Introducing: DemandGen 2.0™

Even with ABM, it is becoming increasingly clear that traditional DemandGen tactics are not quite optimized for the new behaviors and patterns emerging with prospects in the marketplace. Specifically, top-of-funnel activity on LinkedIn and social.

Current State of DemandGen

DemandGen + Sales

Alignment is the cornerstone of ABM, yet marketing and sales alignment meetings tend to focus on marketing performance, lead quality, and other marketing-related strategic and execution details.

Sales performance is generally less scrutinized in sales-led organizations since they view the function of marketing as sales enablement. Discussions are typically focused on leads. Sales people do not want to discuss or hear about brand awareness motions since those efforts do not immediately help them.

DemandGen + PMM

PMM owns core messaging and is generally good at producing long-form content such as whitepapers, reports and blog posts. However, this type of content is ideal for middle and bottom of funnel marketing motions, when prospects are researching more deeply. It is not ideal for top of funnel.

Working with Product Marketing Management, or PMM, presents a unique set of challenges for DemandGen around the topic of content and messaging. One common issue is the gap between this deep-dive long-form content ideal for SEO, and the lack of succinct top-of-funnel content for awareness and brand building. Furthermore, the focus of PMM teams has shifted to sales enablement activities, which leaves even less time to produce the type of content that DemandGen needs.

The format, depth and overall length of PMM assets are at odds with what prospects want and expect to consume on social. Simply sharing a link to long-format information no longer produces good results is being eclipsed by on-platform content. There is a real content gap and content production was listed as the top point point in 2023 and 2024 survey's of DemandGen leaders.

DemandGen + BDRs

BDRs (or SDRs) are at the intersection of DemandGen and Sales as they target and engage directly with prospects. Having a good reason to reach out to prospects makes their efforts more successful. Sharing product updates, upcoming events, recent relevant industry news are just a few examples of good outreach opportunities. Not to mention the relentless pace by which this function is being automated, puts more pressure on this role.

Sharing a link to an article or blog post is not ideal. People want to stay on platform. Adding new, engaging and useful content to these outreach efforts can dramatically improve success rate. Sharing short, snackable content directly in the message or sharing an on-platform link to a post can dramatically increase engagement and success.

DemandGen + Paid Media

Paid Media faces similar challenges in driving good results for campaigns. The majority of paid media budget goes to leadgen campaigns that feature landing pages with gated assets. The success rate of this aging formula has been steadily declining for the past few years and fixing it requires a new approach.

DemandGen 2.0

DemandGen 2.0 is a simple, yet powerful new framework that can be implemented by virtually any DemandGen organization today.

First, let's understand the motivation behind this framework:

If the current state of DemandGen was working, there would be solutions to these issues.

Determining how to address these issues requires that we accept the following 5 truths:

  1. Buyer behavior has shifted dramatically (more time on social, increase in mobile device use)
  2. DemandGen strategies and tactics continue to be less effective (decline in leadgen success)
  3. Buyer behavior is not linear
  4. AI must become part of DemandGen workflows
  5. Content must become a top priority

LinkedIn: Back Story

In late 2022, I decided to take a closer look at LinkedIn, as it had become the dominant B2B platform. We were spending a large portion of our DemandGen budget advertising on this platform and I wanted to better understand how prospects were actually engaging.

Shortly after I started my journey my focus on LinkedIn intensified when ChatGPT was announced. I became fascinated by AI and its potential and expanded my journey to include AI.

Turns out, this was great timing.

I became hyper-active on LinkedIn, using it multiple times daily - on my phone, iPad and desktop. I spent time learning, reading, and exploring AI and the various marketing topics that I was focused on. All the while taking screenshots of ads that were starting to appear (and re-appear) in my feed.

I grew my personal network with people that were sharing interesting information across an increasingly wider range of topics including startups, SEO, design, personal branding, finance and more.

This expansion of my personal network completely altered my LinkedIn feed, transforming it into an amazing source of useful information from a wide range of people.

As my network grew, so did awareness about LinkedIn Live Events, specifically on topics that were of interest to me. I started attending these events and my learning and observations continued.

I soon became addicted to carousels, which are mobile-friendly, short-form PDF documents that can be read in about a minute or so. Mainly because I could download them using my phone, share them and look at them again offline.

Infographics became my second favorite type of content. And short video clips were great too, but they required me to put my headset on so as not to disturb people around me, and they were not easily downloadable, at least not from my phone. As someone that likes to download files, the videos did not appeal to me.

As I started downloading more and more carousels and infographics, I categorized and documented each one. Today I have over 1,500 carousels, and over 2,500 infographics all neatly organized and categorized.

I learned about various content styles and posting patterns and how the best creators were achieving success. I could see their likes and engagement grow. I was tempted to start posting and sharing what I knew but decided to keep researching instead. I probably have one of the best hand-curated lists of great LinkedIn creators around.

As I switched between being a user and researching, new patterns emerged with respect to how professionals and B2B prospects were spending their time and engaging with these posts.

Combining the DemandGen challenges that I was trying to solve with my firsthand observations and experiences laid the foundation for what became my DemandGen 2.0 framework.

What I discovered

People spend time on LinkedIn doing various things, primarily this is what I found to be true:

Creators and advertisers, and social media managers that promote or sell on Linked perform additional tasks, but that was not my primary focus. My focus was to understand the new behavior of people using LinkedIn, which by default included our potential customers.

I was not alone in my obsession with carousels. I could see that carousel posts were achieving 100-300 likes, per post. They attracted dozens of meaningful comments, some of which could easily have been original posts of their own. There was (and is) an overall buzz of positive energy around posts on LinkedIn.

Side note: I saw some, but very little, copy-cat posters, and people that "borrowed aggressively" from others or from assets, trying to pass them off as their own. The good news is, from the tens of thousands of posts that i saw, this negative activity represented less than 0.1 %. Often times, the post was removed because people reported it to the original author.

Some of these creators share very insightful LinkedIn statistics across ads, posts, content etc. And that data was exactly what I was seeing unfold with my own experience. See my Resources Library for more.

Some creators are even "building in public", which is by far the most courageous marketing tactic that I have seen. They share wins and losses and openly share their struggles with various business issues. It's attention-getting for sure.

Adam Robinson in particular is living his B2B world in real-time on LinkedIn. His posts generate 300-500 likes. Some have even hit 700+ likes. His posts are not meant to be comical or entertaining. They are about his real-life business issues - the good, bad and ugly.

This non-stop blizzard of activity, interactions and sharing of information is happening right now on LinkedIn. All organic. These are not ads. No leadgen forms. No landing pages. It's all just happening in real time on LinkedIn.

How does DemandGen tap into this?

The concept of "tapping into" is the first mental shift to make. From my perspective, you "tap into it" by participating and "being part of it". Give freely. Share information. Share your knowledge. That's how you "tap into it".

That means, sharing content directly on platform and in way that people expect.

People on LinkedIn are not interrupting their LinkedIn experience to click off platform (Note that LinkedIn even warns people that they are about to leave the platform, another speed bump to overcome). People are not interested in visiting a landing page that presses them to share their contact information in order to download an asset. Knowing full-well that this exchange will trigger unwanted outreach from someone looking to book a call or set up demo or trial within minutes or hours of this exchange. People are mostly done with that experience.

Let's pause right here to take a closer look.

Many people use the LinkedIn mobile app to browse LinkedIn. The experience is superb. The landing page that you are pushing them to, will be a website, that provides a very different experience (slower, mediocre mobile experience, etc.) and the landing page will further require me to fill out a form. But I'm on mobile and, more importantly I'm not ready to share my information yet. And finally, the asset you are gating is typically an 8.5x11" or A4 formatted document - designed for desktop use. This entire experience is dated and dead.

The very premise of how DemandGen 2.0 was born out of a need to understand, address and capitalize on the new behaviors and expectations of people and prospects, especially as they engage on social. The landing page experience that I just described is the primary playbook for traditional DemandGen and ABM worldwide. And its broken.

Solution

Knowing the motivation, accepting the new realities and experiencing LinkedIn the way I did, enabled me to rethink how DemandGen could evolve to address this new landscape in a new way. I developed the DemandGen 2.0 framework to do just that.

Key Points

At the heart of it, the DemandGen 2.0 framework calls for restructuring the DemandGen org into: CBM (TOFU), ABM (MOFU, BOFU), Paid, and BDR motions.

CBM - Content-Based Marketing - TOFU (Top of Funnel)

The DemandGen 2.0 framework introduces a new content strategy called CBM (Content-Based Marketing) which is focused on feeding and driving top-of-funnel activities. Content produced by CBM can be repurposed for other marketing efforts, however the main focus of CBM is to develop and publish ungated, mobile-friendly, snackable content directly on social - specifically, LinkedIn. CBM assets are not to be gated.

CBM aligns its efforts with the PMM roadmap and overarching business goals. The goal of CBM is to grow the ABM pipeline of target account targets, help increase ABM lead quality, help increase ABM conversion rates and help accelerate pipeline.

ABM - Account-Based Marketing - Middle & Bottom of Funnel (MOFU,BOFU)

The DemandGen 2.0 framework refocuses ABM to drive middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel marketing activities only. ABM is no longer involved in any top-of-funnel activities. Instead, ABM is to focus on the needs of prospects at the account-level, which may not be aligned with any particular PMM priority or overarching business goals. The account or group of accounts dictate the focus of the ABM campaigns.

ABM is now focused on converting warm CBM anonymous prospects into ABM leads using gated assets, and then nurturing those leads with emails and webinars/demos to the bottom of funnel. The ABM team is now able to focus on improving sales enablement motions and not be involved with any discussions about top-of-funnel "brand building" efforts or "vanity" metrics. This shift eliminates the perceived fluff from conversations with CRO and Sales leaders and keeps ABM focused on leads and pipeline.

Paid Media - Ads, Retargeting and Organic Boosting

Paid media is to support CBM by boosting all organic posts. Paid can also run broader ads independent of organic posts or aligned with them (budget permitting). Paid continues to support ABM with account targeting ads and ad retargeting. LinkedIn has throttled the reach of organic company posts, so without boosting, publishing posts would be pointless.

Social Media - CBM prioritized

For many years, social media has been primarily an extension of the Communications (Comms) team and has been focused on sharing PR and news articles. Often times, the social media manager will work on the Comms team and not in DemandGen. The DemandGen 2.0 framework calls for CBM posts to be the priority and non-critical news posts to be deprioritized. That is, CBM content takes precedence over non-critical news posts. That means CBM should have admin access to the social account or the social media manager can report into the CBM/DemandGen org.

Sales

As stated in ABM, the sales org will now enjoy more focused conversations with ABM. The marketing funnel (top, middle, and bottom) is now managed much more efficiently with separate KPIs for each team. CBM is now laser focused on building awareness and growing engagement with anonymous prospects. CBM drives interest in the market, and warms prospects as they research options anonymously.

Product Marketing

ABM remains the primary touchpoint for product marketing (PMM). However, CBM should also become a direct touchpoint for PMM as they share newly created assets with this team. The ABM team is to share PMM information and content with CBM as a fail safe.

Summary of DemandGen 2.0

This subtle but profound split of the marketing funnel into Top (prospect growth) and Bottom (lead nurturing) streamlines the entire DemandGen process and allows DemandGen to grow and engage with top-of-funnel prospects in a much more consistent, thoughtful, organized and meaningful way. Refocusing ABM efforts squarely on leads and sales-enablement, eliminates unproductive top-of-funnel conversations with the sales org. ABM can rely on CBM activities to grow and engage with anonymous prospects that are not ready to connect.

The result of implementing this DemandGen 2.0 framework is a new outbound DemandGen marketing engine called CBM that is created and unleashed to develop a new generation of content that can prime-the-pump for ABM leads.

This new DemandGen 2.0 framework is relatively easy to implement. Define a new function called CBM specifically to address TOF marketing. Re-focus ABM efforts to address MOF/BOF campaigns. This new CBM function is given direct admin permissions to social media accounts and partners with Paid Ads for boosting. The Social Media marketing strategy is updated to be CBM-first (i.e. content-first), making news posts a secondary motion.

This new DemandGen structure allows the CBM team to operate without falling victim to scrutiny by outside orgs such as Sales. CBM is free to grow and experiment with new content formats and engagement techniques, including AI. And this very aspect of CBM is what DemandGen Systems can help with.



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