Even Effective Demand Generation Is Ineffective Without Brand Marketing

I’ve worked in demand creation for more than ten years and have had a lot of different jobs at different companies. The job has changed a lot in that time.

If you’ve been paying attention to the talk on LinkedIn over the last two years, though, you’ll notice that change has sped up and become more important. What used to be a function for finding and nurturing leads is now called “go-to-market” (GTM), and it often gets the most money, especially in smaller tech businesses.

The new demand gen way of thinking:

Those who haven’t been following the conversation have missed some great points about the flawed approaches that have become the norm for generating demand:

I’ve worked in demand creation for more than ten years and have had a lot of different jobs at different companies. The job has changed a lot in that time.

If you’ve been paying attention to the talk on LinkedIn over the last two years, though, you’ll notice that change has sped up and become more important. What used to be a function for finding and nurturing leads is now called “go-to-market” (GTM), and it often gets the most money, especially in smaller tech businesses.

The new demand gen way of thinking.

Those who haven’t been following the conversation have missed some great points about the flawed approaches that have become the norm for generating demand:

• The common use of lead generation as the main measure of marketing success, which feeds short-term dashboards instead of real revenue results.
• This means putting forms in front of all content and putting lead generation ahead of content viewing.
• In lead generation efforts, content is being changed and watered down to make it more appealing to a wide audience.
• As MQL is watered down and low-intent lead-scoring possibilities are added to meet goals, SQL conversion rates keep going down.
• As the strategy becomes more used, more and more leads will lead to SQL results.
• To put it simply, creating demand had turned into a numbers game where you had to chase flow through piles of leads by sending out SDRs at regular intervals.
• Not only is it a bad experience with the brand, but it’s also a bad plan because it costs a lot to get new customers. It was long time to start fighting back against this old way of doing things.
• There were many ideas for how to solve the problem, but they all came down to one easy idea:
• Making high-intent MQLs that turn into pipeline should be the goal of demand creation.

It is suggested that this be done by getting more people to raise their hands and talk to sales directly, instead of searching through the growing number of leads with little interest. Together with these incoming hand-raisers, it would use its lead generation to “capture” the MQLs with a lot of purpose.

All of this would be done to get high conversion rates to SQLs and stable acquisition prices.

A good idea meets a need in brand marketing

Everything that was said about the better direction for demand production is a good thing. It means that marketing can focus on message consumption over conversion, on long-term value creation over short-term results.

The next steps are hard because there isn’t enough brand marketing backing for this important direction change.

The old way of creating demand didn’t have any brand marketing either, but the effect was often hidden because the marketing department was meeting its lead and MQL goals. It should be clear that no current brand efforts are being made to create them once demand generation takes a step back and focuses on quality over quantity.

But as a business, we haven’t put brand building at the top of our list of priorities in decades, so that realization hasn’t hit yet.

Demand generation is stepping in to fill the part of brand marketing that isn’t being played by brand marketing. Even though the person means well, that is in the end a bad idea.

Demand generation is a feature that gets things going.

As part of this new demand generation philosophy, there is a strong and noble desire to win MQLs through a type of persuasion that lead generation has traditionally not allowed. This is what some people call “demand creation.” The goal is to give so much value through thought leadership and clear marketing that people will want to buy your product, which will lead to new high-intent MQLs.

When you look at the theory in light of basic economic and marketing principles, you can see some big problems. One of the biggest is the difficulty in making people want to buy.

It still has the same linear thinking problems as the older demand generation, though, if it means driving demand toward your brand (which isn’t always the case). This is the idea that viewers are passive until you convince them to become active.

There is only one difference: this is happening with unrestricted material instead of lead nurturing programs in marketing automation systems. The issue is still the same, though.

Non-linear buying and making decisions based on the situation

We can’t control when buyers will come to the market. The timeline can’t be changed no matter how complicated the group is.

Handraiser MQLs are not the result of an effort to persuade, but of an effort to remember. A lot of research shows that buyers have thought about making a purchase for a long time before they actually do it. But what’s becoming more popular is the idea that buyers should also think of your brand when they’re ready to buy.

When they need to solve a problem, being aware of your brand in that setting is just as important as having a good opinion of it.

This problem is fixed by memories, which are made and refreshed across time and in a very non-linear way. For example, memories formed months or years ago can be brought back up at random times we can’t control.

The demand generation motion, on the other hand, focuses on short-term results and linear trips as an activation function. This is what brand marketing is all about.

Different ways of thinking and moving

The goals of the new demand generation attitude are good, and they should be embraced. But no matter how good the idea is, they can’t take the place of brand marketing that thinks and measures in different ways.

This is also more than just a theory. HockeyStack says that even though this new demand generation process has much higher MQL to SQL conversion rates than the old lead-gen model, it still has a negative customer acquisition cost because it has reached a plateau due to a lack of brand support.

The new model is still much better than the old one, but demand creation is just an activation function that needs something to work against.

This has always been the job of brand marketing. Now might be the time for real change.

If you improve your demand creation and spend money on brand marketing, you will get huge returns. But they need to be worked on together as a single plan.