058. Demand Creation vs Demand Capture

Foreign. Well, I started talking but. Hello everyone, my name is Emilio Garcia. I hope everyone is having a grand, a wonderful day. This is another episode of Demand Gen Studio and with me as always is now Miranda. How are you, Miranda?

I'm good, how are you?

And we are doing good. I'm. I'm really excited to get back here. I share with people that I talked about this event that I want to do and want to do them more often for sure. I really enjoy having these conversations. I hope that you as well. And today we're going to cover demand creation. We have been talking about this topic for a little while and this, this time I want to compare it to is twin demand capture and how it kind of covers the whole spectrum or area about demand generation in general. So how you can use demand creation to boost what you're doing for demand capture already even if you're not using those words, even if you're not happy with the, with the phrasing. And we will unpack that. But that's in general what I want to cover today. So I don't know if you, Miranda, have anything to add.

I don't think so. Let's get into it.

Alrighty. So what do we mean by demand creation? So going back to, you know, the, the roots of digital marketing in general, I'll say that because most of the initial advertising at the beginning in digital spaces happen either through display ads, your banners or. Or through search on Google search. You know, search engines like Google really quickly kind of a couple of naming came into the field to describe those two activities, typically display ads and anything that was just kind of a banner before social media was related properly to branding, to brand marketing. Because in reality that's how people saw it. Right? Like a billboard in the digital space. Pretty much. Right. Or if you ever had some video, well, it will be like an ad commercial from a TV network that you have, that you have on your browser and that was the end of it. And the really different one at the time was paid search. Because the closest reference that you can have to an ad on Google is the jello pages. Right. It's a, it's a similar to that idea of, you know, this is an advertising. It's not like the Y pages that are organic just because you are part of the directory. But the only way to see those ads was if you were going searching for the service. And because of the nature of it, it started being called performance marketing. Right. Because it was clear that if someone's searching for something and click on that Ad and you get, especially if you imagine for professional services like plumbers and home services in general, you will get these leads consistently from those ads. And so the idea of I'm doing marketing that performs, that brings in sales catch in and created this differentiation between banners and, you know, Google apps. But eventually, especially for B2B, things change and, and continue to evolve to the point that that performance marketing typically has been called lead generation in general because not just advertising for in Google search engines, but if you do any advertising or organic efforts where the goal is to get that form feel, even if it doesn't have commercial intent, then it's not necessarily performance anymore in the strict sense because not everybody's ready to buy, but you are getting a lead out of that when you download an ebook, when you get someone to attend to a webinar. And so you can do those efforts in social media as well, even when it's more of a display kind of advertising. And those efforts, the ones where you have a lead as the goal, became lead generation. And eventually all the efforts related to advertising where you have, when you don't have that lead goal in particular will be what you will call branding or brand marketing. And for a little while, the lead generation camp grew very large, right? Especially because B2B companies lacked access to those databases for those B2B buyers. And the only way to get the inside track track on communications was to get that lead and start communicating by email unless you wanted to get, you know, buying lists of emails and spamming people around. So lead generation has been a big source of results for performance marketers. And out of the fact that if you start tracking what you get on LinkedIn and the cost of it and ignore the brand part, that was what brought demand generation to the table. Demand generation in theory is the answer to don't focus so much on lead generation, don't focus so much on performance because you are, you are really catering to a small group of people in your whole market, right? And in that sense, from the, from the point of view of demand generation, that lead gen, that performance marketing using that demand idea became demand capture, right? So I'm capturing existing demand for my product or for my product category. And if you don't have that demand already for your product category or for a, well, mostly for your product, then in theory you are going to create it, right? And that's when it comes to demand creation. Now again, I, I know that it's a sensible topic in the sense that some people strongly suggest that you are truly not creating demand at all because that comes from the buyer. And I agree you are rather opening the eyes to someone that I already have a need and probably already have some brands in your mind and you're trying to add yourself to the set of possible options or selections, but independently what you call it. The big point here is that what you are trying to do is to compare the sizes of the audiences and how different they are on the way you approach them, right? So you have demand capture, there's already intent, there's already people searching and in that case your efforts will be more about making sure that they understand why are you better? Why are you different Handling objections and offering a clear path to conversion. An easy one, as frictionless. Frictionless as possible. And those are the goals there. And it works pretty well. But the only problem that it has, and it's very hard to see at the beginning when you're doing advertising is that it's quite a small, right? That's the one thing that is not easy to see. It had taken me a long time because that's what I started doing, right? Doing mostly Google Ads. And so. But you are catering in best in the best of the cases, 3,5% of your target market, you are missing out on the under and the order 95. But while this orders other size of the market is way larger, is way harder to work on it, right? And the reason is the messaging and I like to put this example a ton and is that one of the reasons why organic works so well in terms of engagement and conversions both on search and on social is because the algorithms prevent people from making very bad mistakes in terms of matching their offers and their messaging to the right audience. So let me put you examples. If you were to create blog posts organically that you want to rank on Google, the, the, the title, the description of the blog post, what you're talking about, the body itself will, will determine what keywords you will rank for. And if you are not truly that relevant and if the content is not that good, you will never show up for an unintended keywords because it's not in the benefit of the search engines to show irrelevant content. Right? So it's really interesting that if you pick the right topic, the right people will find it and that's what makes it so compelling. But it's not true on the pay search side. While costly and probably very inefficient, you can target keywords that have nothing to do with the landing page that you're trying to promote and you can put out There messages that have nothing to do with the intent of the buyer. And the reason you can do that is because you are paying for it for the privilege of having the opportunity to show up. Right. So in demand creation is even worse because taking again the algorithm of social media, look at all the things that constrain the mistakes that you can make on your post on social media. And I will take as an example, your post will show up primarily to your followers, right. And in theory your followers are somehow interest on you already. If not, they will have unfollow you, right. Or remove you as a connection. You have the content itself that nowadays is becoming more and more like TikTok. I don't know if you Miranda have seen it. I just discovered it recently that I, I, I'm spending more and more time on places like Facebook for example, and obviously on LinkedIn but on Facebook. And I was wondering why is that happening? Because I already know that I will see posts there from family and friends and what they're doing is that they're becoming more and more like TikTok, that while you're scrolling the feed, you are seeing things from people that you know. Ads, of course. But I don't know if you notice there's more suggested. Right. And those are very random things. Yeah, but they are related to what I watch. So they are, you know, and it's a very nice combination is well, based on your history, based on where you are, based on what other people that you know that in theory share your values and beliefs, this is what you probably will be interest on. Right. And most of the time you're just scroll by, but sometimes you pay attention and you are feeding that information to the algorithm. So even if you are creating content on LinkedIn that is not geared toward your current network, those posts will get suggested to the right people. Right. So and that matters for the main creation because compared to demand capture or performance or lead generation, you're in a very specific part of the funnel. You are in mostly consideration. Sorry, sorry. Not consideration. You are in decision. Mostly decision. Right. On that whole HubSpot funnel of awareness, consideration, decision, most of the time you're in decision, it's very hard to do a bad job about it, for use a nice, a nice phrase. But on demand creation you have a larger spectrum of possibilities. You might rarely, but it does happen. You might have someone that is unaware of the problem. It's not common. There's something that especially a guy from LinkedIn constantly, you know, challenged that most buyers are not unaware of the Problem are not unaware of the problem. They know the problem very well. Most buyers know the problem very well and they know the potential solutions that might be true. I agree with the fact that most of the time you understand your problem very well and you're not just blissfully ignorant of it. But there are cases where someone is just expressing the symptoms. They, they know they have a problem, but they cannot put a name on it. You might have that population that might be large or not. Then definitely you have the big group of people that have the problem understand it very well, but it's not painful enough to start thinking about doing something for it. And definitely you have the other group of people that are certain, you know, thinking about building knowledge about that pain point and thinking about potential solutions, even if one of those solutions is not yours. That, that's pretty much the definition of consideration I use as an example. Transportation. If, if you are spending a lot of time going from a place, from place B to place A to play B, your immediate solution is not buying a car, right? You can buy a bicycle, you can take the train, you can take subway, ask for a ride. I don't know. There's so many potential options. So if you're a car maker, you don't necessarily want to push the idea of a car at that point of your brand. At that point, probably you just want to push the idea or present the idea of the benefits of owning a car versus other transportation methods, right? Or a bicycle, in this case for a bicycle manufacturer. So at that stage, there's a different kind of methods that you have and so forth, right? When you're trying to build trust, you want to cater to your social proof and testimonials and strengths and all that. But the biggest point here is that because of that ladder, that's why demand creation is so hard compared to demand capture. And it's hard because you have to understand the distribution channel well, right? Where people are spending time in demand capture. It doesn't matter as much when I use an example, again, the example of a plumber or when you have an accident on the highway. You don't need to build a community around people that their cars break down in the highway, right? The tow service company needs to be there when you pick up the phone and look for a tow service company right away if they know of anyone already, right? If they don't have anyone that they trust. But for the man creation, the problem is different because the intent is not there. So you have to be where their community hands out. That's one critical thing. And once you know that place, you have to understand the place, how it works, how people spend time on it. Once you understand that, then you have to build this ladder of content for each of the stages, right? And only when you have the right content, then you start thinking about where do I distribute that content and what level of budget I will allocate for each of the stages, right? And there are not right or wrong answers. We are working right now ramiranda on on a client that for example decided to start at the very bottom of that ladder, right? It's just people that is aware of the brand, but they have visitor websites of our website but it's not really still yet ready to pull the trigger because if they have been ready, they will have filled the form already. You can start there is the easiest or the low hanging fruit. You are constrained by the size of that audience, right? But is the one where you will have the highest impact in terms of brand recognition. And maybe you can nudge some users into rethinking taking action at that level, but you can go as high as you want, right? You can, you can go into not building trust for your solution, but helping someone understand how your solution compared to similar solutions or alternatives or as high as just talking about the problem itself. So I think that's the biggest difference between demand creation and demand capture or lead generation. It's not an easy choice because the impact of it will not come right away, will not come this quarter and even if you get a handful of leads they will not be as ready as your performance. Demand capture lead generation effort where someone already expressed intent, there's going to be a ton of resistance and and you have treated that way. So but for those of you listening to this, if you have healthy lead gen or demand caption efforts and you are looking into investing your next dollar into additional efforts and you have maxed out your lead gen efforts or they have become very costly. Exploring some demand gen initiatives makes total sense. And just like this client that we have right now, maybe starting with the low hanging fruit of people that is warmer to your band would be an easy pill. Easier pill to swallow. Yes.

Yeah. And I think with both of them, with demand capturing demand creation, when you're able to take the step back and think about who is the audience for this ad that I'm creating, who like who do I want the end user that sees this to be and where are they in their journey and what's going to be the most impactful for them to use your Example of finding means for transportation. If you you can create the most awe inspiring ad top talking about the freedom that buying a car offers you versus buying a bike or buying a bus pass. You know, you it opens up the world to be able to travel anywhere you want. If you're reaching a person who has already decided they want to buy a car and they're looking for a car to buy that ad isn't going to hit them the same way as it would. So someone who's trying to decide if they want to buy a bike or buy a car. Whereas if you have an ad that really hits home of why you are the car for that person, you are the car manufacturer that you know that person needs and that represents their personality, then that's going to really hit home for the person who already knows they want to buy a car and they're trying to decide which one is best for them. But it's not going to do as much for the person who's deciding if they should buy a trust or buy like.

And that remind me of the other thing that on demand creation you have to be very wary of and is the goal of the campaign or the effort. Because again comparing to demand capture lead generation, because you have almost by definition clear understanding of the stage where you are, which is decision, then your ad and your landing page have a very clear goal and that goal can be measured very clearly even if you have a spillover effects, right? A little bit of demand, A little bit of demand capture, A little bit of demand of lead generation builds brand. Because some people will not take this choice right away. They will just visit the page and drop, but they will explore the website, will understand you better and maybe we'll come back later the end. They might talk about your brand to someone else that might be the right buyer. But at the end of the day using the goal of getting leads, it's a perfect one for those kind of efforts. But in demand creation, not just as important to understand the stage that the buyer is and therefore the message that you will deliver, but also the thing that you want to, you know, accomplish with it. Because the other great problem or the other great opportunity is that just as I was telling the algorithm will not prevent you on the pay side from matching the right message, the wrong message to the wrong audience. The other thing that it will not prevent you from will be picking the wrong goal. Right? You can build a campaign that has the goal of getting leads for an branding effort and fail miserably because you will not get a ton of leads. Your reach will be very constrained, very. People will see that ad because it will focus on someone that is already knowledgeable. The algorithm understand that it will see the behavior of the users and say, this person has visited the website before or visited similar websites before or somehow have signals that show that they have few forms in the past. And it will focus on people that fill forms or have visited your brand already. They will feel brand new to you, but they are not. It's just that the algorithm will know that population. So you truly want to get to the people that have no idea about who you are. And for that you need a different goal. And I use the example of what you do in the real world. I've been going to networking events. And so when you go to a networking event, you know that your goal cannot be, I'm going to close a deal to today, right? I'm gonna. I'm gonna meet someone, talked about what I do, explain to them our benefits, and they're gonna say, you know, Emilio, I wanna hire you guys and start doing a project with you. That. That's not reasonable because the, the level of trust of knowledge is so low. What is your goal in a networking event? Present yourself right? Break out the barrier of just showing up and saying who you are. Listen politely to what they do. Exchange cards, exchange, you know, LinkedIn connections. Most of them will not be direct buyers because the chances of you meeting someone in those events that's actually your potential buyer are very slim. But if you. If you place the little seed of them, recognizing who you are and what you do, people, and explaining what are the. As much as best as possible, the trigger points of, you know, if. If you're struggling with growth, if you're struggling with traffic, if you're struggling with leads and you happen to be a B2B brand, think of us. That association will happen and it will not happen for one conversation. That's the thing, right? One ad will make no difference. We don't know exactly how many. And it's not because the ad is little by little changing the brain of that person to make a choice. It's not. It's not a manipulation thing. It's not a. Oh, well, I'm gonna have to ask act, because I have seen the ad, rather the. The impression. The goal of the impression is to strengthen the association, right? This person or this company do this for this audience, and it's different in this way. And that's what you're doing all the time. All the time, all the time. Until that's strong enough that it can be recalled effortlessly. If you can, that's, that's what you want to accomplish. And that's the other part which is so hard. That's why the man creation is so hard to, to sell because measuring and attributing value to data idea to that, to that end game is extremely hard. But I invite everyone to think about how do you engage with brands as a human yourself? It's a little bit of common sense, right. If it works for you, probably works for almost everyone. Right. If you think that the way that marketing works is that you see ads and then you're immediately conversed to buy that doesn't happen to you, then there's a little disconnect there. Right. And so I, I think that's the other big, big difference and challenge of the main creation is that you will have not just multiple campaigns that have multiple audience with multiple levels of awareness. So you need to match the goal to the level that you are. Sometimes you just want people to see the app, sometimes you want just a small notch of engagement that shows you that they have consumed the content, that they have listened to you. The physical equivalent of exchanging that business card. Right. That's all that I want. And sometimes you want something more aggressive, more proactive like let's go and visit the website. Right. And we want you to spend some time there or take a little bit of an action attending to one of our events or getting some more in depth information and that's fine. But typically your goal is not to get to, to a sales conversation. Yeah. And so I don't know if honestly that's all that I have for today about this topic. I don't know if. Miranda, you have any other comments?

I don't think so. Yeah, it was very. And a very interesting conversation.

Yes. So, well, that's all that we have for today. I hope that you tune into future episodes. We are working hard on getting some guests as well. So if one of you is listening here, you happen to be a B2B marketer and you want to share a little bit of your experience on your industry, your company, let us know. And we are excited about the possibility of bringing in some other guests that they can share their own experiences in this fascinating industry that is marketing for B2B brands. So thanks so much, Miranda. Thank you for joining. And until the next one.