I’m a career B2B marketer.
I’ve worked in several functions across multiple industries. During my journey nothing has been as rewarding as marketing to marketers. It’s a big reason why I joined The Juice.
If I zoom out and look at my career I’ve spent the most of my time doing 3 things:
- Direct sales support: RFP, deliverable creation, partnership work, etc
- Demand generation: Being the guy that leaders turn to and say, “We need more leads. We need more leads now!”
- Brand and content: Telling the story and playing the “win marketers hearts and minds” game
I wrote about my time building relationships with information in an article that I recently dropped. If you don’t feel like reading 2 pieces of content from me in one day, the SparkNotes version is that you will get shit done with your sales counterparts by building a relationship where you are feeding them signals on the accounts that they are working on.
I spend a majority of my time working on brand and building content like this piece today. You can follow my Creator Page on The Juice to read, listen, or watch the latest and greatest content that I am putting out. If you are interested in learning more about content distribution, brand building, or how to grow your audience the right way then make sure you smash that follow button on my page! .
The area of my career that I’ve spent the most time and talked about the least since I’ve been at The Juice is demand generation. This isn’t an indictment against demand generation. Honestly, I think demand generation is one of the most important pieces to the marketing machine when done with the interest of the audience in mind.
The problem….most of the time demand generation is done in the interest of the marketer and their KPI’s. I’m not trying to point fingers here. I’m just as guilty as anyone else reading this who has bought a list, over-invested in shitty content syndication programs, or spent more time worrying about your own attribution than creating great experiences for your future customers.
If you are still trying to pull a fast one on the audience that you should be serving then stop. The old way of capturing leads to build demand for your brand is over. Let me help you by officially putting a nail in the coffin of “me-centered” marketing. It’s never been about your numbers. The people who have problems that your product solves don’t care about your numbers.
The dark side of demand generation has always been highly transactional.
It goes something like this:
I am going to pay for this thing.
We are going to deploy the thing.
We are going to capture leads.
I am going to upload leads into the CRM.
I am going to pass the sales.
My job is done.
…it’s like nails on a chalkboard. My mindset used to be completely transactional. The industry shifted and now making your content as easily accessible as possible is the way. The audience that you are trying to connect with is completely overwhelmed by the volume of content, campaigns, and outreach they receive on a regular basis. There’s so much degenerate demand generation that is going on right now, which presents an amazing opportunity for modern day marketers.
Have you heard me talk about quality over quantity?
It’s been from a content marketing perspective and have had some really smart modern day marketers help me in the process. This shift in B2B isn’t exclusive to content marketing. We can apply the same principles for why we should focus on less, but higher quality to our demand generation efforts, too.
Remember Intent Signals from last week?
We’ll be releasing Intent Signals in July. I’m excited because this update allows marketers access to key account data from their content. This information can be used to facilitate more productive conversations with your sales team. It moves away from, “Here is the lead. Go follow up” to “Your dream account has been reading our content on brand building. Here’s how I think we should follow up”.
After I published my piece from last week I got a Slack message that shared an update on Intent Signals that I want to share with you here. The update struck a chord for me and I believe can help silence the outdated, demand generation tactics that we keep forcing on our audiences.
Modern Day Demand Generation Coming Soon
My job is to build momentum.
I want to build excitement without sharing all of the details before the launch.
You can consider this the sneak preview of what we will be releasing next month.
The Juice has created win-win relationships for content marketers and B2B professionals. We have 5,000+ sales and marketing professionals engaging with and looking for high-quality content. For marketers, this means we're your match-maker. You choose the content you want to feature. You choose the audience you want to see. We deliver the data.
I am excited because I believe these insights will:
- Ignite more focused, higher quality demand generation experiences that will enhance the experience for your future customer and positively impact your brand
- Allow for a stronger, more productive relationship between sales and marketing during account planning
The old way to do demand generation is to invest a portion of your marketing budget to content syndication and celebrate vanity metrics. It might make you feel good, but will only force distance with your sales team.
The new way is to focus on quality over quantity. It’s about unlocking data points that you can take to your sales team. It’s not about taking that information and leaving. It’s about using it to identify a plan to collaborate together to deliver a great experience for the future customer on the other end.
It’s time to turn off the lights and let your old demand gen tactics collect dust.
We’ll shine a light on more details of how we are helping modern day marketers like you enter the modern day era of demand generation.
Your next customer will thank you for it.
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