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Level Up Your B2B Demand Strategy

Turn the page on your demand strategy by downloading the playbook

Download the playbook (PDF, 5.78MB)
level up demand strategy

Introduction

What does a world-class demand generation strategy look like? Uncover just how to get in front of prospects for better leads in and more deals out.

We know executing demand generation campaigns is a part of your wheelhouse—and you know the fundamentals when it comes to crafting one. Identifying an audience, digging into data, and gathering purchase intent data are just some of the key steps we talk through in our beginner’s guide How to Develop a Demand Strategy.

How-to-Develop-a-Demand-Strategy

But you’re no beginner, and you deserve a demand strategy that takes your marketing efforts to the next level. In this guide for the experienced marketer, we’ll walk through tips and tricks for leveling up your campaigns, real-life use cases, and key industry trends and stats that will help you get in front of prospects.

Challenges you may be facing:

Deliver high-quality leads

Attracting a large amount of new leads doesn’t mean they’re qualified. They need to show an interest in investing in your company’s products. In other words, your leads must have purchase intent.

Data quality

43% of marketers, from our recent study, who reported they are using the right data to target their audience saw a significant increase in revenue last year compared to just 13% of those who feel less confident that they are using the right data.

Little budget and little time

According to our recent study with Ascend2, only 16% of those surveyed saw a significant increase in their marketing budget for this year. On top of that, marketers are facing challenges hitting lofty goals. Less than one-third of marketers surveyed feel that it is very likely that next quarter’s goals will be met.

Constantly shifting buying groups

As companies evolve, new roles are created and added to the buying group. Marketers should keep an ear to the ground and monitor for potential additions to buying groups. Additions may mean you have to expand your targeting or rethink your tactics.

What to expect in this guide:

1-1

Use Intent Data to Delineate B2B Buying Groups

2-1

Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey

3-1

Create Strong Lead Nurturing Programs

4-1

Focus on ABM Campaigns

5-1

Audit and Iterate

Section 1

Tips for Leveling Up Your Demand Gen Campaigns

Use intent data to delineate B2B buying groups

A successful demand generation plan must consider buying groups. While this additional layer of contacts does create more complexity, mastering the art of engaging at the buying group level can significantly improve an organization’s chances of winning accounts.

According to Gartner, the average buying team size is between 14 and 23 people, depending on the size of the spend.

Intent data can provide deep intelligence about your audiences and segments that you wouldn’t otherwise know. Intent monitoring may be focused on specific personas to identify buying group members, watch their behaviors, and target them strategically.

61 percent
 
61% of Data Heroes (marketers that are utilizing the right data to convert audiences, as proven in their pipeline) report that they use buying group scoring.
 
They are nearly 2x more likely to be using this scoring method than B2B marketers who don’t feel they are using the right data.
 

Who makes up a buying group?

Book Head Portraits_5

Champion

These individuals are engaged throughout the buying process. Often they are in mid-level roles and are looking for ways to improve the business with a new solution.

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Influencer

Popping in and out of the purchase journey, these members help provide expertise and additional research. It’s crucial to use educational materials to engage them at the top of the pipeline, and then stay connected with them during the solution evaluation and selection process.

Book Head Portraits_3

Decision Maker

These heads of departments hold onto the budget for the buying group. They will usually come into the journey when it’s time to commit and make the big decisions.

Book Head Portraits_1

Users

In a committee purchase scenario, users come from Line of Business (LOB) teams and get involved early in the journey. For single-department scenarios, users are involved in defining requirements and hands-on demos.

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Ratifier

These members sign the checks. They usually just follow the guidance of the buying group and simply need a case study or other confidence builder at the end of the purchase to agree.

Section 1 continued

Marketers who report that they use buying groups as a scoring element in their marketing programs also saw more improvement in metrics last year than those who do not:

Anteriad-Ascend-Report-Graphs-2023_Q26-1-1536x1187
Section 2

Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Buying group journey map Operating from the buyer persona’s perspective, a journey map lays out interactions, content choices, and engagement at each phase of the purchase decision. You can then use this information to create programs that get buying group members to engage at appropriate points. Once they recognize a problem or need, buyers within these groups typically go through three phases on their purchasing journeys: care, consider, and choose.

Screenshot 2024-03-15 at 10.56.46 AM
  • Phase 1: Case Phase
  • Phase 2: Consider Phase
  • Phase 3: Choose Phase

Care Phase

In this phase, buyers are trying to understand why they should make a change. This phase shouldn’t require a large time investment, nor should you ask for personal information to gain access to content. Your content should demonstrate value and show that you understand the prospects’ challenges and industry.

Types of content in the care phase:

  • Publicly available blogs
  • Short videos
  • Case studies
  • Webpages

Consider Phase

During the consider phase, buyers evaluate their options and determine which solution best addresses their needs. Here, content should require an investment of your prospects’ time, further enrich their journey, continue to showcase your company’s expertise at a deeper level, and start exploring solutions that could suit them. Gating content by asking for personal information is acceptable here.

Types of content in the consider phase:

  • eBooks
  • Webinars
  • Podcasts

Choose Phase

This phase is when buyers determine which provider will get their business. By the nature of the offer at hand, gathering the prospect’s personal information is appropriate and should be required for them to progress to this stage. By this time you have demonstrated enough value that prospects will have no problem investing their time and telling you about themselves and their organization.

Types of content in the choose phase:

  • Whitepapers
  • Demos
  • Consultations
  • Trials
With the journey map, you can determine how best to target your prospects based on their persona and their actual behavior prior to purchase. Think hard about the subject lines, headlines, and abstracts that are likely to resonate with them based on their information needs. Then, to improve your content strategy going forward, take inventory of what has moved the needle in the past and establish baselines to set clear priorities as your marketing programs progress.
Section 3

Create Strong Lead Nurturing Programs

B2B marketers can use a strong lead nurturing strategy to develop a long-lasting relationship with their buyers, increase further demand for their products and services, and generate higher revenue.

When it’s done right, lead nurturing can help brands:

  • Offer relevant solutions that address and combat prospects’ pain points
  • Address and answer prospects’ concerns
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Foster strong relationships with leads
  • Convert leads into permanent customers

73 percent

 

Demand Gen in Action

How a major IT marketing provider saw a lift in campaign performance

When this provider realized their ways of reaching customers needed a digital update, Anteriad stepped in to create a strategic “marketing-first” approach to their reseller remarketing. Through audience identification, they found that much of their partner community were early adopters of certain channels, allowing them to make smart budget allocations. Anteriad also developed attribution models to measure account level activity and optimize spend. The provider has dramatically improved its marketing performance:

  • 4.5x increase in percent of the company’s customers marketing budget allocated to digital marketing (from 8% to 26%)
  • 133% increase in targeted campaign performance using Anteriad’s unique intent-based insights.
  • 250% higher click-through rate than industry average (.25% vs .1%) for those channel advertisers
Read the story
glasses on desk

What does a strong lead nurturing campaign look like?

Leveraging personalized content

You have to understand your unique buyers, and then design content based on their interests, goals, and marketing triggers. By tailoring content to your prospects, you can improve buyers’ engagement, fill the bottom of your sales funnel with highly qualified leads, and increase conversion rates.

Multi-channel nurturing

To turn prospects to customers, you have to actively engage them across channels like email, social media, and website throughout the sales funnel. Search engine marketing, programmatic display to social media, Google AdWords, and advertisement on social channels are just some of the multi-channel techniques you can use.

Scoring your leads

To build a robust lead-scoring strategy, your sales and marketing teams should collaborate to assign numeric values to each lead for their actions, such as browsing behaviors, conversion events, or social media interactions. These numbers reflect how well a lead matches your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), and how many times they intersect with your content. This scoring then helps you determine whether leads are sales-ready or need further nourishment.

Using a marketing automation platform

Marketing automation platforms can rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate lead segmentation, lead scoring, assigning rank, and predictively sending emails. These automated platforms help you nurture leads through flexible, adaptive communication. You can educate and convert your initial lukewarm leads into hot, sales-ready prospects at scale.

Section 4

Focus on ABM Campaigns

When properly executed, account-based marketing (ABM) is proven to generate better conversion for sales teams.

What goes into a successful ABM campaign?

Building out your ABM list

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Think about the demographics, firmographics, behavioral data, and psychographics of your best customers.

Layer on intent data

Look for customers who are showing interest in your product or service. Online activities, like visiting web pages, reading blogs, or engaging on social media create intent data that is then used to pinpoint individuals who are in-market. With intent, you won’t waste time and effort on accounts that aren’t close to a buying decision. From there, you can also use their intent data to understand what types of content will resonate with valuable prospects so you can tailor your outreach.

Expand your list with content syndication

You can take your existing list and use the information you have to target similar individuals at different companies. This effectively helps you cast a larger net using very specific criteria. As people engage with your content syndication program and it generates more leads, you can see if they are a good fit for your ABM campaign.

Demand Gen in Action

How one software company found campaign success

When ServiceNow had trouble reaching their evolving audience, they partnered with Anteriad to expand their programs to address new buying groups and grow databases across all personas. Anteriad then started a highly targeted test email program and ABM demand generation model. Anteriad’s focus on audience activation allowed ServiceNow to deliver the following metrics:

  • 200x ROI based on annual investment across solution categories
  • 91% of leads are net new companies added to campaign database
  • Significant increase in pipeline generated annually, measured by multi-touch attribution and lead scoring model
Read the story

Begin a targeted campaign to reach your ABM list:

Start your ABM campaign through channels you know your audience will be engaged with. For example, if you know your audience is highly engaged on social media and email, these may be the best places to start.

Incorporate personalization

One of the major benefits of ABM is that since you’re using a small list, it’s easier to personalize your outreach to your targets and help them feel connected to your brand. But make sure you time it right based on where they’re at in the buyer’s journey—too much personalization before a prospect has engaged with your brand can come across as creepy.

Retarget them with high-value content

Once your target accounts have begun to engage with your initial emails or ads, plan to retarget them with high-value content or offers. At this point, you know that they are in the market for your services and your goal is to move them down the funnel. A personalized social media ad or well-thought-out nurture email can keep them engaged as they get closer to their purchase decision.

Section 5

Audit and Iterate

After leveling up your demand strategy, it’s essential to keep making improvements to meet your goals. When it comes to reviewing an existing demand generation strategy, here are a few of the steps you can take:

Validate your ICP

Review the data in your customer relationship management solution to ensure the accounts you are targeting are still in the addressable market for what you are selling. By the same token, you’ll need to know if new companies have entered your ICP so you can segment them into a priority tier and begin targeting them.

Ensure you have clean data

If you don’t have correct information in your databases, then you are missing connections and possibly losing revenue. 

Look at your performance fundamentals

How did your demand generation campaign perform against your set KPIs? Did you drive the requisite marketing or sales qualified leads? What was the sourced revenue from the demand generation activities? What was the cost per deal closed? 

Review the tactical performance of your activities

How did my content syndication perform? What were the conversion rates of my emails? How much traffic did I drive to my website? How many leads did I generate from my webinar?

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Screenshot 2024-03-15 at 11.21.10 AM

Conclusion

As you’re planning for the year ahead, and setting goals for your marketing efforts, look at incorporating some of these tactics into your overall demand strategy. If you can get in front of prospects with mature, targeted demand programs, you’ll be well-equipped to deliver more effective and relevant buying groups to your sales team. If you’re ready to start implementing some of these strategies or want to learn more, please reach out to Anteriad.

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