Demand Generation: What It Is, and What It’s Not
I read 40 articles about demand generation and you would be surprised at what these articles have in common.
There is surprisingly little distinction between demand generation and lead generation. At times, as a product manager I was confused by the conflicting information — it felt like what was needed was a true back to basics positioning, where we are educated in not only the definition of demand generation, but what the point of demand generation even IS. Voila:
- Improve the odds of discovering your product, make them aware it exists
- Build consumer understanding of your product beyond the name (what does it do? why is it valuable? is it fit for my use case?)
I found this:
There Were A lot of Generic Recommendations
Having thought leadership, content marketing, a social media presence, measuring user intention, free trials, A/B testing of content, relevant Calls to Action, Videos on YouTube, Do Events: the Biggest Events, Post on LinkedIn, Publish an E-Book, do some Webinars, use Influencers.
Most of the recommendations were sort of obvious. And they don’t tell you, for instance, some really important things — like that different content types appeal to different audiences, and can have a different purpose and a different ROI inherently; different venues of engagement are going to be more successful, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage in lower yield venues.
Recommendations That Were Rare
There were more rare recommendations:
- Follow the AIDAR model, which I’d never heard of but definitely do as a Product Manager
- Have Strategic Partnerships and Co-branding
- Make a Discord … #profit?
- Acquire a company with a large userbase that would likely use your product (ah, yes, spend a million dollars to make a million dollars strategy)
DemandGen Recommendations I Disagree With
Gating Content
No one should do this anymore. You know (and I know) I want to download this PDF. If I give you my real email, you’re going to spam me for the next five years. You will send crap I didn’t want to read, some of it I literally chose not to read intentionally. I’m never going to respond. I will click unsubscribe and mark you as a spammer. Possibly your company will spend tens of thousands of dollars on data cleanliness to get rid of all the fake email addresses I give you. I guess we’re even.
Renaming your sales team to ever more confusing titles, with the sole intention of obscuring the fact that they are, in fact, sales reps
I saw this (leadgen) recommendation and I wanted to blast whoever wrote it to the darkside of the moon. Maybe further. However far it would be so that they never came back. It’s just easier if a bot says “do you want to talk to someone from sales?” and I click YES, and then you know for sure I welcome your advances.
There were just two pieces of content in the entire slurry that I found interesting:
- The 30% Juice Rule (Content Marketing)
- Lead Gen vs Demand Gen Budget Split
I couldn’t help thinking that all of this was just wrong, particularly when it comes to SaaS products, where your userbase (or potential userbase) are developers. The advice all just rang sort of hollow.
Why Am I So Dissatisfied With All This Content?
There’s nothing about community
The ROI of community (having a group of users who know and love your product) is insane. A community, even if its just 10 true fans, can help provide support on forums, evangelize, provide references, give valuable product feedback, assist in marketing content, in person events presentations, tutorials… moreover, if you can’t create a community, you probably don’t have a good product. It’s incredible signal.
But that requires interest. It requires responsiveness — a reciprocal relationship in which there is giving on both sides; the product manager or engineering organization as listener and seeker. It requires work.
Rather than just someone throwing a blog post out into the world and expecting everyone to be wowed, you have to care if they actually are wowed. You have to do something when they are not. The marketing person doing demand generation is maybe an unlikely listener… but hypothetically if a piece of content has no conversions, the ask of why not is so critically important that it’s almost impossible to believe that question doesn’t happen. And while it’s easy to blame the content (the blog post was not well written enough!), this doesn’t invite seeking. It doesn’t invite dialogue. In short, it doesn’t help you, the product person, discover the truth.
Conclusion
In a very roundabout way, I ended up believing that the secret of demand generation is actually… listening. Caring. Truth seeking. Responding.
Rinse and repeat that…
That’s how you get users. That’s how you find product market fit. That’s how you retain. That’s how you earn evangelists and advocates and people willing to pay.
That’s how you get growth.
