solution.

I know that this brand has 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.

I 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 q&a 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 dealing with being blacklisted in my email marketing.

Oh, it’s because I didn’t set up any 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? 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 a to elucidate on what the problem is that you just know something’s wrong, hey, our web analytics numbers are down 40% This month, right? It can make you feel like 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 problems begin the creation of demand, right? That pain, that discomfort that 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’re trying to 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 the less control you have over it.

Right? So for example, Hubspot for years, spent like 10 years on hundreds of millions of dollars building the unbranded term, inbound marketing, right, there was a problem.

Marketers were struggling to build demand.

They’re struggling to get results, and Hubspot, like okay, we’re gonna go and create a new category, we’re going to create an unbranded brand, right, a nonspecific branded inbound marketing, which of course, they own.

And after 10 years, and $100 million, they successfully owned that category, they’ve built unbranded and branded demand at the same time.$

Now, if you don’t have 10 years and100 million, that’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, your 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 a it’s a month left in the quarter.

And we’re our lead numbers are off for 2%.

What are you gonna do? You don’t have time for a 10 year brand campaign, right? Because you got to make your quarterly numbers.

So those are my suggestions, figure out which layer of the brand and demand sort of matrix you’re weakest in and then fix what you can fix.

Right gets to start digging in, start building your brand, start building unbranded demand, and then start helping customers understand that they do, in fact, have a problem if they actually do.

Really good question.

We could spend 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 demand generation are not the same thing and be 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’d like this video go ahead and hit that subscribe

Christopher Penn 10:06

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Christopher Penn 0:13

Christopher Penn 5:06

Christopher Penn 10:06

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