How to Integrate Brand Marketing Into a Demand Gen Strategy

[00:00:00] Doz Anyaegbunam: So welcome everyone and thanks for joining us today.

Honestly, I'm excited for a ton of reasons because When you think about how the year has started in B2B, I mean, we've literally continued from where we had last year and then AI is not stopping anytime soon. It just kind of looks, it's now the Deepseek thing that's going on.

When Deepseek came out, someone really big, a really big Um, LinkedIn influencers sent a newsletter and said, Oh, this is how to use deep seek to do customer research. This is how to use deep seek to do stuff. And I was just like, not again, not again. No, come on. We can do better than this. Like synthetic research.

Okay. You know, um, but I think I'll just get right into it. And the big thing or the big debate, which everyone, I think everyone seems to worry about is. I have an [00:01:00] existing demand gen strategy. It's, it's running, it's easy to defend. I have a budget for it, but I like this brand stuff. It looks interesting.

It looks like it's worth it, you know? And I think the other big problem then is that we have established systems. We have metrics that already guide everything basically. And it's just plug and play for me at this point. And so if I was to go through like a complete overhaul and say like, you know what, I want to start, like, where do I start from?

Like, if you were, if, if it was you right now, like, what would be your first three, five steps, the first, what would you start with? You know, cause I, it's

[00:01:44] Liam Moroney: If there's an existing demand gen program in place. Yeah.

[00:01:47] Doz Anyaegbunam: Yeah.

[00:01:48] Liam Moroney: And I think, you know, the, the, the mindset I always go into with this stuff is, you shouldn't do brand because you just like brand and it sounds fun.

Like it is, it's, it [00:02:00] seems like the more fun one, but there has to be a good compelling reason to do it. And. A lot of that gets uncovered by asking questions. And some of those questions are like, are, is our demand gen not working as well as it could, or is it getting less effective because we're seeing that there's something else causing it?

This I think is the big thing that I, I see a lot of where we look at the world, like you said, through a set of metrics, we look at them through a very demand gen lens as an industry. And when you look across the industry, most of the trends are saying pipelines getting harder to get. Customer acquisition costs are going up.

And the question is why, and some of it is more competition. There's less money to go around, et cetera. And a lot of it is because it, a lot of demand gen worked in what, if you have no brand support, you're working in essentially the longest odds, because when you look at the pieces you need in order [00:03:00] for a marketing program to work really well, it's do people know who we are.

Do they understand what we do and they do think of us when we have a problem? And then the other part of it is, and then can we get them to take an action when they do? Can we remind them that we exist? Can we just go, Hey, by the way, here's a really easy pathway in. And the problem is if you don't do the first piece, then the second piece doesn't really work very effectively.

And there's tons of market research data out there that supports this. So when you look at Gartner's data, when you look at, uh, the Sixth Sense report, when you look at HBR, they all come to the exact same conclusions that most of the time when people are coming in market, they're about 60 to 70 percent of the way done with their sales process.

When, by the time they talk to a salesperson, they've already made, largely made the decision on who they want to go with because they have a consideration set from the very, very beginning. And that consideration set is made up. Of people that they thought of, that they had heard of, that they were already [00:04:00] familiar with.

Here's where it gets really compelling. About 90 percent of the time, the winner in deals will be one of the people in that set. And about 80 percent of the time, the winner in that set is the top one, the first one that was in there. So what that really means is, all, especially in complex B2B purchases, the winner has already been decided.

Before they've even started really actively talking to salespeople. And the one they thought was going to win generally wins. So if you're not doing marketing, that puts you in a consideration set. So let's say you're doing no brand marketing. You're not getting awareness. You're purely doing real conversion marketing.

You're trying to win in that 10 percent that remains where they are willing to talk to somebody outside of that set. That's a really small window. To try and win in, and it's a really expensive window to win in because you're competing [00:05:00] against all of the other stuff where you're trying to go like, Hey, I know you've already made a decision.

Consider me though. And that's a really expensive way to win. Now, the reality is that that is the way that most new players. Brand new companies begin their life because no one has heard of them. That's why they do outbound. That's why they go to events. That's why they knock on doors. They ask for intros because no one knows who you are.

So you're trying to win in that 10%, but eventually. The odds just don't work and the math stops working So the best thing is to start to say would it not be more beneficial to be trying to get into that consideration set? And it's a very long wind of saying that's what brand is supposed to accomplish and it's what demand gen on its own Generally doesn't And the main reason is because demand gen is often, not often, demand gen has near term metrics.

It's being held to conversion metrics. So it's very hard to do long term stuff unless you've carved out a separate [00:06:00] strategy saying we're going to have this section and its job is to increase awareness, its job is to increase the people who think of us, and it's to get into more consideration sets. And then alongside that, we have the demand gen piece.

And here's the thing. That's how most marketing is supposed to be set up when you go through basic marketing fundamentals. That is the long and the short of it. That's the mix.

[00:06:27] Doz Anyaegbunam: You know, I have a ton of questions, a couple of questions here. One of them is a very mischievous question. I'll keep it for the last one, but the first one is, I think I've seen someone ask you this question on LinkedIn, which is for complex purchases, this, this sort of tracks now for, and that's probably, I guess complex, yeah.

For the sake of the conversation, let's say 10k, 10k new 10k investment all the way upwards 100k. Now, 5k, 3k, 2k, do you [00:07:00] think it's still the same thing? I mean, I, I, let me not say what I think, but do you think it's still the same thing? Like for smaller purchases where a manager can just spend that money without getting approval?

And it's just, You know, it's just, Oh, I have, I have a credit, a 2k credit card and I need to get this for my team and I'm just going to just invest in it. And then if he works, I can say, Oh, you know what, um, CFO, I want to buy this for a year for an annual plan. What do you, do you think it's still the same thing?

The dynamics are

[00:07:32] Liam Moroney: definitely different when you're at something you can put a credit card in for. And a lot of it comes down to how risky is this purchase and how. How much are you putting on the line by making it? And if it's something you can try and you can cancel your credit card and go, ah, it didn't work, whatever.

It wasn't that big of a deal. Sure. Like there's a very different way of buying. However, it's still generally, there's, there's things that come along with being unknown and the biggest thing that comes along with being unknown is you have [00:08:00] to either price yourself down or discount yourself in order to get chosen because that's why you have free trials.

That's why you have a lot of them. They still have them at big companies and long. Long things, but you depend on them, you know, like take that, take a non B2B example. If you go into a supermarket and there's a brand on the shelf, you've never heard of, you're not going to try it unless they give you an incentive to go.

It's on sale new item. Like that's what discounting is. That's weak brand awareness. And in B2B, it's very similar where you're relying very, very heavily on incentive based marketing. And it can get people in the door, but the problem is, it has, there's a couple of kind of like, not necessarily great dynamics can come along with it.

So, free trials work. They definitely work. Uh, 30 day trials work, freemium has a place. It's also very, very inefficient. In a lot of cases, because you bring in people who will try it for free, but won't pay for it. So you get lots and lots of attrition. [00:09:00] You get people who might try it, but like you have to really give away something pretty meaningful them to give it a try.

And you end up with a very high hill to climb because your. You're consuming all the risks so they don't have to, even at relatively low purchases. And the other thing is like people generally don't spend their time sifting through LinkedIn randomly going, Oh, I never thought of that. Yeah, I'll give that a try.

Sure. Even if it's 30 bucks, there's just too much to do in the day. So a lot of the times the best thing you can be is familiar. It works. It makes your open rate go up. If people see a brand, they recognize it makes your ad click the rate go up. If they see a brand, they recognize like brand lifts the performance of demand.

Jen, that's it in a nutshell.

[00:09:47] Doz Anyaegbunam: I think the, the other thing I was going to say is, and it's more, it's more like it, it taught something to think about than the question, which is when you describe it that way, you start to really wonder when [00:10:00] you talk about the point about the math, at some point the math doesn't work and you just, you start to wonder about.

the VC math and, uh, you know, the, the, the fundraising math and you're like, okay, is that why it feels like sometimes we, we, we fund a ton of stuff and say, we're funding customer acquisition. What we're really doing is just discounting the purchase at, so that people can try the product till at some point, hopefully, There's enough demand in the market to pay back all we've discounted along the way.

Yeah.

[00:10:39] Doz Anyaegbunam: Yeah.

[00:10:42] Liam Moroney: And in a lot of cases, a lot of demand gen, most of my career when I was in house doing demand gen was at VC backed companies where we were losing money for every customer that we acquired. By quite some amount. So it was that whole growth at all costs. And suddenly when the math [00:11:00] has to change and you have to be efficient, the same, the same playbook just doesn't work because you didn't have that burden when you were able to spend 10, 000 for a customer that paid you five.

[00:11:17] Doz Anyaegbunam: That's a. That's a very scary place to go because I feel like it's almost like that. Some, sometimes the future stops to work and sometime in the future, the business packs up because the master just wouldn't work no matter what you do. Since we're talking about numbers and budgets and VCs and stuff,

I like that about the two questions. Think about like two things you mentioned, but even if I have that all set up, like, Oh, I. What's the problem? Is, is my demand gen not working anymore? And then what do I do for that? How do I even go about saying to my team lead, my CFO, I want to put forward a budget for, for brand, [00:12:00] for brand marketing.

Like how do I, how do I start that conversation? Especially because While I do think it can be tracked, and you've talked about that before, it's a bit, um, you know how we are with metrics in B2B, we love them metrics. Like, I mean, people talk about them all the time and with brand it's, it can sound a bit wishy washy, like, and I hate that term, but it's just how people, you know, 2 You know, so how do I start saying I need a budget for this and this is how I'm going to prove that the budget actually works for brands, Speaker 1

[00:12:38] Liam Moroney: I think the right starting point is to connect it to a problem everyone agrees is a real problem and I've always found, I think we've talked about this before, sales is great at telling you brand problems because they feel them and, you know, they'll often be the ones going, no one heard, has heard of us, we're left out of all the RFPs.

A lot of it comes back to [00:13:00] like, is there a problem here that needs to be solved that isn't currently being solved? And more often than not, it's that we're not being thought of, we're not known, or we're not known in an area that we're trying to break into. And so some of it starts with just everyone agreeing that like, do we all agree that that's a problem that has not yet been solved?

I've rarely ever seen a company where they're like, nah, our brand awareness is fantastic. We're totally fine. The other part of it then is there is data that you can start to bring to things, which strengthens this case, because. Yes, we've talked about the reasons brand marketing works, the, the, you know, invest in this and it will work.

The problem is people tend not to like to invest for the longterm and things they don't feel they have a need to do in any case, nobody wants to buy insurance for a problem they don't think is going to actually happen. That's just that that's the reality. So sometimes you can look for things that give you that information.

If you have the ability to. And this one is not often, but I will advocate for it. [00:14:00] It's bring research to the table. You know, most marketers are talking about our brand awareness because they're hearing about that from sales. Sales will be the one going, we're always losing to this competitor. This is like where we're weakest and they know why they lose deals, but that doesn't mean it represents the entire market.

If you have 5 to 10k you can get a pretty meaningful. Baseline of where you exist in your prospects, you can come back and go, Hey, it turns out for these use cases. No one even knows that we do it or when, when people are thinking of the top three vendors, we're like number six, you know, like that can be pretty damning information because that's a brand problem.

There's a very cheap way of doing this, which is a starting point. Uh, we've talked about share of search as a metric. It's very easily available. You can do it with Google keywords for free, although it's not that accurate. If you have access to a SEMrush or an Ahrefs, you can do it with those. And you can also do it with a [00:15:00] tool called My Telescope, which is like 20 bucks a month.

Like they're not expensive to get this information, but what it can at least tell you is, Hey, of all the brands that are being searched for in our category, here's where we stack rank on there. And is it going up? Or is it going down and sometimes, and I caveat sometimes, if you're in a relatively, relatively mature category, you can see things that I've seen when I do this with clients where the share of search is going up for everybody, but you, that's a pretty meaningful problem.

Or yours is trending down over the last six to 12 months because you over indexed on lead gen stuff and you forgot to sponsor anything that might increase awareness. Sometimes that can give you stuff to come to the table saying we have a problem. It may not have hit our ROI numbers. It may not have hit the pipeline yet, but it will.

And if we don't get ahead of this, we're going to feel this in the future. And a lot of what you're trying to do is you're trying to give marketing a voice about where the market is going. [00:16:00] Hey, we're not thought off. There are new competitors that you're not even aware of. And that's what in most industries, the CMO's job is it's the external view of the world.

And so I think it's a very long answer, but. If you can't bring something of material value to the conversation going, we have a brand problem and it will not be, it will not be solved by a demand gen solution. We need something explicitly to solve this. And that's where, yes, there's a little bit of the kind of talking points of, you know, there's not a whole lot of awareness comes when you're getting everything behind forms.

There's not a whole lot of awareness. And the, some of it is just, you know, Is the content we're putting out there for demand gen would someone who's not looking to buy anything read a long checklist of how to pick you the best tool for X? Probably not. So it's it's more about identify the gap, assign it to a problem, and then.

Figure out how much you're able to try and get, even some of it as test budgets. But I think the key bit is [00:17:00] it should be something that's allocated separately to demand gen. Maybe you take some out of a demand gen by finding inefficiencies, you know, like so some low quality lead gen or display ads you're doing that don't work.

Maybe you're doing bidding keywords on branded search that aren't really that all useful and you just put it into this bucket. And at least then you, the more it's protected, the more it, It's being measured differently to the rest of the stuff.

[00:17:24] Doz Anyaegbunam: You know, there's something you say that made me feel bad about some of the things I've done in my life in content, you know, like all the getting stuff and building checklists and stuff.

And you know, that thing about asking yourself, and it's the funnel thinking again, it's like, is this thing really, because someone, if you don't know who I am, why are you going to get my checklist?

[00:17:48] Liam Moroney: Yeah, and why would I pay you for it by giving away my information? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're actually paying your, you're paying through the email address.

That's what you're doing. Yeah, there's a cost It's a price of entry. So [00:18:00] you have to treat it like a purchase. Would you buy this?

[00:18:07] Doz Anyaegbunam: Okay But continuing that If you think about, so that's sales. Now, one thing, I mean, B2B talks a big game about alignment. Oh, well align sales, marketing products, marketing, all those people, but you, I don't, I don't, I don't know if we are really that aligned as we say we are when we now go into our teams and you, so when you talk to teams, you get this different sense that.

When exactly aligned.

[00:18:37] Liam Moroney: Yeah.

[00:18:38] Doz Anyaegbunam: However, how do you know? So, because the way you describe it as a sales problem, how do you not translate that to make it a product marketing problem and a product problem? You know, I think finance kind of gets it because for finance, it's like, we're not making money anymore.

Like, Oh, the money, the money pot is about to run out down [00:19:00] the line. So I think finance gets it. But I think all about this, the, the product marketing team, the product team, because, uh, because. One thing brand does is brand involves everyone in the conversation. And if, if you all are going to hit going to this dance, the same beat, and like, then at some point the customer is going to notice that, okay, this thing's a bit different.

The landing page for the website is different from what I'm hearing in marketing. So how do you get everybody just kind of, you know, moving at the same bit?

[00:19:33] Liam Moroney: You know, it's funny. I was talking to, to someone that, uh, he, you know, met on LinkedIn. I won't, I won't name him or his company, but he, he's a brand, he's a head of brand for a pretty well known, SaaS company and they did a large brand campaign recently.

And I asked him what, what happened? Like, tell me what happened after you did it. And they did, it was an expensive campaign. Like they really put money into this and they, they kind of identified like a really simple tagline that they wanted to try and get everyone to think through. It [00:20:00] was very, very well done.

And of course they had all the questions that they usually get. When's the leads coming in? when's the ROI, all that stuff. But he said there was a thing happened that he didn't actually expect. And it was really interesting, which was that it gave everyone this shared language that they now started to talk in.

So he, like he said, the brand look and feel and the taglines were being extended into the sales kickoff decks. They were using that tagline. It was very, it became part of. The language that everyone spoke with, because it gave a bit of clarity about here's a really simplified idea of what we're trying to accomplish here.

And the thing about brand is that it's very, very different to product marketing and demand gen in that. You're not trying to tell everyone all the things you can do, and you're not trying to say, look at everything we're able to help you with. You're trying to go. Here's the simplest way to think of us, and we just want to make sure we come to mind when you're thinking of this, and it's a really [00:21:00] distilled idea.

So hopefully it gives you and the company this kind of. North star to look to and to say like, that's where we're looking to get to. Here's how we're going to make sure that this translates into everything. Because most brand campaigns are very, very simple ideas. And that's good because everyone can get on board with what a simple idea is.

And it just kind of, it hopefully simplifies that. So there is a big element to, does this reinforce things? And I think in my experience, so I do a lot of workshops with clients and a lot of what we do with these workshops is start to create some more focused areas of where brand campaigns come from.

And what I always find. Every single time we do this one particular workshop where we're identifying category entry points, which for all intents and purposes are just. When do people buy this like what what do they think of when they're why are they coming in market for something you do? And how do you make sure [00:22:00] you're thought of?

And I have yet to see one example where it hasn't been a complete muscle memory shift for the organization to stop thinking in terms of Of our solution and to start thinking in terms of their problem, that's a game changing way of shifting mindsets because it changes how you think about the product.

Is it easy to start using this? It changes how you think about sales, where are they coming into this conversation? So hopefully it's a, it's a unifier through really simple ideas as well.

[00:22:30] Doz Anyaegbunam: And you know, it's, it's wild how we approach marketing B2B because really it's the four P's.

[00:22:37] Liam Moroney: It is, it is. It's the

[00:22:39] Doz Anyaegbunam: four P's.

[00:22:40] Liam Moroney: And I think, you know, a lot of it, and actually the four B's are really good example of where brand really does come together because yeah, we can all acknowledge most people in the B2B SaaS industry don't have the ability to influence the price or the product, but what you do have the ability to, is to understand how your audience thinks about [00:23:00] prices and products, because we often, um, Decide what the most important features are based on what customers have told us because the product team does interviews with them or what we believe based on our own understanding.

That's very biased thinking. I hate to admit it, but customers always want something that's new, but it turns out when you do market research for most categories. People want the basic functions that there's certain things matter more than other things. And you can only know that by asking people like, do they want, how much is AI really the thing that makes the sale versus it being easy, fast, reliable, safe.

And you don't know that unless you ask people who don't really have any incentive delay to you. And a lot of bias thinking happens internally. So the four P's are really good way of informing a brand strategy going. If people really care about. Simple, maybe that should be how we're introducing ourself to the market and not overcomplicating it.

And that, that's where a lot of brands starts to think in terms of the overall market [00:24:00] as opposed to who you hope are thinking of the things that you're thinking of.

[00:24:05] Doz Anyaegbunam: You know, I also feel like one thing that I really would love to work on, maybe after this, is I think B2B lacks a ton of brand case studies.

We don't have enough of that. And then I guess people are not willing to probably share yet. Results are probably not that impactful yet. I mean, people are still trying this out. I think some people have done this a lot, or maybe the ones who have done that, the bigger brands and, you know, like Julia Kina always says on LinkedIn is like that small brands are pretty different from the big brands.

And so they have different issues.

Yeah. But

[00:24:40] Doz Anyaegbunam: I feel like people like, it's like, well, you're just saying it. Um, it's gonna, it's gonna push back a lot of the content that they wanna pull out of But since you've brought that up, you know, I don't know if it's my point, but if you could talk about how you've been able to do this and reach people, you know, from miles to miles and make people feel like, okay, [00:25:00] I'm capable of doing this, I can do this.

Um, yeah, it's been a lot of work and, and, and, you know, to try to push it and make You

that seems to go down a particular hole they're already in and you're like, no, that question is not clarifying. You're just digging for that. And can we just step out of that and have a conversation? But, but yeah. Ah. Cause

[00:25:25] Liam Moroney: it's the four P's. It is the four P's. And, and the thing about brand, you know, and especially brand examples, it's, it's very easy to give the shiny ones.

Like we can all go HubSpot, great brand, Clay, great brand. Like, sure, it's easy to say, but the truth is that, like, All that matters is at the end of the day is, are you thought of when people have problems? And are you known? And known is actually way more important than people appreciate, even in relatively low, low consideration products.

It's much easier to buy something if [00:26:00] when you tell people you bought it, they go, Oh yeah. Yeah, that's a good call. I heard good things about them. That's a whole lot easier than, you bought what? Who's that? Like, that, and when you, when you get more expensive, that question becomes the thing that they say no to.

So, like, Brand is just this, it's just this, this tailwind that makes life easier. Because, and I've written about this a few times, For smaller brands, challenger brands trying to break into big markets, the truth is big brands have very unfair advantages, very unfair advantages, because they already exist.

They don't even need to work for the same deals that you have to work night and day just to get a chance at, and that's the benefit of brand. And. The best thing you can do is try and accomplish that at a small and manageable scale. I think the problem is we're always trying to find the right message at the right time to the right person.

That's a pretty, like, that's a, you're really, [00:27:00] again, you're in the long odds when you're trying to do stuff like that versus is there a segment, and this is back to the four P's, uh, STP segment. Targeting positioning, if you don't have a lot of budget, narrow your audience down to the smallest, meaningful group that you can own a bigger share with than everybody else.

That's how you win in those categories. And it's all about just be, be the loudest voice. Like the weird thing is when you actually step back and this is not necessarily the case you would make to a lot of executives, although I have made this case, there's some really almost depressing data. When you look at brand and how brands help you.

How, how they grow. And one of them is share a voice. It is consistent that the brands who people hear about the most, which means they've got a bigger share of voice than their competitors tend to be the brands that are biggest or the ones that grow. And the main reason is because we buy from the companies that seem biggest and safest and most familiar, [00:28:00] and we're not reading their 10 K reports.

We're not looking at how many employees they have. We're judging them based on how often do I hear about you? You feel big. Okay. That's brand. That's, that's most of what it is. It's perception is reality and brand is trying to influence perception.

[00:28:16] Doz Anyaegbunam: Consistency. Yeah, just. Well, okay. Now I think the thing to think about here also is, so you, you've, you've, you've, you've defended the budgets, you've got it going, you've somehow convinced your CFO.

But knowing that you're still in the, at a point when things are still a bit shaky, how do you, is there, what do you think of, how do you find a balance between keeping, hitting your demand gen targets while still, you know, while still building brand? I mean, I think the B2C businesses do this pretty well, but I, I don't see many, I don't know about B2B cases because I feel like [00:29:00] every single time you have that conversation, people always just go like, but if we do, Brand marketing, then demand gen suffers like, you know, but do you have any thoughts on how to kind of keep that balance and make sure that you still feed the beast while building the.

[00:29:14] Liam Moroney: Yeah. And this is a tricky one because I think the wrong answer is let's just get our targets done. And then when we're on the other side of that, we'll start doing brand. I've heard that story and it never changes. It's always kicked down the line because there's always a new thing happening. So it, it doesn't work when you go, let's just get our house in order.

And then when we feel like we're on target and we're hitting our numbers, then we'll do brand. It just doesn't work. It really doesn't. So there has to be at least a valid case for why you're doing them alongside each other. And. You know, sometimes, sometimes the reality is people are way behind on numbers and you don't have the luxury, but you know, like it always catches up.

If you're not doing something for the future, then you're, you're, just deferring pain later. That, that's how it is. But I think. The other thing to note is [00:30:00] that there's not this really hard divide between brand and demand. And I think this is really important because if you say, what is long term marketing and what is short term, they don't fit neatly into boxes.

Some things do both. Some things do both really effectively. Events are. Often demonized, but I actually think events do both really well, because if you have a booth and an event and yeah, listen, they're very expensive. We all know that, but we do spend money on these things. When people come up to the booth, you get conversations, you close deals, you get pipeline, but there's also people who learn about you at those things and they may not buy from you today, but they will many years from now.

And there might be a dinner where you talk to somebody and you meet them at the next event and the next event and we all have those experiences. There's a lot of stuff you can do that also accomplishes long term marketing. And the question is, can we start to just balance the types of content that we do?

And I find that the easiest place is the. In my experience, there is a lot of stuff we do in demand gen that could be very easily augmented to also be a little bit of brand. And at least [00:31:00] you're doing something in there. When we talk about having a dedicated brand and demand strategy, it doesn't mean there's this complete church and state where we don't talk to each other, they don't work.

There's no overlap. There's always overlap. The difference between having a separate brand and demand strategy is mainly that you have separate ways of measuring. If your long term stuff is working and you have at least dedicated budget that may overlap, but at least is always allowed to pursue long term stuff.

It doesn't mean it's a totally different motion. They can run alongside each other. It's just about making sure that you're, you're able to do things that are specifically for long term, but to the whole feeding the beast thing. I think some of the question is, is everything that you're doing genuinely driving real incremental results, or is it driving nicely measurable stuff?

Because you may very well have areas of inefficiency in a demand gen program where, [00:32:00] you know, you know, I, I give brand branded keywords as an example, because if you're spending a really meaningful amount of money bidding on people who are looking for your brand name. There is a good argument, and there's lots of data, to say, maybe if you turn that off, you would see nothing happen.

Because they were searching for your name anyway, so maybe they'll just come in through other means. You can do that test. You can do incrementality testing. You can do incrementality testing to some of the other channels that you're looking on. And some of it doesn't have to be sophisticated. It's just like, leave it off for a week and see if anything happens.

Um, because I think a lot of it is, there's inefficiencies you can borrow from. Not everything is actually, you know, you might be feeding the beast, but you're not be, you may not be actually feeding the growth. And that's, there's a big difference in those two things.

[00:32:50] Doz Anyaegbunam: Yeah. I mean, I think I have like three more questions for you, but I want to ask, um, for folks on the, In the room.

Do you have any, like [00:33:00] any branch, if anyone is in this kind of situation where they're saying to themselves, I have a demand driven strategy, I need to find a way to kind of put brand in there, could you mind sharing that in the chat and let's answer that here and now we're having, we're having on the call, like they can try, uh, at least you don't have to pay the consulting fee or the workshop fee.

[00:33:26] Liam Moroney: I love this. I'd I. You know, while, while people are potentially typing in there, I think there's a lot of, a lot of brand content is only different to demand content in the fact that it's really about who are you talking to? And is that something that would be interesting to someone who doesn't know who you are?

And the thing that's really interesting about brand content is some it we think of it as very expensive, but it doesn't actually necessarily have to be. So like, I'll give you a stat. This one, Can be hard to kind of accept took me a while to come around to accepting it [00:34:00] but the linkedin b2b institute heavily advocates this they have data behind this if you had a million dollars or viewed and you were trying to like you had okay let's say there was a million people in your audience is it better to try and get.

All of them to see your ad once or to get half of them to see your ad twice or to get a third of them to See your ad three times and the answer is always it's better to get all of them to see at once You do not need lots of exposures of brand content for it to work It just it gets less effective by every exposure.

So in reality One good brand content asset doesn't have to change very often. You only have to get people to see it once and it's done almost all of its job. It goes a lot farther than demand gen spend does by that measure. Um, I see we have some questions. Uh, what is the easiest place to start integrating brand with demand?

Is it content, an email campaign, social media? [00:35:00] It is content. And I think a lot of it is in my opinion, it's starting by identifying if you have gaps in your content. This is something we do a lot with a lot of clients where we, we will find how much of this content is assuming they're looking for a product like yours versus talking about the problem that they have without explicitly talking about the solution.

We often find that a lot of the content. The programs are very category specific. They're very solution specific, but they're not really talking about the problem that doesn't look that different. It can make, in a lot of ways, you can just identify those gaps and run what feels like a typical normal content marketing program, only you're doing something that's slightly better atop a funnel than what you're currently doing.

So sometimes it's like, think of it like a Trojan horse where you're doing actual brand marketing, but it feels like demand gen marketing. Like that's the easiest place to integrate it for sure. Um, I'm looking brand and awareness scare off our CEO. I've tried talking to them around how, and I've heard this one, [00:36:00] uh, with how brand activity, prime, stronger conversions and demand gen, but it's not getting through.

I've heard a few people say this before where they don't use the word brand and they don't use awareness because it's got such bad connotations. I hate that that's true, but I do accept that that's true. And. I think, so this is where I think before you give them labels, frame them as problems. Ironically, this is brand marketing.

We're not finding solutions. We're finding problems where you're asking, do you think enough people know who we are? And the answer is probably no. And it's, well, do they think we do all the things we do? Are they aware of that? How do they think of us as being an SMB product? But we're trying to talk to the enterprise.

The more you can frame it in, where are people's perception gaps about us? And do we all agree that they exist? That opens the door to would it be beneficial if we ran something that was explicitly trying to solve that problem? And you never need to say brand but that's what you're talking about. So [00:37:00] like, you know, it's a little bit Socratic method and you're kind of like almost gentle parenting CEOs but you have to do it sometimes, it is a real thing.

But I think the more you frame it Would it be beneficial to solve this? And if they agree, it's, would you be open to me presenting some ways to solve this? The wrong way is going, we should be doing more brand because you get that immediate, like, that sounds expensive. We don't need to be leads or what matters.

And like, it's, it's just the way you introduce it in my opinion.

[00:37:29] Doz Anyaegbunam: And then we have a Todd one quick wins. Is there a quick win I can show my boss that proves, so we have more, more That I can show that proves brand works so I can get buying for a larger brand ask

[00:37:46] Liam Moroney: quick

[00:37:46] Doz Anyaegbunam: wins.

[00:37:47] Liam Moroney: So this is why I think, cause here's the, I'll give you kind of the sober answer and I'll, I'll expand on it.

Brand does take time. And if your deal cycles are long, it takes a pretty surprisingly long time [00:38:00] because you've got to try and create awareness. They have to come in market with that awareness. Like you can, the math can often be a bit, Depressing like, Oh, it'll probably really show up in like six to 12 months.

Like that, that sucks. But it's unfortunately largely true. However, the reason I'll advocate for having a separate brand and demand strategy is the first and hardest thing to get people to buy into is if more people. Are aware of us, and if more people think of us more highly, is that valuable? Do we all agree that that is valuable?

Because you can measure that over a relatively short amount of time. You can run a brand campaign that shows at the end of the quarter that you had a 20 percent lift in the amount of people who knew where you were. More people associate you, but that's still not meaningful until you've gotten people to agree that Getting that number to go up would be meaningful so you you can like this is I think the thing I always say there's a lot of ways to measure brand you can use share of search to see did it go up [00:39:00] you can see did organic traffic to the website go up you could even potentially see the click through rates go up in some of the emails that you do but unless everyone agrees that that would be what we expect to happen and that we think that is valuable.

That hurdle is more important to get over, because it's easy to show quick wins if everybody agrees what a quick win looks like, because if they think a quick win is pipeline, you're gonna be really disappointed.

[00:39:24] Doz Anyaegbunam: Okay, um, okay, we got more, we got more, um. We missed one from the Q& A area, which is um, we do some brand marketing, trade shows, LinkedIn, blogs, ICPs, IT directors at any business.

We focus heavily on SLED. Please, what does SLED mean? Do you know what that means? I don't know what that means. S L E D.

[00:39:45] Liam Moroney: I do and my mind's gone blank on why I don't know what that is right now.

[00:39:49] Doz Anyaegbunam: There are a lot of other computers that do what we do. So my question is what tools and techniques would we use to outperform our competition?[00:40:00]

[00:40:01] Liam Moroney: Let me read that. So ICP directors at any business, we found heavy on sled. There's a lot of competitors that do what we do. So, yeah. And I think, so the, the big problem with competitors is if you train, especially if there's competitors who have way more budget, which is often the reality that people are it can often feel A bit defeatist for them for you to say, like, we can't match them on budget.

They're always going to outdo us. And that is true. Again, we're back to this kind of, you know, the unfair reality of competitors and bigger brands. The thing that you can do best is narrow, either the thing you're trying to get known for, or the audience that you're trying to get known with. Or both, because if they were really big competitor.

In one example, the best option you have is that the downside to a really big brand is they have to talk to lots and lots of people. So they tend to talk in very surface level generic ways. It's why, you know, big corporate brand content sounds corporate and boring and soulless because it has to be. It talks to everybody.

[00:41:00] So the alternative is pick a really narrow group. And really get known with those people and talk deeply to those. That's how Salesforce grew on day one. They talked to a very narrow group of CRM marketers way before cloud based stuff was there. Like it's how most brands grew. The other version of this is one where let's say it's a competitor of relatively similar size.

Then it's be known for a much more specific thing. Like do you have differentiators that you. That you are better at and that are meaningful in sales conversations and really own that. It's always about focus. It's narrow the area, narrow the topic, narrow the people, or narrow all of them. And that's the best way your budget goes further.

It's back to share voice. You're owning more share voice. Geez, this is

[00:41:47] Doz Anyaegbunam: easy and

[00:41:47] Liam Moroney: hard at the same time. It's easy in concept, very hard in practice, but I think sometimes having the, When you know that more share of voice is a better thing, then it's, at least it gives you a [00:42:00] mechanism to go, what could we own more share of voice with?

How can we get our budget to go really far in a meaningful area? And

[00:42:08] Doz Anyaegbunam: then we have from happening as the company transitions from product focused business to tech focused one. When do you think we should begin shifting our messaging to align with the new direction and target the right market?

[00:42:23] Liam Moroney: Uh, the depressing answer is.

Usually before you release the product to the market, uh, because you kind of need to generate some awareness. It's you're essentially pre marketing, but I think the, the earlier, the better, because you're, again, you're competing with the timelines of people buying these things. If you market to people today, most of them won't buy today.

Most of them will buy over the course of the next two years, depending on how complex your industry is. So the right time is. Is as early as possible, truthfully, because it's going to impact how well you can capitalize on that awareness.

[00:42:59] Doz Anyaegbunam: And then we have, [00:43:00] what's the best way to measure awareness, sentiment, especially actionable, qualitative results versus vanity metrics.

This vanity metrics thing. Okay. Yeah.

[00:43:11] Liam Moroney: I, it's only, to me, it's, it's a vanity metric if you can't put it in the context of why it matters. Drive something. So like everything, everything can be a vanity metric if you don't have a good story for it. But I, I get the point for sure. I think best depends because there's best cheapest and there's best, most comprehensive, like best is obviously like in depth qualitative panel research.

It's also very expensive and slow. The ones that I think awareness. The reason I keep going to Sheriff Search is because it's highly accessible to most brands. And depending on how complex and mature your industry is, it can be immediately valuable. You can get a number that moves today, uh, between now and two months from now.

That's the most actionable one because you can see it essentially moving. When you do qualitative type surveys, you're doing pulse things. You're looking at a moment in time, and then you're comparing it another [00:44:00] moment in time. And it can be different and it can be inaccurate. So it best, there's a lot of ways of defining best, but I think some combination of are more people taking actions that look like they're researching us.

That can be direct traffic to the website, organic traffic, combine that with share of search. What you're essentially doing is building a picture that there's a story goes along with, and I think. Share of search is very, very easy. There are great tools. Like if you've got the budget, winter is really good for messaging testing.

You can get a really, really good sense for, you know, couple of grand of do people like the messaging, does it resonate, or do they think differently about how you are, but there's like, there's lots of survey options in between that are really accessible too.

[00:44:43] Doz Anyaegbunam: I think we're actually over time. So I'm just going to try and wrap up and just ask one last question, which I think is, what should we not do when implementing brand?

In our dimension strategy,

[00:44:56] Liam Moroney: not do, I think, [00:45:00] I think don't, don't do it because it is, it's shiny. I think certainly don't do Bram because we want to have a commercial and we want to have a billboard. Like it has to be purposeful. It has to be solving a gap that is more people knowing you, more people thinking of you.

I think the other is don't make it feel siloed to Dimanjin. It is not brand versus demand. You are not doing it because DemandGen is failing. You are doing it because DemandGen needs the support of brand. They are part of the same effort. And I think we as an industry, and I was guilty of this, over indexed on Well, the demand gen marketers were the ones who care about numbers and revenue and where they're like, where the really like revenue generate.

Don't be the brand equivalent of that, where you're going, you're only the one who generates leads. I'm the one who generates like, no, we're all on the same team and is all for the same purpose.

[00:45:53] Doz Anyaegbunam: Yeah,

[00:45:54] Liam Moroney: that.

[00:45:55] Doz Anyaegbunam: That is a, is a huge, huge wall we need to cross as an [00:46:00] industry, to be honest. Yeah. Well, thank you.

Thank you everyone for like, we're over time and I don't want to take too much of people's time. People are already dropping off. Um, we'll add, we'll be sending out a resource at the end of this, which Liam and his team has put together. It's called the do's and don'ts of integrating brand and demand.

It'll come in your emails. Once if you're RSVP for the event. So check your email once it's over and to get that. Thank you everyone. We would love your feedback. You know, tell us what you talked about today's session. If you have a topic you think we should talk about, you have someone else you should bring on board and let that person debate about brand, probably like a brand versus demand in real life.

Tell us and we'll bring the person on board. Well, thank you so much and hope you join us when next we do this. Thanks again. I'm like, I always love doing this. I

[00:46:49] Liam Moroney: love these. These are always

[00:46:50] Doz Anyaegbunam: fun. Thanks everyone.