How to build category-winning demand marketing
Tags: B2b Marketing, B2B, Marketing, Demand Marketing, Demand Generation

At the B2B Marketing Expo Virtual 2021, Cognism CMO, Alice de Courcy, gave a talk on demand marketing.

The talk reflected the journey Cognism has taken themselves; evolving their marketing focus from lead generation and lead acquisition to demand generation.

Alice then explained what this means in a practical sense. The tactics that we’ve implemented to enable this transition, and also the results we’ve seen first-hand.

This isn’t a talk from a marketing theorist — it’s a demonstration of Cognism’s proven marketing method.

If you’re looking to sharpen your marketing team’s edge, you’re in the right place.

Generating more ‘direct demand’

A definition of ‘direct demand’ would be a good place to start.

Direct demand is basically when someone comes to your business, and voluntarily makes contact. That could be filling in a form for a demo, asking for more information or requesting a free trial.

Whatever the specifics may be, that contact is reaching out on their own terms, with direct intent. It hasn’t been forcefully manufactured by marketers.

That’s not how we were doing things when Alice joined the team.

The old system was lead acquisition: scaleable, predictable and consistent.

But we left it behind.

Alice explained why:

“The role of any marketing leader is to be always thinking about the future and your goals. Looking at channel exhaustion. Trying to do things better.” “One thing that was clear to me was that direct demo requests were converting at a far higher rate than content downloads.” (obvious, right?). “The difference for us was a 10% meeting booked rate from content downloads, and a 45% MB rate from direct demand demo requests.” “We had no doubt that generating more direct demand leads would make us more efficient, more effective, and give us a better marketing engine overall.”

The next step is easy, changing the way you think about B2B marketing. 😬

“Our best content is more likely to give us direct demo requests. Rather than gating it, we started thinking about how we could get more people to consume it.”

In the image below, you can see our previous method (lead acquisition) on the left, and our new method (demand generation) on the right.

lead acquisition vs. demand generation

Today, Cognism still focuses on lead acquisition and demand generation with a pretty even split. The plan in the future is to focus primarily on demand generation.

Changing goals

With a change in strategy, comes a change in goals. Not just overall, but for every aspect of your marketing output.

So how do you change these goals?

Let’s first take the example of webinars.

Changing goals — webinars

Previously the success of a webinar was measured in net new leads. Now, we measure success by the quality of the content and the distribution of the content after the webinar.

“I wanted my team to stop focusing on the number of emails that were sent out to generate leads. I wanted them to focus on creating quality content, and how they’re going to distribute it afterwards.”

So what have we done differently?

Increased the frequency of our webinars.

Reduced the number of details requested to sign up for a webinar, to just those required by the platforming hosting the webinar.

Built robust webinar distribution plans.

Ungated and embedded the webinars on ‘on demand pages’. No longer requesting details for people to watch them.

This means that for us, across our ad platforms and website, we have more high-quality content to be easily consumed.

We created a list of tasks to consider when we create a webinar, which you can see (and steal!) below. 👇

Next, we’ll take a look at how we changed content goals.

Changing goals — content

Since we’re no longer focusing on lead acquisition, it makes sense to focus on different types of content.

We’ve moved away from 50-page eBooks, and are looking at actionable templates that can be directly matched to readers’ and consumers’ intent.

Here’s a look at our updated content calendar.

Now, if that looks like a screen from The Matrix to you, here are some of the key takeaways from Alice:

“You’ll see that under the ‘Title’ section, we don’t have many specific titles, rather we have blog types, e.g. marketing blog, sales blog, RevOps blog.” “Each of our writers has specialised in one of our key personas. We’ve asked them to become journalists and go and find stories in that field. This means we’ll always be writing the latest and best content, whatevers trending now. Not what we planned 6 months ago.” “The key is writing content that’s ready for distribution.”

With that, the way our writers create content has changed. They’re looking at trending hashtags and top influencers, and are spending time researching content within specific niches.

Now, their success is measured by how distributable the content is, and how it performs from a distribution perspective.

We also took one of our writers out of the content role, and asked them to focus specifically on distribution. Here’s more from Alice:

“We’ve all heard the saying ‘Create once, distribute forever’, but how many of us actually do that?” “Often, companies spend too much time writing, and not enough time distributing. We want to focus on distributing really well. That’s why we dedicated a member of our team entirely to distribution, to make sure we make the most out of the content we create.”

Changing goals — LinkedIn

We decided to double down on our personal branding.

We now run sessions for personal branding, we record them, share them within the company and analyse the data from everyone who is posting.

We’re bringing our team with us as we build our company and personal brands.

We’ve also changed our approach to our brand social media profiles.

“The times of just putting a blog post up on LinkedIn and saying ‘here’s a link to our article are over. That’s not the kind of content people want to see. Now we’re trying to get scientific with our posting.” “We’re breaking down post types, posting times, measuring impressions and engagement, and working out what our audience actually wants to see.”

Actioning direct demand well

Since we were driving more direct demand to the company, we needed to think about how we were actioning this new demand as efficiently as possible.

MDR

We have a role at the company called the Marketing Development Representative. They sit within sales, but focus entirely on marketing leads. It’s a promotion from the SDR role, so these reps are all high performers.

Why don’t these leads get actioned by the rest of our sales team?

“With marketing inbound leads you have to focus on SLAs. We have clear data on the chances of converting an inbound if you don’t respond within 5 minutes.” “So, our SLA is five minutes or under. It’s great to focus on generating demand, but you also must focus on actioning it.”

From this specialisation, we’ve seen our inbound direct demo requests, meetings booked and SQOs doubled.

Measuring the impact

As with every change in marketing, you need to be able to measure the impact.

“The metrics I care about as a CMO are the top-level metrics:

Lead:MB — sales reps need to be at capacity

MB:Meeting attended

MA:SQO

SQO:Closed won

MA:Closed won

“As long as these are on target, or over target, I know that what we’re doing is working.”

“That said, the number one goal for us is revenue. We’re a revenue-focused marketing team. That’s the underlying thing that we care about.”

Here’s the problem we encountered with the direct demand generation approach. We started paying for activities that we couldn’t directly measure.

Things like awareness activity on social media.

Whilst we can measure the in-channel metrics (cost per view, cost per engagement, cost per landing page view), it can’t be tied back to a particular demo request.

That’s a problem we had to tackle.

“I mapped the number of direct inbounds we have month on month, and the awareness spend.” “Then I looked for a correlation.

“You can see a 47% uplift, which for me is a clear indicator that this is working. I want to focus on demand generation even more moving forward.”

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