[{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#Article","articleBody":"Hey B2B marketers, we really need to talk about demand generation.\nYes, we need to generate revenue. And ostensibly, in order to generate revenue, we need leads. \nBut collectively we are suffocating our own marketing programs with an obsession over the wrong end of the proverbial funnel.\nYou see, recent research from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and LinkedIn (disclosure: my employer) have codified an important if uncomfortable truth for many marketers:\nMost of your B2B buyers\u2014to the tune of a full 95% of them\u2014are not currently in the market for your products or anything like them.\n \nKick ROI, loyalty, and engagement into hyperdrive via great content\n   From e-books to blog posts, videos to GIFs to podcasts, great content marketing wins audiences - even if they reside in galaxies far, far away.  \nWhy are you so obsessed with me: B2B marketing demand gen\nLots of B2B products and services have higher price tags, long buying cycles, and are the sort of purchases that businesses just don\u2019t make (or change) on a regular basis. Which means that most of the advertising and marketing we create is touching the 95% of the market that is not ready to buy anything.\nWhy does this matter? Well\u2026 because most B2B brands are pretty terrible at doing the kind of marketing that the 95% of out-of-market buyers need: brand marketing.\nWe often recoil from brand marketing and paid media because it feels fluffy somehow. Superficial, not nearly serious enough for our very serious offerings, and hard to measure and quantify. \n(And didn\u2019t the digital age promise us that we\u2019d be able to \u201cmeasure everything\u201d?) It\u2019s exactly that sort of tactical overpromise and creative under-delivery that\u2019s exacerbated a critical gap in most B2B marketing programs today.\u00a0\nThe reality is that advertising \u2013 including the stuff you\u2019re doing on social media channels and your content marketing programs \u2013\u00a0has its biggest impact on something called brand salience.\u00a0\nIf you\u2019re not familiar, brand salience is \u201cthe propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations\u201d. \nIn short, when someone is ready to make a purchase \u2013\u00a0 especially a big and potentially long-lived one in B2B, we want them to not only know we exist \u2013 but remember our brand in that context.\u00a0\nWe tend to ignore this critical concept in B2B, pretending instead that we can somehow \u201ccreate demand\u201d through our content and our media. \nBut our marketing doesn\u2019t create demand, the customers\u2019 needs do.\nWhich means our marketing has to instead address the most likely gap in the process: making sure they think of us when those needs arise.\n \nWhat is brand experience management? Definition, meaning, insights\n   What does brand experience management mean? How does it compare with brand management? What tools help and how can you measure it? We've got the answers.  \nHow B2B marketing can walk the marketing talk along a non-linear journey\nB2B marketing demand gen obsessions creates a plethora of issues \u2013 how do we fix them?\nBy making sure our marketing is distinctive, memorable, interesting, and relevant to our customers, not just pleasing to our own teams or checking boxes of \u201cvalue propositions\u201d\nBy creating content and media that\u2019s reflective of the world our customers inhabit during the 95% of the time they don\u2019t need us (which requires us to talk about ourselves a heck of a lot less)\nBy designing for the long tail of marketing, understanding that tomorrow\u2019s buyers are not likely to be today\u2019s decision makers, and that building salience takes time so that when those buyers eventually enter the market, we\u2019ll be there to meet them\nThe truth is that the marketing \u201cfunnel\u201d is something we created as marketers because, well, it\u2019s simple. \nWe like to think the buying process is linear (it isn\u2019t), that people behave neatly and predictably throughout it (they don\u2019t), and that we can create demand for things just because we need people to buy them (we can\u2019t).\nSo the answer is that we have to have more realistic expectations of the power of our own marketing. We have to raise our eye level and think bigger, more broadly, and more creatively in order to truly win those storied \u201chearts and minds\u201d.\u00a0\nAnd we absolutely must stop measuring marketing success in terms of campaign clicks, quarterly reports, and lead volumes alone.\nThe B2B brands who will win are the ones we\u2019ll remember. Which means most of us have a lot of work to do. And if we do that work right?\nWe might even manage to take the boring out of B2B and give it oxygen again.\nKick-a$$ commerce. \ud83d\udcf2 Innovation.\ud83d\udcf2 \ud83c\udf43Sustainability.\ud83c\udf43 \u23f1 Service + support.\u23f1 Customers expect a lot from brands. Hear the best in the biz talk how to deliver.","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#Article_Person","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#Article_Person_ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/23x6xj3o92m9361dbu2ij362-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Amber-Naslund-150x150.jpeg"},"name":"Amber Naslund","sameAs":["https:\/\/twitter.com\/ambercadabra","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/ambernaslund\/"],"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/amber-naslund\/"},"dateModified":"2021-09-24T18:26:25+00:00","datePublished":"2021-09-13T05:01:13+00:00","description":"B2B marketing demand gen: We must stop measuring success in terms of campaign clicks, quarterly reports, and lead volumes alone.","headline":"Your obsession with demand gen is going to suffocate your B2B marketing","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#Article_ImageObject","height":"630","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/B2B-marketing-demand-gen-FTR-1200x630.png","width":"1200"},"mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/","name":"Your obsession with demand gen is going to suffocate your B2B marketing","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/","additionalType":"https:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/wiki\/Q1193236","description":"Relevant, timely information & analysis on commerce trends, both consumer-facing and B2B.","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/23x6xj3o92m9361dbu2ij362-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/themes\/hybris_foc\/assets\/images\/layout\/logo-new-2x.png?_=1","height":"96","url":"https:\/\/23x6xj3o92m9361dbu2ij362-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/themes\/hybris_foc\/assets\/images\/layout\/logo-new-2x.png?_=1","width":"500"},"name":"The Future of Customer Engagement and Experience","sameAs":["https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/a-call-for-a-better-experience\/id1479742201","https:\/\/twitter.com\/FutureOfCEC","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/groups\/4844282","https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/feed\/"],"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/"},"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#Article"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"2021","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"09","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/\/09\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"13","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/\/09\/\/13\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"Your obsession with demand gen is going to suffocate your B2B marketing","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/09\/13\/b2b-marketing-demand-gen\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]