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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai 0:00
How do you assess whether your audience is problem aware or not, and how do you find potentially pockets of them where, where they are?
Stefan Maritz 0:10
I've got a lover's relationship with the B market on this, because there's that this stat, a statistic about from mr. Sharp, thrown around on the internet, of like, hey, 5% of your market is buying, or like 3% or 2% whatever someone's making up on LinkedIn. Now, anyway, it comes down to you, look at the spy chart, and this little small piece is like active buyers and solution seeking. And then someone goes to says, oh, that's the demand you have to capture, and then there's this big part of the pie that says these are the people you have to do demand gen on, because they are not actively seeking, but you need to build mentally, like when it's 100% like in theory that makes a lot of sense, and like it's a very easy way to describe it, but what's not true is that it's not black or white. If you look at the spectrum, I've got a personal funnel that it's not, not anything official, but I tend to look at it like the pie chart is more like slices to it, where on the at the bottom of the funnel, on far right, you've got the active buyer, someone that's, that's, you know, they're sitting with like contracts on their desk right now, like, or like three proposals, and they're going to decide who we're signing, like that's like the bottom of the barrel, like you already made it, and then right at the top is someone that's like, call them inactive, they might not be, it's not that they're not problem aware, it's just that they're actually not, it's not their problem right now, like for instance, I'm going to use a car buyer, someone is purchasing a new car as an example, you're not a BX, B example, because it explains it very nicely, so if you just bought a car yesterday, if you just work through the cycle, and you just sign, you got your car, you got your keys, you drove out tomorrow, you are not in the active market. It's still, you can still buy a car in the future, and you likely will, but you're back to like step one, which is dormant, because you're just actually happy now, unless you're shopping for a second car, which is the obvious, like the average human being does do that, but now you're dormant by it, doesn't mean that I don't have to market to you for your future purchase, and that's the same thing that happens in B2B, but in the middle there's a lot of other things, so five years pass, I start thinking about maybe it's time to upgrade my car, maybe I need a new CRM, I start a new job, and I'm like, I see this problem, I'm not necessarily going to throw my entire existence at it yet, but it's there, so now you become problem aware. It's like, okay, cool, this is coming up, I might want to solve it at some point. From there, problem aware person is not necessarily someone that's going to bind within like the first or the next year or three years, even. So then it goes over to like solution curious solution seeking, and then only active buying, because it's only you go through these hoops of like finding information to make your case and to actually spend money, and like everything, your demand generation happens all the way from dormant straight through to like when someone is actually solution seeking, because that's like cool. What's my problem? How am I going to solve this? Who's got the answer to my problem? Who's the vendors I want to include in my consideration set, and then only when you get to the consideration set, that's when you start capturing demand, obviously. So, whether it's ABM or whether it's like the more kind of, you know, top of funnel push of like building awareness, they all fit into different pieces of that funnel, and that mental spectrum of like making an actual purchase, whether it's a call, whether it's a new software for a business edition, and demand generation is really about making sure that your brand is in the consideration set when that person gets to the point when they actually want to make or decide, I might make a purchase. These are likely the three I'm going to look at.
Tom Rudnai 3:50
No, that makes all the sense in the world, and the analogy is very useful. I guess what I'm really interested, though, at some point you need to translate that to, okay, we have limited resources and a content strategy and a target like how do we, whatever, what that presumably requires, because there's different content that you're going to create for every step, in that is the ability to some extent to assess within your time, within your market, how what the split is like in terms of distribution across that funnel, like maybe to use the example of over at CSL, like, when you first come in, how do you go about assessing that, so that you can say, okay, this is where we're going to place our chips from a content perspective. So, yeah,
Stefan Maritz 4:30
basically, it's another way to think of it as, like, one too few and one to many. Like, what do the people who's just back to, like, the funnel of, like, if they go over from dormant to, like, solution carriers right? What type of content do you want to show them? That's your typical thought leadership, that can be your, your brand awareness players, your, your standard ad push. For us, that would be just making sure that people see our tips and trick videos on on TikTok, for instance. They're not, we're not actually pushing by, we're just saying yes, free snippet. Self, our courses, just so you can see there's this brand that is pushing our thought leadership content. I'm not asking you to buy whatsoever. And then, as they move through, they might go and say, 'Oh, now I've got a personal development budget, or 'there's a new year coming up and I need to like spend my next $1,000 or something next year. Where am I going to spend this? And I might start thinking about, like, oh, this maybe goes to Udemy, or maybe I should go to CXL, and I'm still just like thinking, because that purchase is only coming up in two months' time, but my manager said start thinking about this so long for your, like, next quarter, or like, we clock the year, that goes different, and that's where someone might sign up for the newsletter, obviously, and we still just more or less, it's still like a value push of like free content, like we're just establishing that the quality of our content is super high. You're not going to find this anywhere else, and when you do compare that with like anything else in the market, you're not going to find the same depth, you're not going to find like the same level of expertise that is actually like presenting that content. So that is the job really there, it's just the positioning, and then at some point it obviously goes over to, okay, now I'm like looking for a solution, like I might want to see what are the costs of the content, like the courses out there, like what are the packages that I can buy, what can I actually get with my $1,000 and that's where we start with, like the ads, and you know, come here, this is it, buy now, it's better to take the subscription than it is to take the individual course, because it's worth more for your money. Maybe then we go over to the promotion, because there's still like a DTC element to it. So, once I know you're in there, you're looking at SEO courses, I'm obviously going to push an SEO course to you and say, "Hey, you can buy this at, you know, maybe a special today, maybe I'll give you a free course to just come check it out, and then try to convert you, so just back to like the broader scheme, and not not CXL specific. It's kind of like, what is the content that a person needs to see if you're talking to 10,000 of them versus what is the content that a person needs to see if they're on a like a one to one conversation basis on the big scheme to the big market, you're not pushing, hey, for a SaaS company almost exactly like yours, we did xyz, and the results were 200% increase, and, and, whatever metric it's different, you're talking about, you're talking about the big problem, you're positioning yourselves as a thought leader, and then when you've got that person on the table, and they're like, "Hey, we need to send this to the CFO for sign off. I really like your company, but there's also three others that we like considering. Why you? When that question comes up, how do you answer that? And that should really direct your content, like whether it's a case study on that level or a webinar in the middle that's way more solution specific, and there's 50 people showing up for that webinar, or it's just like, hey, here's a newsletter or a blog article that is just talking about the problem in general and positioning us as like a credible, trustworthy source of information on that,
Tom Rudnai 7:58
and what I'm hearing here, a little bit, is that the framing of my question actually isn't very helpful, because what I'm saying is, okay, we have vertically stacked five different stages of the funnel. I'm saying, okay, limited resources. How do I prioritize where I put my resource? But I think what I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is like, you can't, you have like you have to spread your resources across all of those five stages, which means that the only way that you can account for limited resources is you scale back horizontally, so you hone in on covering that for a tighter and tighter group of people by focusing on less channels, whatever it is, your way of narrowing the audience, but still making sure that you cover all of those different stages.
Stefan Maritz 8:37
In an ideal world, yes. So, sorry, I keep like talking around your, like, there's multiple sections to this, so obviously in a lot of cases, and this is marketing as a unique problem, where the moment someone spends marketing on money on marketing, they expect a return on investment. It's fair, because same with sales, like it's a growth engine, it's supposed to be, you have to start at the bottom, like there is, if there's demand to capture and it's readily available, if you are not trying to grab your piece of the pie, you won't get it, like that's like the simple idea there, but you can't only focus there, because especially if, like, depends on the market, if there's like big players you're up against, like, how does the competition work, you can only get so much from that segment, like think back to that 595 rule, like that segment is really small, so you have to focus there, but you can't focus all your resources there, and then you just start working backwards on that, because focusing at the right of the top, if someone's completely dormant, is also super expensive, because to take someone all the way from dormant to buying, you can't do that, like, in, and sometimes it will take, like, two to three years, so you can't realistically focus on the top only as well, and then expect demand to be generated, and someone to come by within, like, you know, six months' time, so you almost, like, gradually work your way back from, like, actively buying solution-seeking solution key. Areas problem aware, and then dormant, like, is almost like the last one. You can obviously move some of some of the content that you might use in the middle phase, will also help for, like, the dormant phase. But I would, I personally like working my way back. So, for instance, if you're launching a brand, the first place you start is like in our case, if someone's on Google searching for B2B marketing courses, I want to be there. How do I answer that question? Like, yes, it's SEO, and SEO is getting harder now with the AI stuff. So, what do we have to do? We have to make sure that the LLMs are mentioning us, number one, and number two, let's just run ads to make sure these people get on our website, so we don't miss that actual like that segment in the market, and that goes for anything, whether I'm selling dishwashing liquid, or like a SaaS product. If someone's actually looking and you're not there, you can't compete for that sale. And then obviously moving it back, you have to like build that mental awareness. After the mental availability, you have to build the trust, like the relationship is still important. Like that's when the founder content comes in and you just start building your blocks all the way up to the top and then you hopefully get to a point where like hey guys we've got the entire funnel sorted let's also just start like focusing on the dormant market because what doesn't matter
Tom Rudnai 11:12
yeah well and I think it's a fundamental mistake a lot of people make is that like we need to get people as early as possible so that we build a relationship with them when they come to buy then they're going to choose us but it's a bit of a misunderstanding of, like, there's this whole thing, like, all of B to C is basically offer optimization, right, and that is a huge driver in the decision. So, going early is great for getting yourself in the door, making sure you're one of the three on the shortlist, all that good stuff. But there is still a job to do to convert, so you can't - it's a big mistake to think, okay, we'll do awareness, and that'll, that'll pay dividends later, not if you're not doing the fundamentals at the bottom
Unknown Speaker 11:41
and.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai