How the Right Content and Delivery Strategies Double Demand Generation ROI

How the Right
Content & Delivery
Strategies Double
Demand Gen ROI
John Steinert, CMO at TechTarget
Zak Pines, VP of Marketing at Bedrock Data
October 2017
®

2How the Right Content & Delivery Strategies Double Demand Gen ROI
• Where we are and how we got here
• What we were seeing and our study results
• Implications and next steps for you
Agenda

In marketing as a whole, there were once
two very distinct groups of thought.
There were people intently focused on
strengthening awareness of the brand and
how that helped, and there were people
concentrating specifically on converting
product demand into sales pipeline.
If you’re a large enough company, this might
still be the case to some extent.

Now in the classical period, these two
groups had pretty separate perspectives
and methodologies and they operated, more
or less, in different philosophical universes.
There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of
available connective tissue to knit them
together, very few systems, etc.
The concept of integration was conceptual,
theoretical, super hard to do.

Well as you all know, with the growth in
available technology, Marketing has taken
off for B2B.
It’s now an important element in the toolkit
of B2B companies of all sizes.
Everybody knows this; we’re probably all
products of it.
But while there’s been huge growth in
demand gen practices in B2B, maybe
because of the availability of helpful
frameworks and systems.
At the same time, for many companies,
there’s been relatively little growth in
branding investment in comparison and in
many companies there’s been significant
divestment.
And we’re all familiar with the common
criticisms of traditional dis-integrated brand
advertising. If you do much reading about
Programmatic as a whole, you can see there
are a lot of challenges.

While Branding has been bumping along, at
the same time, something else is happening.
At a lot of companies, certainly in the
enterprise tech space where we play,
over the past several years, we noticed
marketers starting to get really caught up in
a very limited and inflexible set of KPIs.
Simultaneously, relative to their past
successes, many are seeing the
performance of their tried and true
techniques starting to stagnate.
From a business perspective, if we assume
their market is growing, that means they’re
having increasing difficulty winning their
share of the total demand out there. They
are becoming less competitively effective.
Now, this situation leads to obvious
problems for a lot of marketers, and it
creates some common symptoms that we
call “Demand Gen Tunnel Vision.”

In these companies where Demand Gen
performance is stagnating, tunnel vision
symptoms look like this.
1. We often see an accelerating focus on
volume inputs – especially at the top of
the funnel. If they simply buy more inputs
for the top, things will get better at the
bottom.
2. We see Marketers feeling serious pres-
sure to reduce “cost pers” – Cost per
contact, cost per “lead” for example. Lots
of pressure on cost.
3. At a minimum, instead of better inte-
gration, we see further disconnection
between “brand” thinking and “demand”
activity. There’s even less of a coming
together of these two ideas. Less serious
thinking about integration.
4. And lastly, more than ever, there’s always
too little time – too little time to figure out
what’s the root cause of the problem, too
little time to think about different points
of leverage. Too little time to integrate
plans, investments, and most importantly,
targeting and execution.

In contrast to this, what we see among
our client base of 1,200 enterprise tech
companies, especially with those who are
super fast, is that companies who are out-
performing their market tend to have a more
holistic view of how to pull the different
levers in their marketing toolkit.
They’ve somehow gained a different
perspective than their peers of how to
improve their tactics at an individual level
and to build up the impact of their whole
program.
It was observations of examples like this
that caused us to do an in-depth analysis
to see if we could quantify some of what
was going on to make it more accessible to
larger numbers.
So basically what we are trying to do is clear
away the emotional fog around branding
and demand as completely different, and
try to help more Marketers better see the
power in integrating both the forest and the
trees.

So we built a pretty robust study to look at
3 key questions about what happens when
you integrate Brand and Demand as we see
top performing companies doing. We asked
the data to tell us:
1. What, if any, is the quantifiable impact of
branding on consideration?
2. Can branding cause changes in consider-
ation over time?
3. Does consideration have any effect on
the standard KPIs that matter to demand
gen marketers, specifically, on things like
clickthrough rate?

What do we mean by consideration?
It’s nothing mysterious.

We sell a product called Qualified Sales
Opportunities™
for which we use our
purchase intent data to identify actual deals
taking place and then we do research on
them to discover exactly what’s what in the
decision making process.
Among the questions we ask the buyers
is “which vendors are you considering for
purchase”?
The company’s answer to this question tells
us exactly which companies are considering
for their purchase.
It’s as simple as that.

So we looked at a large number of deals, we
looked at the companies being considered
in them, and we looked at the advertising
that was run to those companies during the
period.
Since this is enterprise technology, the sell
cycle is long and the marketing programs
tend to run for multiple quarters.
What we found is that consistent advertisers
increased their consideration performance
in the deals by 25% versus like companies.
Over the same period, in the same types
of deals, sporadic advertisers generated
some lift when they were running ads, but
significantly less overall.
And the companies not doing brand work
actually saw their performance going down
compared to their peers. They lost ground
against their competition.
This is clear as day. It’s the power of
integrated marketing at work.

While it’s clear that branding impacts
consideration rates in the deals themselves,
can we see an effect of this in the measures
that demand marketers typically rely on?
The answer lies in when you run advertising
to the same people in the same accounts
at the same time that you’re running e-mail
campaigns to them.
Their improving consideration also drives
up their clickthrough rates – their “direct,
measurable engagement with you” – on
average by 22%.

So to better communicate the implications
of what we found, to put it together in one
integrated place, we built this generic model
showing two programs running for a year,
one demand gen only, one with demand
gen plus consistent investment in integrate
branding,
Again, integrated branding means
advertising of various types done to exactly
the same targets – the ones receiving the
email – using the same purchase intent data.
There you see it all together on the right:
the consideration improvement growing
clickthroughs by 22% and then impacting
conversions lower in the funnel, 25% each
step of the way from lead to MQL to SQL.
Until at last, at the opportunity stage, the
result is more than twice the pipeline, all for
a relatively small investment in the right kind
of branding.

To make this super simple for you to use in
your planning, here’s the math we use in our
generic model.
The conversion rates come from two
industry standard sources, Marketo and
Sirius.
The big numbers show the Marketo and
SiriusDecisions averages. The small
numbers in parentheses cover the
improvement in CTR and the 25% lift driven
by consistent, targeted advertising.

Here’s the net-net on how to achieve this.
I like to do it with reference to the new
SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall,
because it covers the critical elements very
well.
The net-net is that consistent advertising,
to the right targets, executed together with
demand gen, is proven to be a really great
way to maximize your outcomes. CTRs up
22%, lower funnel conversion up 25% at
each step, 2X improvement in ROI.
Note that this is not simple Programmatic
volume advertising. This is integrated
advertising done to an audience you’ve
defined really well, an audience that you
target using both technographic and intent
data to take advantage of precise fit and
real, relevant activity.
You use the same data source to integrate
your advertising with your demand gen so
they both reach exactly the same people
– people who you know are consuming
content precisely relevant to what you sell.
When you can do that, you can get a pretty
incredible lift.

There are and lots of phrases and
buzzwords around marketing, but one thing
that is key to this is integrated marketing,
which is really what we are talking about
here. Bedrock Data is a software to
help companies connect and integrate
technologies. One of our common use
cases is if you are using a whole range of
CRM systems and having connected and
consistent data between that CRM system
and your marketing automations. That
background is important as we explain
some of the targeting we have done
successfully in our demand generation
approach.

A nice phrase to tie this all together is
“Brand + Demand.” The most important
profile for us is not size of company, or
demographics, but technographics – what
technologies they have. This makes sense
given our business that we are an
integration. It’s the systems where there
isn’t an easy way to connect the systems
but there is a need to connect them that
makes up our target audience. For example,
it could be a company that has Marketo
and NetSuite, or Hubspot and Microsoft
Dynamics. There is also a lead role which
typically includes a lead marketer for a small
marketing team or a marketing operations
or demand gen role for larger marketing
teams. As we sought out to build brand +
demand programs, we took a cross-channel
targeting approach which included a blend
of technographics and specific accounts.
We looked for people searching on these
integration pairings (i.e. Marketo and
NetSuite), or technographic targeting
through search. We are targeted individual
accounts based on a technographic profile
with the assistance of HG Data. We had
targeted contextual ads to people looking at
content specific to an integration. Other
channels were email and phone based
targeting to the account. In all cases, there
is technographic targeting. In some cases it
is targeting through a specific account, and
in other cases it is based on the context or
content they are consuming online.

We built out a set of integrated creative
and messages across each channel. For
example, the top one is a Facebook ad and
the bottom ad is more of an all-purpose
digital ad across a whole range of
publishers. We thought of this as brand +
demand – meaning that it was important
to us that the Bedrock Data logo was
prominent, that there was a consistency
across mediums with a call to action. But
we didn’t view the KPIs on this around CTRs
or Cost Per Direct Leads, we took a longer
view expectant that through consistent
level of advertising to these accounts, we
thought there would be a view-through
impact and an additional benefit to this level
of advertising beyond just a straight up,
traditional cost-per-lead type of metric.

From a content perspective, we then took
this approach toward the content we were
driving the audience to consume. The
content itself was packaged up as an
expert guide as well as well smaller content
snippets that could be easily consumed
through social media, blog posts, etc. The
foundation for the content was the essence
of what we do – we help people connect
varying systems, namely specific marketing
systems. That became the pillar content
around which we built expert guides. When
we were building out specific targeting and
messaging, we explored things like: “What
might a customer be connecting HubSpot
to and what would be some of the specific
pain points they may be experiencing?” So
the execution was a single content asset,
but it was used as a wrapper towards this
second system.
Here is a more general way to think about
the approach desribed related to content
marketing strategy:
There may be central points of content
strategy around topic and those topics
may be further tailored towards more
specific pain points and/or sub topics.

Here we show a specific example:
If you are talking about HubSpot in your
CRM, there is very specific HubSpot
terminology related to “Powering your ‘Lead
Source Report’ with sales data”. Pardot,
for example, refers to this same thing as a
“Product Lifecycle Report”, so we would
use this specific terminology in an email or
social post that would be speaking to that
specific issue for a very specific audience.

Here another example of testing different
ads:
When marketing a piece of content, would
putting the actual piece of content in that ad
be different than showing say, a male or a
female, and would those results vary based
on the audience?

Here are the results:
This showcases real-life examples of the
notion of view-through or impact beyond
just click-through in an ad. The first example
was a company we were targeting based
on the fact that they had HubSpot and
Microsoft Dynamics. Over the course of
a month, we served 28 different ads to
them across 17 websites, and we got an
inbound phone call from that company.
For all these examples, there are different
ways that company chose to connect with
us. Whether it was picking up the phone,
or a website chat, or an embedded form on
the site, in all cases, a stream of ads were
served up to these companies (via The Big
Willow) and we were able to tie that back to
downstream action and consideration.

To tie this back to the example TechTarget
provided earlier in their presentation (slide
15), we took a look at how the conversion
rates we got compare to those industry
standards. To give you a sense of what is
possible here:
We targeted 673 accounts. A “lead” is
someone who showed engagement,
meaning they registered for one of these
expert guides or engaged through chat
or another form of conversation. We saw
a conversion of 6% there. Relatively small
sample size here, but here you see we are
talking about a 2.5-6x to as much as 12x
versus what you would consider traditional
conversion rates. It is very powerful in terms
of the impact that brand can have on overall
demand metrics – especially when they are
viewed in totality with the real outcomes
being pipeline and new customers from a
target set of accounts that fit your ideal
profile.

In summary, we will also revisit one of
TechTarget’s slides from earlier (slide 16).
Here are 2 wrap-up takeways:
1. The advancements in the SiriusDecisions
demand model are very useful – The
notion of “Target Demand” is where
it all starts. For us, technographics
are very important here to define this.
Further, we look at some combination of
demographics, industry, company size
and other characteristics. Start out with a
target definition – however that my apply
to you.
2. As you work people through the funnel,
an integrated marketing approach is
important – TechTarget has this huge
study and Bedrock has this single case
study, but everything about these two
examples is telling us that an integrated
marketing, cross-channel and/or
brand+demand approach is the one take
and is the one to invest in. You must
have patience with this approach, but
ultimately you will be able to measure the
payback on the strategy. Tools like HG
Data and other sources like TechTarget
and The Big Willow help enable this
approach for your company. 2x is a great
goal to have here to improve the impact
of your efforts. These examples show
that 2x can be a very real number to
achieve.

26
About TechTarget
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driven marketing and sales services that deliver business impact
for enterprise technology companies. By creating abundant,
high-quality editorial content across more than 140 highly targeted
technology-specific websites, TechTarget attracts and nurtures
communities of technology buyers researching their companies’
information technology needs. By understanding these buyers’
content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase
intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales
activities for clients around the world.
TechTarget has offices in Boston, London, Munich, Paris,
San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney.
For more information, visit techtarget.com and follow
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the right to make changes in specifications and other information contained in this document
without prior notice. The reader should in all cases consult TechTarget to determine whether
any such changes have been made. Updated 1/18

How the Right Content and Delivery Strategies Double Demand Generation ROI

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