DEMAND GENERATION IN B2B: 5 WAYS TO CUT THROUGH WITH YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE 5 From start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations, demand generation remains a persistent challenge. Markets are saturated, attention spans are short and post-pandemic budgets are strained. And it’s about to get tougher. Businesses are under more pressure than ever to review and optimise their 2020 demand generation strategies just to keep a seat at the table. Today, that means overcoming these common challenges. But first, let’s make something clear.. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 02 This is Real Demand Generation The goal of demand generation is to deliver qualified leads and opportunities to sales, distinguishing it from lead generation, where the objective is to produce a volume of leads for sales to qualify. Demand generation is more sophisticated and nuanced, and notably more aligned to sales. The challenge is not simply to accumulate a vast amount of unqualified leads - that approach can be expensive in the long-term - but to nurture leads through a series of touch points, moving them through the funnel towards the point of sale. Whilst lead generation may focus on one or two channels in isolation, demand generation campaigns take a more holistic view of the buyer decision-cycle, combining multiple marketing channels into a cohesive and considered strategy. Channels might include: • Paid Search • Paid Social • Organic Social • Search Engine Marketing (SEO/SEM) • Email marketing • Offline events such as trade shows and conventions The point at which your target audience raises a hand and takes some level of action marks the transition from lead to demand generation. Demand generation, then, is about producing marketing campaigns that drive meaningful commitment and intent—drawing on multiple marketing channels to create a cohesive customer journey that moves them to a point of brand preference and decision. Sounds simple? Clearly it is not. According to one survey cited by the Content Marketing Institute, only 33% of businesses felt they had enough content to meet their demand generation goals. From our experience of working with both SMBs and global brands, we’ve identified the five common Demand Generation pitfalls. Read on to learn how to remedy each one and achieve cut-through with your next campaign. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 03 1. SHORT TERM VS LONG TERM TENSION Disruptive brands can bring a campaign to market within weeks or months [See what we did with Aruba]. Bigger organisations need months or even quarters to produce and sign off a campaign, by which time the market has moved on, or a competitor has occupied the strategic high ground. The bigger the organisation, and the more stakeholders involved across regions and departments, the longer the decision cycle. Then there’s a personnel issue. The average tenure of a CMO is 43 months, which means that those who buy into an idea at the start of a campaign may well not be the same ones sitting at the table when the time for execution arrives. There’s little incentive for marketing managers to “plant trees in whose shade they will never sit”, which can tip the balance in favour of short-term campaign-thinking that chases a quick win, rather the creation of a considered demand generation strategy. As B2B marketers, we’re accustomed to working to quarterly targets, keeping pace with the relentless demands of Business Development Managers and Sales for more high-quality leads. But that’s not the speed at which businesses grow, and it doesn’t reflect the reality of B2B decision-making. Effective demand generation campaigns are considered. They integrate multiple marketing channels, account for decision-making cycles, and look beyond vanity metrics to drive real business value—and that often requires longer campaign cycles than we’re prepared to allow. Successful demand generation in 2020 requires a new approach, so stop ‘spinning up’ campaign landing pages, put your haphazard paid marketing campaigns to one side, and plant yourself a tree. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 04 The solution Be a connector. Put a stop to the creation of siloed marketing campaigns and instead lead with an integrated approach. Bring together the relevant marketing functions to create a truly cross- platform demand generation strategy incorporating Paid Social, Paid Search, the SEO team, and Email Marketing & Automation. Instead of focusing explicitly on campaign vanity metrics such as your paid social click-through-rate (CTR) or ‘total clicks’, embrace a more elaborate range of ‘through the funnel’ KPIs that incorporate consumer behaviour and long-term decision-making. In particular, that means giving these three metrics the attention they deserve: • Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) - the cost for acquiring a new customer. Analyse this metric across multiple channels and refine your traffic generation channels based on those that result in the highest conversion rates and lowest cost-per- acquisition. Whilst some channels may be highly effective in driving traffic, cheap traffic may not always translate into opportunities. Your CPA should be the leading commercial metric of any B2B campaign. • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - the total revenue or transaction value you can expect from a single customer across their average lifespan with the business. This is an excellent metric when assessing the viable cost-per- acquisition (CPA) for new customers and one we don’t hear enough B2B businesses using. When planning your next demand generation campaign, use CLV, the length of the decision cycle, and the number of interactions required to accurately assess your maximum viable CPA. • Contact-to-Opportunity Ratio - the number of new leads that enter at the top of the funnel versus those that convert to new marketing generated opportunities (MGO) or closed sales. This is perhaps one of the best performance metrics for assessing the end-to-end health of a demand generation campaign and or marketing funnel, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of activity at each stage; from awareness to decision. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 05 2. LOCALISATION VS GLOBALISATION There’s a relentless tension between global marketing and localised markets, and in too many cases it’s a destructive relationship. Big global ideas do not automatically map neatly across local territories - at worst, they can clash painfully with local cultural sensibilities, with disastrous consequences. Think of Pringles promoting bacon- flavored crisps with a Ramadan message, Nike’s southwest pacific tattoo designs, or Arsenal discovering that their shirt sponsor Sega made them the object of ridicule when playing in Italy. Global marketing might take the lead on marketing direction and campaign ideation, but effective marketing must always be localised. That means giving regional and in-country marketing managers autonomy, and allowing them to operate within a sophisticated messaging hierarchy that offers the freedom to adapt content. The solution When rolling out a significant global campaign, complement it with a Playbook for local markets that gives detailed guidance on how to adapt messaging, language and visuals where required, as well as details on how to deploy the campaign effectively. It’s what we did for the rollout of Visa Checkout across Europe. It can also be effective to operate a tiered agency structure with a lead creative agency at the global level, helping to coordinate the execution of the campaign with regional or in-market agencies. This has proved highly effective for our technology and financial services clients. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 06 3. CONFUSION ABOUT ATTRIBUTION It’s been called the ‘greatest unsolved problem in marketing’ [Source]. Despite the recent advances of cookie-based tracking, it’s still hard to achieve accurate marketing attribution; particularly when it comes to blended online and offline marketing, or multi-step advertising campaigns. As B2B marketers, we often can’t assess where the best leads are coming from, or we fall victim to biases; regularly placing too much emphasis on the last piece of content in a marketing journey. We plan neat sequential campaigns, where customers progress seamlessly from social advertising, to lead magnet, to conversion, but customer journeys are rarely linear. The customer lifecycle doesn’t overlap neatly with our marketing campaigns. The solution Embrace data-led marketing. A new era of algorithm-based, AI and data-led marketing is just beginning and those organisations that invest in creating new cross-channel marketing and attribution models now will reap the benefits. Platforms like Bombora are pioneering the use of user intent signals to help organisations understand and respond to changes in market demand, whilst platforms such as Thunderhead are developing software that can combine multiple marketing data sources to model, predict, create, and optimise customer journeys based on contextual information and machine learning. The next wave of highly effective B2B campaigns will combine emotional intelligence and behavioural assumptions, with data- led models and predictive analytics, to deliver truly personalised and relevant marketing communications, whilst radically improving marketing attribution. Now is the time to find forward-thinking partners and software that can help you take your B2B campaigns to the next level. BBD BEST PRACTICE GUIDE #5 Demand Generation in B2B: 5 Ways to Cut Through with Your Next Campaign 07 4. SATISFYING KEY STAKEHOLDERS A challenge that is as pervasive as marketing is old, the sheer number of stakeholders involved in the decision-making process continues to be a barrier to effective and timely demand generation campaigns.