Re-balancing B2B brand & demand generation

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That's a bit shit, isn't it? It's not a good start then. We can edit this bit, can't we? Edit that out. Right, Peter Piper picked a pepper. So how would you normally start a podcast? No, don't need to cringe, I can't do it.

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So last time we talked about what the future of MQLs is. We talked a lot about the fact that the MQL is no longer necessarily viable as a marketing metric on its own. We didn't necessarily talk about what's next. I'm worried, James. I'm worried. I feel like we're going backwards. Well, a lot of the narrative is about why marketing needs to be almost less measurable. Well, that's at least how it comes across to me.

This is whole concept of brand being back and brand as we all know is notoriously difficult to measure. And that to me seems like an attempt by the marketing industry and the people within it to move back to a system where marketing is less accountable and less measurable for the results they deliver. And I think we've come too far to ruin all that hard work and all that progress. I'm worried the

the industry is going to disappear up its own ass again like it was, like it used to behave 20 years ago. So I think, yeah, there's this big conversation that's happening at the moment. Brand versus performance. Brand is back. What does that really mean? For me, brand never really went away. But I think as you've just talked about and as we talked about in the last podcast, there's a lot of

People now that are saying the old playbook doesn't work, the old playbook being gated content, form submissions, nurture leads, BDR follow-up. There's some truth in that, And it still works. We know it still works. it probably is a case of diminishing returns for many. Most buyers or prospects are wise to it now and they don't necessarily want to give up their email to it.

for any piece of content, they're a bit more discerning, but they still do. And that's because they know they're going to get hounded by BDR as soon as they give up their email address and they're never going to be able to get them off the phone. So it has to be really valuable. Nevertheless, lot of marketers are seeing their numbers diminish and that's a concern. And obviously whenever something almost reaches the end of its life cycle, something new comes along.

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within marketing, there's an endless, endless kind of message to, to marketeers to reinvent themselves, to reinvent the wheel, to look at new things. and it's, you know, it's, it's a challenge because you don't want to miss out, but equally you can't be distracted by every new initiative, every new concept, every new idea. You've got to be rightfully really skeptical and you've got to choose, choose the right things to, focus on if you're going to make fundamental changes. I think,

There's a lot of questions being asked right now and I think the big concern I've got is there some loud noises, some very prominent experts and some big agencies. Some that tip your hat too, got a bit of respect for but this whole kind of brand is back thing, we've seen it with velocity partners who again, think they've produced some great content over the years. I'm sure they won't be too concerned.

about our opinions, to be honest. And the other three people watching this podcast will probably disagree or agree with us, who knows. But I think there's a lot of marketeers that will be worried about this brand is back. It's also looking back, isn't it? That's the problem with it. There's this whole next big thing in marketing, trying to take advantage of the newest trend, etc., which of course is the wrong thing to do. But it's equally wrong, I think, to revert back to the old way of

doing things and thinking that brand is, you know. Well, let's just touch on what that old way was. know, sadly, a little bit more seasoned than you in terms of age. I remember the days where we used to hire agencies that would come in and run very expensive brand projects. And it would be like the example that we talked about earlier where, you know,

There's these 3D mailers that are sent out in the post. big fucking balloon pops out of a box. Demonstrating your brand values and your brand position. We don't need to go back to that. We really don't. think Velocity Partners seem to have latched onto this article that I think it was John Miller, the ex-Marquetto guy wrote, and in that he'd said that marketers now should apportion 40 % of their budget to brand.

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but what he didn't say, but what they've kind of intimated is that should be brand only positioning campaigns, which I think is a valid attempt at saying back to creative, back to creative campaigns. Talk about your values, not try and connect anything to your services or what you deliver or your expertise. You just put stuff out there. and it, you you're not particularly concerned if it generates any results because it's creating, you know,

Awareness for the brand. It's helping build the brand over the long term. But to continually do those kind of brand-only campaigns for such a long period to have an impact is a very expensive way of working. And I just don't think where we've come to now in terms of getting the board more on board with marketing, because we've got actual tangible measures that can demonstrate impact, they're going to settle for this, don't worry about MQLs, don't worry about reporting.

We're just going to do these brand only campaigns and you're just going to have to take a leap of faith that it's actually having some impacts because over time it will build your brand. For some organizations, I think that has merit. think for bigger organizations that actually have the deep pockets, but also the purpose that I think these brand campaigns are intended to show. So if you look at an organization like, I don't know, let's say Atos.

I'm not even saying at us. I'm thinking more B2C. I say hello fresh Yeah, so they're their vision their mission is to improve people's quality of life and and save the planet. That's a valuable Purpose which I think a brand campaign would be useful in that world to go and deliver but when you're talking a 50 to 120 person IT company in Sheffield like

Yeah, building your brand is not building your brand based upon a purpose message. You know, we want to change the industry to make IT professionals more valuable within the IT world or whatever it may be. It's going to just. Yeah, it's bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think if you work in a big company, you're managing the marketing program or you're managing the brand. It's almost like a lot of the hard work has already been done. brand's been built and been established and now.

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You're almost the custodian of that brand, maintaining its awareness. Reinforcing it. Reinforcing it, making sure it's still visible, has its place in the market. And I think that's, it is a far easier task than working in a small company that isn't well known. You've got to build that brand and you've got, in parallel, you've got to generate, you've got to generate leads, you've got to show tangible impacts through any investment in marketing and show how that is having an impact on revenue.

And it's very, very difficult to do both with a stretch budget when you're under pressure for generating results and demonstrating results. Difficult to put 40 % of that stretch budget into campaigns which are from the start not linked to revenue in a meaningful way. Yeah. So I think brand isn't back. I think it's never gone away. I think it's always been important. I think

It does feel like an attempt from the creative industry to try and wrestle back some kind of place in the marketing world, which, know, let's face it, marketeers have progressed into being more focused on technology, more focused on data, more focused on the science than the art, But I'm seeing quite a lot of creative types and brand managers and, you know,

all sort of jumping on this bandwagon again. I think this brand is back notion needs to be really well defined. If you're to spend 40 % of your budget on brand, then be really, really clear about what that means. And let's not disappear our own ass again like we were 20 years ago. Like you said, think brand has never gone away. The article that we referenced earlier, which we'll put in the show notes, talks about how your webinar is your brand.

that your infographics are your brand, your social media is your brand, your blog content is your brand, your content marketing in general is your brand. In which case the question is, people are doing all of that, aren't they? So what have they got to do differently? Just focus that on non-related content about their purpose?

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That's not necessarily how you build a brand, it? I guess I understood it to be more, you've got a central, I think they call it a galvanizing story. You're just seeding that story, that positioning all the way through everything that you deliver, which again, that's not anything new, is it? think most mature-ish organizations would have a positioning and then would try and reinforce that through their content. I think what they're really saying is that brand is back.

in terms of the key measurable. You know, if you think about it, brands always been there and it has, as you just said. What they're saying is let's shift the focus away from MQLs, which is what the article says really, and start measuring brand as the core metric for a marketing function. And to be fair, I don't think it does say that. I think it says what we said on the last podcast, which is you've got to do both. You've got to try and measure brand. You've got to try and measure

lead generation in siloed and it does say performance marketing and brand together is what is powerful and don't think we disagree with that. certainly don't. No, no. But like you said, I don't think that's anything new. it's the other signs within it that just smack of old school kind of brand. It's this talk about emotional decision making. It's suggesting that as always, as people have been saying for

20, 30 years, B2B is boring, it's too conservative, we need to spice up, it needs to be more creative. Tapping into that emotional part of the decision making process, talking about people, again, it's nothing really new, that is something that's been around for a long, long time, a topic that's been covered to death. think for me, brand building, where we've seen the most successful brands being built, and I think in the Velocity Partners Manifesto,

They use HubSpot as an example, which obviously close to our heart. They're in a fortunate position where all the hard work has been done to build that brand. They didn't do it through brand only campaigns. did it through content. They did it through inbound marketing and they did it through thought leadership content. Absolutely. They also built a brand by creating a huge ecosystem of partners that would promote their brand. They also did it by having a very, very extensive outbound operation. A team of BDRs going out and hitting the

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banging the phones and pressing the flesh and generating lots of opportunities on the back of it. But most importantly, the reason why they've built such a great brand is because the product is fucking great. Yes, all of that obviously has helped build their brand, but we'd be being a little bit unfair if we didn't also mention the fact that they were certainly in the early days driving this inbound agenda. It was a purposeful agenda to change the way that Optimus done. I don't see that.

necessarily as brand. think that's an opinion. could say he's brand. think it's a purpose. You know, they could see that the when they when they first set out that the old way of marketing outbound primarily the bullshit world that you talked about earlier. Yeah. Was wasn't fit for purpose anymore. And they very much invented and drove the inbound agenda. Yeah. And that I think is brand purpose. Is that thought leadership? Is that opinion? Is that brand? I think it's brand because it's purpose driven marketing, isn't it? It's

We believe the industry should change. We are the spearheads of that change. And they did a lot of promotion around that change in the way that the industry, they did a lot of promotion in the way that the industry should change. they did it through thought leadership. They did it through, but that was the mechanism for brand marketing. wasn't... Yeah, thought leadership is basically challenging conventional wisdom around a particular approach and then coming up with an alternative argument.

And that's what they did very well. So, so that's probably where we disagree. That's galvanizing story. Well, their galvanizing story is all around in bad marketing. Yeah. But it's still for me, it's more, well, I think. that did help to develop their brand. Yeah, absolutely. It was their flag poles and it was their, their fucking stake in the ground. Yeah. That's what the position of everything around. things impact a brand. I think just to say that you're going to spend 40 % of it on,

brand building activity, if that activity is largely brand only campaigns that aren't measurable, and going back to balloons bursting out of a box, that would really, hopefully that's not what's been suggested. I don't think it is. I hope so. But I think there's so many ways to build a brand. Obviously with HubSpot going back to their example, just the way the people are within HubSpot, the interactions, the experience you get from working with them.

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That sets them apart. Everything's very consistent. Everything's very bound together. And it's those overall experiences with a brand that builds that trust. And ultimately, it's about trust. It's all about trust. As one of our clients said many moons ago, the benefit that we had to them through building brand through thought leadership was that when they walked into a room, people already knew who they were.

And that's way more powerful than a form submission on an ebook download. It's way more powerful than MQLs. I want to think of it that way. So I think kind of strangely the way we started this discussion, we were actually largely agree in the fact that... Well, I think my main concern is just not going back to how it was when a lot of creative agencies dictated how we should go to market and it was...

brand building campaigns that weren't measurable, that had no impact. they were, because I think just by its very notion and a campaign has a window, has a start and an end. And a big fucking hundred grand bill. Yeah. And that's not, if you're just going to do isolated campaigns, how's that building a brand long term? So going back to that scares me. Hopefully that's not the underlying.

tone that's, that's, well, that's not what the underlying message is. think if we can agree that, the traditional WACA form up on your website, put some half decent content behind it, get someone to submit that form, get a BDR to follow up and then you generate an MQL and SQL, cetera. That traditional cycle of lead generation and follower is or shouldn't be any longer the only game in town. Brand should play a much bigger part of

a marketing team and an organization's focus from a budgetary perspective but also from a measurement perspective. I think we agree with that. I certainly do. If we both agree that brand should play a much bigger part of the way that organizations measure their marketing activity and a much bigger part of the budget, but that it shouldn't be isolated in the fact that we're going back to an unmeasurable or very difficult to measure and therefore not measured metric.

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then the question is how do we measure brand and also what replaces the MQL if we were in agreement that the MQL is no longer an effective measure? Are we in agreement that's the case? I don't know.

I think it's still an effective measure. think the way...

the MQLs are generated is the concern. think submit a form, hand over your email address, connect your email address to your IP address, create a contact record, and you can track any engagement thereafter. Pass that to the BDR team, spam them, cold call them. That mechanism still

works, if you want to say that, but it is diminishing returns. So it does need to change that, as they say, the playbook that needs to change. And I think what people are struggling with is what it changes to. think that's slightly different to is the MQL still a viable metric. think to answer that question, you've got to think about what we're actually trying to achieve as marketers. in fairness, the article that we wrote was

quite clear on the fact that the problem with all the marketing nerds, as it put it, and the big sheets of data is that it dehumanizes the experience for a prospect. Now, MQLs are numbers in an Excel spreadsheet rather than actual human interactions with a brand, and that dehumanizes it. So think of what we're looking to achieve is engagements with individuals that are potential buyers.

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of what we're trying to sell, then ultimately we shouldn't necessarily be looking at MQLs as that measure alone because typically that's just through form submissions. But there could be thousands of engagements with a brand that don't go through that form submission. It might be that they've read a blog, but when was the last time you reported on blog? Well, I think that's the problem. The MQL is just easier to report on, it? We've created an ebook and we've

put that behind a form and we've had 100 people sign up to it. And marketing has done a great job pat on the back or it could be a webinar, it could be something else. think some of the more engaging content now is harder to measure. So there has been this talk around the subscription model. if your content is so great and you're pushing it out on a regular basis and there's a variety of content,

you start to request more subscriptions so people become members of a community that consumes content. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. And that demonstrates further engagement than just someone that's stumbled across your website, grabbed your ebook because it's got a couple of good stats in it. And then if you were to call them two hours later, they wouldn't remember which website they'd been on. I think... It also from a practical level, it takes out that...

stupid thing whereby if a person within your audience or your membership wants to go and download another piece of content two months later, they need to resubmit their information that you've already got. It's a flawed model in practical reasons as well. If we've got subscription, we've already got their information. We know when they're going to visit a piece of content online. We don't need to get them put that barrier in the way and get them to submit another form. So I think this subscription model is a really clever one in terms of

in terms of marketing reporting, because what we're looking at then is the number of people that have chosen to receive ongoing material and then engage with it. What I don't think that does though is, if you went to a business leader and said, well, marketing and performing really well, our subscriptions have grown 20 % this quarter, the first question is going to be, so what impact does that have?

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On sales. On sales. that's always going to, as much as we try and say brand is back and everyone should be thinking about brand equity and the value of the brand, that is always going to be a question that's asked. There's no getting around that. There was no education that the marketing team can do or anyone can do that is going to convince a business leader that they're going to invest in marketing purely for brand or, you know, invest in marketing and not expect to see a measurable return.

that you're seeing in terms of marketing needs the new CMO, the different type of CMO that cat actually convinced the CMO. that this is the right way to go. Brand is the way forward. I think that's going to be quite a unique individual that's able to do that in today's world, unless they're working for a big established brand.

We're looking at a new set of metrics that are more relevant to engagement and are part of a connected suite of metrics that are all sort of part of the same mix within sales and marketing and even service. back to rev ops again. So there's another dimension to this that I wanted just to throw in.

I think some of the organizations we've worked with over the years, we've seen real success when there hasn't been such a massive focus on MQLs. That's always been there. And that's an important metric to show progress. where they've had faith in the model, faith in the approach, and they've consistently demonstrated their expertise through thought leadership on a continuous basis.

And they've done it well and they've got better and better and better at doing it. I've, we've seen maybe over two, three years how that's changed their position in the marketplace to become a trusted brand. Yeah. It's not made them a household name, in their particular niche, are seen as the go-to company, seen as the experts. And I think when it comes to brand and you talk about emotion, talk about

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rational decisions. think ultimately, when you're thinking about people who make these decisions, the main things I've worried about are from an emotional perspective, if I hire this firm, if I buy this product, am I going to fucking lose my job? Is it going to be a decision I'm going to regret? Or on the flip side, is this company going to make me look great? Am I going to be really successful as a result of working with them? is that going to lead to promotion?

Those are the emotions really that we're dealing with. those emotions are based upon the capability and expertise of that organization. Absolutely. Which is demonstrated through their thought leadership, demonstrated through their experience of the people that they interact with, through the products that they're evaluating. But it's not based upon we're a brand which really values sustainability in this brand purpose driven stuff and we want to make the world a

better place. It's all about trust. It's all about building trust. think creative can come in at the awareness stage to get attention. We've seen some interesting campaigns and we've been involved with certain companies that have tried those kind of creative runs through all of this though, doesn't it? Cause you wouldn't buy from a company if they were telling the right story. If they had a shit website, you'd think of that. Yeah. Equally if they had a good website and what they were talking about was also NAF. So it's a, it is a, it

It's a combination. Creation should run as a thread through everything. think, I think let's sum up because we want to, yeah, some, let's wrap this up. So I think key takeaways for me, brand, brand is not back. It's always been there. However, I do worry this, this sort of rhetoric at the moment has been played out. It does feel like there's an agenda to get creative back on the table and everyone focusing on.

creative campaigns and that's fine. Whether it's 40 % of your budget, I'm not sure. That seems like a stretch unless you're a big brand already and it makes sense because let's face it, someone like EY, PwC, they don't do lead generation. People know who they are, they don't need to. So to building their brand, makes sense. But if you're a smaller company and it's not well known, you've got to be more direct. So I think brand is great.

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let's not return to those horrible days of balloons popping out of a fucking box. That's the key thing for me. Whether Velocity Partners, whether other branding agencies, whether other experts in the industry are meaning that or not, I don't know. I get the sense there was a little bit of that. not. That's just being a skeptic. We're trying to take focus away from the MQL and put that on brand. What we're saying is keep focus on MQLs and increase focus on brand. And I think that we can finish on.