Hey B2B marketers....Brand vs Demand Gen?
Brand vs Demand Gen....Okay so Drift smash both these strategies 🙌, but as a small marketing team who know the power of both, we have to choose our battles. Any B2B marketers out there have stories of success from prioritising one over the other?
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Depends on how good you are at building chatbots and and conversational content. I just built one for a client today. They are crushing it and it is a PDF. They have a site as well, but we are pushing all traffic to the conversational content bot and conversational video.
If you are going to have anyone go to your site. You'll want to also make sure that your brand is consistent with your bot. Here is a link to a video that explains building branding into your bot. It's on the most recent Drift blog you can find here. Check out #6..."you bot doesn't reflect your brand". https://www.drift.com/blog/why-people-leave-chat/
Let me know if that helps!
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I went from a fully demand gen marketing leadership role to being a one-man marketing show. I tend to lean more heavily towards demand gen because revenue, but I'm finding a healthy balance between that and brand awareness. The best strategy is to tie brand awareness efforts to revenue-generating activities. Win-win!
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@Jennifer Rathgaber That's exactly my sitch. I'm trying to use the good old 'big long idea' to use as a jumping off point for my demand gen campaigns (mostly content led) whilst feeling the benefit of the longer term brand affinity. Add enterprise strategy to the mix too.... my daily question is how many ways can you spin up and tailor one piece of hero content? Good to see B2B focusing on brand more.
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That's my motto - reuse and repurpose EVERYTHING until it gets so dissected it's irrelevant lol. Ideally, your thought leadership content pieces should be able to be brought down to the product/service level, so building a piece dedicated to the topic at hand as it relates to your product/service is a great way to bring thought leadership (branding) and demand gen together.
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Hey Lucy! I can hear everyone at Drift collectively saying the same thing in my head right now: BOTH! (And immediately also collectively groaning because we've heard BOTH so many times 😂)
Of course, that's not the answer you're looking for but when you have a small team, you have to be scrappy sometimes. I wasn't here in the early days of Drift but from what I understand we focused on big brand plays that we knew would also generate interested people (MQLs). Do you have anything in your arsenal that has brand power AND lead gen power?
Hope this helps!
Molly
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"In B2B, our data suggests that marketing also works best when brand and activation are working together, but that the balance needs to be slightly different. Efficiency appears to be maximised when around 46% of the budget is allocated to brand, with around 54% allocated to activation."
If that isn't a concrete enough answer, I don't know what is. 😂
I've been wicked impressed with the results of the B2B brand effects study done by LinkedIn and the authors of the 'Long and Short of It' research. I think it could come in handy here: https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/amp/marketing-solutions/images/lms-b2b-institute/pdf/LIN_B2B-Marketing-Report-Digital-v02.pdf
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Demand Gen will build your Brand and done correctly will be much more personable too :)
+ You'll get a pipeline, product development guidance, service orientation, digital transformation ideas, ++
So yeah, for me DG.
