5 mistakes B2B Companies make with DemandGen
Today’s post is from a webinar titled “Top 5 mistakes B2B companies make with Demand Gen and RevOps” by Kamil Rextin, the founder of 42 Agency with over 12 years of demand gen and revenue operations for high-growth B2B startups under his belt.
Kamil breaks down what demand gen actually is and common mistakes companies make.
Maybe demand gen doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it out to be.
What is Demand Gen
Demand Gen is not just paid media, direct response, demos or acquisition. Demand Gen just simply means the journey to revenue. It’s taking someone who did not know about your product or the problem all the way down to revenue or turning them into an opportunity.
The job isn’t done until a sale is made. Something Kamil says here that struck me is that he sees Demand Gen as more of a mid-market enterprise function compared to the growth function which is targetted more at SMBs
In mid-market enterprise, you’re connecting more with sales and may even take on more of a sales role. You’ll not have that much influence on the product side because the product is not very “self-serve.” With growth, because it’s more focused on SMBs, your costs compared to revenue need to be smaller so you’re pushing more people into the self-service funnel. You are responsible for product onboarding as well as acquisition as well as upgrades and other things that are product-related.
As marketers, we like to put labels on things (e.g. product-led growth, freemium, demand gen and growth marketing) but in the end, it’s all about good marketing- understanding your customers’ problems and solving them.
Top 5 mistakes companies make with Demand Gen:
1. Ignoring product-channel fit
Understanding how buyers do research and buy your product is very important when it comes to deciding what channels you want to be on.
For instance, if you’re selling ERP software it’s unlikely that your buyers are researching it on Reddit but they may be reading Gartner reports or industry publications because they’re more of the C-Suite.
If they’re more SMB then you’re likely to find them on Facebook, Google or LinkedIn.
Align your marketing channels and strategy to your customers’ buying process. When a company says ‘X channel doesn’t work for us it’s very likely that it’s because that’s not where your people hang out.
2. Wrong bids/optimizations
A lot of people say ads aren’t working for them because they’re not optimising their ads for the right thing. It’s best to optimise for the outcomes you want.
ad platforms will work based on your selected goal. If you’re running Bottom of Funnel ads, optimise for conversion events vs. traffic. If you’re running Top of Funnel ads, optimise for video views or landing page views vs traffic.
Build quality traffic that you can remarket to. Brand awareness ads usually aren’t the best for B2B Saas.
3. Not optimising for business outcomes
Sometimes you hear businesses say that the quality of ad conversions isn’t great or doesn’t match the CRM. One way to solve this is connecting your CRM and Marketing Databases to the Ad Platforms to drive for quality vs. volume.
Most of the Ad platforms now leverage offline conversion tracking which means that they get data from your CRM and you can send those
events as offline conversions so ad platforms know that these conversions are worth more than someone that’s simply filling out a form.
This helps train the ad platforms to deliver and measure conversions much further down the funnels as the algorithm has a better idea of what matters the most to your business.
4. Not considering the holistic experience
Most companies will invest heavily in the campaign’s technical setup but ignore the quality of creatives or the customer experience. The average person is exposed to a good number of ads a day so you have to have solid creatives and a great post-click experience.
An example is running ads on AdWords and sending the audience to a home page, the home page is not optimised for converting that kind of traffic.
The homepage is for somebody who might already be familiar with your brand. If you’re targeting a cold audience who has never heard of your brand, the home page is probably not the best place to send them because they’re only going to check it out for a few seconds before they leave- they don’t understand what your homepage is talking about.
In contrast, if you have a dedicated landing page per campaign which talks about the problem and matches that to a solution, you’re more likely to get results.
Other things to consider include what context or time of day they’re browsing in.
Consider the attention and trust framework. Your job as a marketer is to get attention and build trust. You get your audience’s attention by strong creatives and you build trust by strong copy and words on the landing page.
5. Over-investing in Branded search
Branded search often does not bring in and increase in customers and when it does, there’s a need to ask if those customers would still have converted via organic search.
To find this out, check Google Console for the click-through rate on branded queries. If it’s high (more than 70%) cut down on branded spend. If it’s low e.g. 20% or less, run branded search but invest in SEO because ideally, you should rank on top organically for branded search terms.
Bonus- Understand Out vs. In-Market
Not everyone in your target market is ready to buy today (or in the next 30-60-90 days)
You and other competitors are trying to reach the people who are actively in the buying cycle. Marketing is understanding that 90% of your target is not ready to buy and asking how you can build brand affinity and mental availability so that when they are actually in the market and ready to buy they have an affinity for your brand and your products vs. your competitors.
So instead of focusing on the tiny % of the market that is In-market and ready to buy, the goal is to think more long-term and build trust with the Out-market customers so they think of you when they’re ready. This also helps to lower your customer acquisition costs. THIS is what Demand Creation/Generation means.