025. Building a Demand Gen Strategy that Scales (Part 1)

Hello everyone, my name is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. I am really happy for the opportunity to have a conversation with you today. And today we're going to discuss a topic that I think is very relevant, especially obviously for the audience that these series of videos and podcasts is intended for. Today we are going to discuss how do you build demand generation strategy that scales. So the general idea is that if you. I'm thinking about a couple of scenarios here for those that might be interested on this topic, but in general will be if you are new to demand generation, either because you change a company, change companies, and you have taken a new role as responsible for demand generation for your company or brand and or it's a current company, you just roll into that. And even those of you that have been doing a little bit of demand generation in the past, maybe not formally or even, you know, a program that is going on and just want to review if you're using best practices around how do you, how do you set it up or how do you structure it so it can scale and work better for you? So that's the general idea. I initially wanted to create just one episode about it. I think I'm going to break it down in a couple. So this is going to be part one and in the next one we will have a conversation about, you know, the rest of the content. So the general idea or the basics where I want to start obviously are give you a preview of the key elements of demand generation program, how do you set it up? So ideally you cover these four areas and in some implementations you can break it down even in five or six different key elements or steps. But these four I think are the basic, the core, and they are initially, and I will explore during the episode, the first two today and the next two on the next episode. But first two are setting up the ideal client profile or defining the ideal client profile and buyer Personas or buying committee and what you are the question that you're trying to answer when you go into this first step of the program or the process is, is who is your target audience? Pretty much that's the general idea. But obviously we will dive a little bit into what we mean by that. The next step or structure or step that you have to take will be around auditing your current content or your current digital assets. And the questions that you want to answer around that step are what have you already done, right? What is that you already have either because someone else or another team implemented or you have done it in the Past and also very important is what I have already. Does it fit my current audience or my ideal client profile, the people that I want to target now? And obviously also you want to have an understanding of your current content because you want to understand later if that content fits your goals. And the other question that you want to answer is not just the content from the point of view of the brand or the company, but also how that content maps to the way that your buyer search for information. So you want to also understand if there's a gap there. The third step will be once you know who your audience is and once you know what you have and how that fits your buyers, then you want to establish some goals and KPIs that will allow you to understand first, what is that you want to accomplish so you can understand the gap. And second, how are you going to measure success basically? And finally, based on the goals that you have in the content, you understand your gap. And then you can determine or create a game plan, right? Plan a strategy usually structure in the way of programs, demand generation programs that are break down into campaigns and usually are implemented through different marketing channels. Right? So it's going to be a whole idea that we're going to dive into, but the general idea is that you simply do and then measure based on those goals that you set up at the beginning. And obviously you adjust as you go and if you know the marking conditions, changes and all that. So those are the general steps, right. I will repeat them again. So you have the. You have to define your ideal client profile, you have to define or audit your current content. Map it, do your buyer's journey, establish goals and how you're going to measure them through KPIs and finally define and implement an action plan. Now let us dive into the first step, documenting your ideal client profile. And the first thing that I want to discuss is why is this important and where is it coming from? The ideal client profile, which is the name that or the way that we look at the audience from a demand generation perspective actually has been built up, at least for me, from what we have learned from the Inbound movement Spearhead by HubSpot. So one of the great things about Inbound is that he taught us or helped us learn that buyers are nowadays the one in charge of the, of the purchase cycle or process, not the sellers anymore. Right? So we understand now pretty clearly that you need to attract prospective buyers through content, through engaging content. And we also know that even when outbound efforts work, they are usually less effective than letting people come to you, right? Instead of you going out there to the market, which works to some degree, it will do the job. And especially if you have a strong brand, then you can erode it a little bit with, you know, doing outbound. And if you are very tactical, it can work really well. But in general, letting people to come to you in their own terms when they are ready is usually more effective. And you, you come from, from a better position in terms of selling. So attracting people is usually better than just reaching out directly. However, there are some challenges from that approach that inbound teach us to follow. And one of it is that usually for inbound to work, you have to have these massive audiences. So you define these buyer Personas and then you create content for a large audience, which usually a lot of them are not ready to buy. But more importantly, a lot of them will never buy from you. They are not the kind of clients that you want to sell to or that will be willing to invest time and money in your solution. And so while educating prospective buyers is obviously fun and something great to do, at the end of the day, you want to close some business too. So I believe that identifying your ideal client profile is fundamental to accomplish just that, right? Going beyond the buyer Persona and really focusing on the kinds of companies that you are really successful with. So that's the general idea about the ideal client profile. If we have to make a definition, the first way that you can look at them is your idea client profile is that you want to understand internally what are the types of organizations that you serve better, right? Either because they get a lot of value from you, right? That you know that you provide a lot of value for your product. And this is something very interesting. The same product will have completely different kind of impact to different buyers, right? You don't, you are not changing anything about them. It's just that for some buyers, there's ton of value from them or from those products at that price point. And from other buyers, there's not a ton of value, right? So it's really important that you understand your current solutions. What are the kind of companies that benefit the most? So what's one side of the coin? The other important side of the coin is, or the other side of the coin is, is what companies are likely to recognize that value from the things that you sell, right? Because in that the flip side, because once you know who benefits from your solution, but it's also really important that you understand in the marketplace what kind of customers already know that, so it will be easier to Engage with them because recognize they recognize value from your, from your offering, from your products and services. So ideal client profile is usually around companies in B2B and not necessarily only about individuals. That's one key difference. And there are basically two kind of data that you can aggregate to define it, right? So you want to be or you are interested on things like location, right? Geographical location, where those companies are in terms of, you know, countries, state, cities, depending on the reach of your company. Another key element usually is the industry that they belong to. And for me, industry is usually one of those factors where the distinction between a company perceiving value or not from your solutions comes from right there. Maybe your product is super helpful and valuable for healthcare, but not so much for education, for example, or manufacturing versus information technology. Another criteria or another criteria you can use obviously is company size in the same way, right? You might be very valuable for small companies, medium companies, large companies, and really related to that is revenue. And there are also some, they're called technographic criteria. Especially this is very relevant for SaaS, but for SaaS companies, right? Selling software as a service, but it can apply to other kinds of companies. In general, you want to understand the, we can call it technology or just the solutions that they have already in place. Because usually you need a level of maturity before they start looking for the next level of the solutions that you're already using, right? So they can be very basic in the middle or very advanced. And so understanding the kinds of solutions that your ideal client profile is already using will help you to get to the most relevant population or most relevant kind of company faster and in a better way. You also want to understand the, the ways that or the things that trigger their journey for looking for a solution called something called purchase triggers, right? What happened, what situations trigger the intent of the buyer to start looking for solutions in the marketplace or what are usually their drivers right within the company. What what is that they are trying to accomplish in terms of company goals or personal goals? They that might help you reach out to them at the right time, at the right moment, versus, you know, trying to talk to everybody at any given moment of their buyer cycle. Now these are some of the criteria that you can use for identifying your ideal client profile. But that doesn't mean that you are, you know, just selling to companies. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter that it's B2B, you are selling to people who is actually making the purchase is not a company, it's a group of people or a person. So you still need to have that portion of the buyer Persona included on your ideal client profile, right? So once you have the understanding of the icp, then you layer on top of that the roles and responsibilities of usually the committee or the group of people that influence the decision, right? And there's obviously different ways to organize or categorize the roles, but in general there's the decision maker and then you have someone that actually owns the budget and there's the end user and people that influence the purchase. So usually in B2B, depending on how large is the quantity or the amount of being purchased, and you know the how critical is for the organization, you will have anything from one person to six or seven people influencing the purchase, even when there's just usually one person that is actually the owner of the budget. So you want to understand for that group of people, obviously their job titles or roles that got to be involved, the seniority or level that needs to be involved in the case of decision makers. And as we were saying, this is the level at the buyer personnel level where you understand the triggers that detonate their search for solutions. And very important obviously here is that you understand how they consume content. And while you have to do an intersection between what your company feels comfortable producing, the formats that your company is capable of producing, you also have to take in consideration the type of content and how your audience usually consume them. Right? It makes no sense to create video if most of your potential buyers just read blog posts and vice versa. So obviously there's a trade off there. But at least you have to be aware how they are consuming content right now and adapt your strategy based on that to provide the formats that matter to them. So once you have identified your ideal client profile and then you layer on top of that your buyer Persona information, then you go to the next step, which is mapping your content to your buyer's journey. And the general idea here is that in the very basic stages of content creation, usually you treat all your content the same way, you give the same weight to them or organize it just on the formats that you have on your website or your internal archiving system, right? So you might say something like this is sales collateral and this is the blog content and these are the videos that we have, and these are the case studies that we have. But your, your buy it do not see your content in those terms. They are not looking for infographics, they are not looking for rarely they're looking for ebooks or, or just to follow your blog content. The way that they discover content is based on the stage, on their own journey. And that's how they start consuming content. And it's usually triggered by questions, right? So your buyer will be asking questions along the way. And when they're search for those, for those questions, they will get answers from you, from your content. And that's the part that you actually have to map out. You have to understand for each piece that you have the question that you are trying to answer with it. And you might discover they are announcing any. And that's when you will start doing changes. But in general that will be the idea. Why is this important? Why do you need to frame your content as a way to answer questions to your buyers? Well, usually because if you provide information then your potential buyer will convert faster. They will go through these steps of the buying cycle in a faster way compared to the potential where they have to ask friends and dig on their own in a non structured way. And the other important one is that usually when you share information use shape the opinion that the potential buyer has of your brand. It's very subtle, but it happens. And so you want to, you want to be part of their process. So when they are ready to make a decision, you are in their mind, you are top of mind to them. Obviously from the conversation that we were having before now, we can see that usually you don't want to create content just for one role, right? Just for one buyer Persona. You want to create content that is tailored to the different roles that your ICP might have, right? Depending on if it's a decision maker, if someone that influenced just the decision you will usually have for each icp, you will have a key buyer Persona role, usually the person that's actually making the decision or the end user. But you don't want to forget about the rest, right? In the way that you map out the content. So having in consideration that the way that you organize it. And this is pretty standard because it's using other methodologies like inbound. You start with the purchase triggers, right? That will be the questions that usually a person will be asking. And you map each piece of content that you have to one of the three stages that usually someone goes through when they are researching. And different companies and different methodologies call it differently. I will use the one that comes from HubSpot, but obviously other companies call it different ways, but it's in general similar. You have awareness, which for me is usually that part of marketing that is in charge of lead generation. So you have that brand awareness portion and then the traffic or, or, or People coming into the website and usually it's a function of lead gen of marketing and that is intertwined with lead generation. And then you have the consideration stage and I forgot to mention it. Now in general, what I mean by awareness, the kind of questions that a prospective buyer is asking are related to symptoms of the problem. They're trying to understand the problem, they're trying to understand what's wrong or what are the opportunities available to them. And then they move into the consideration stage where they are asking questions related to potential solutions. And one of those solutions might be yours and the rest might be from, you know, the competition or alternative solutions. But in the same way that we were saying about awareness, you want to be part of that process because if they might decide that they don't want your solution, but that's temporary, might be not right now, they might choose something else later, but they might come back to the way that you do things and you will be top of mind to them. So then the order stage will be consideration. Usually it's part of in the marketing process, in the lead nurturing sub process or steps. And finally you have decision where someone is already aware of the problem, as already researched some solutions and is now comparing your offer against the competition. And so they are looking for content that helps them or either helps them decide or they are gathering information for the decision maker so they can, so the decision maker can make a commitment. So that's where your case studies and your reviews come in play. Right? So each piece of content that you have, you will have to map out to those three stages and, and try to understand what are the questions that people might be asking and the potential answers that you are providing. You might discover while you do this that there are going to be some questions at some stages where you don't have any content or if you have a content is not the right fit. And that's okay. That's part of the idea, right? You might discover that maybe you have a lot of content on the decision stage, but very little on the consideration or awareness stage or that you might have on the awareness stage. Content that is too broad is not answering any specific solution. So you are bringing non relevant traffic that happens very often. And that process will help you understand the gaps, right? Where you have some answers and another ones you don't. Another area of opportunity for your content audit or another thing that you should discover is related to how that content is performing. So here are some ways that you can evaluate that. One will be usually from the website point of view you will try to understand what are your top assets, right? The ones that are driving the most traffic, the ones are people spending the most time or they are scrolling or investing more times. And usually also if you've, if you try to look at them from the lead generation point of view, the ones are having the best conversion rate. So you want to understand what kind of content is working best for you from the website point of view. If within your current efforts of demand generation, you already have an email marketing effort of any kind, then you also want to understand if you know the emails that you're sending are being open, if they are being clicked, if they are being people is interested in what you're offering, if you are increasing the amount of new subscribers to your database and how many people is unsubscribing. Which will give you an idea of, as we were saying, how relevant is your audience to the content that you have. If you're doing any effort on social, you can evaluate it in the same way, right? In this case more for if you're increasing the number of followers and if they're the right kind of companies, the right kind of buyers, the engagement that they have with the content that you're producing from their website and if there's any share of traffic that you are sending to your website that can help you to get leads and eventually nurture them, you can do the same evaluation from the SEO point of view, right? Rankings, the keywords that you're ranking for the mix that you have between branded terms and non branded terms and even referral traffic that comes from other sites link into your content. And finally, if you have any kind of digital advertising effort, depending, and we will explore that in more detail in our next episode, but depending on the kinds of campaigns that you might have, right? Those campaigns oriented for awareness or for consideration or for decision, then you will evaluate things like reach. How many people are you, are you impacting with your ads impressions, right? And or frequency to, for the awareness portion engagement with your ads and traffic, that will be for consideration. And if you have performance campaigns, those gear toward either getting leads or nurture leads so they can become customers. You want to understand also your conversion goals. So that's in general what you will try to accomplish on the content or the mapping of your content in the, in the, in the second step, right? Understanding all your assets, understanding at what stage they are talking to what, what questions are you answering with each piece of content and if you're using different channels to distribute them, how effective are those channels in terms of awareness, consideration and decision for your brand. So this will be all for our session today for episode today. On the next one, as I was sharing at the beginning, we will cover the other two big steps of a successful demand generation plan. We will cover how do you set up goals and KPIs, and we also will help you to understand how do you organize your game plan right? How you set it up in form of programs, campaigns, and in general, what marketing channels do you use for each of them. So thank you again for your time. I hope you have found value on this episode and talk to you in the next one. Have a great day. Sam.