Overheard at B2B Marketing Expo: Demand Gen Workshop

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Stefano Iacono
Stefano Iacono Posts: 18 6senser
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Early on day one of the B2B Marketing Expo at ExCel London, we hosted knowledge-hungry demand gen practitioners gathered in 6sense’s VIP Lounge, Club6, for a peer-led roundtable. 

The topics on the agenda centred on: mastering campaigns, measuring data and ROI, plus scaling your demand gen efforts. Don't have time to read the entire recap? Here are the suggested next reads:

Go deeper: Why misaligned marketing KPIs are hurting revenue teams
Go deeper: The perfect guide to lead generation strategy
Go deeper: Revenue technology guide

Here’s what we overheard during the conversations between the demand gen experts. 

Topic One: Measuring Data & ROI

Topic one took attendees straight in at the deep end: measuring data and ROI. Our groups covered:

  • What does success look like and which metrics to track
  • Determining the most effective allocation of your budget 
  • Criteria for selecting accounts for targeted marketing efforts

Measurement, as ever, proved a tricky topic. 

Marketers being measured on marketing sourced metrics alone voiced frustration that the full impact of marketing (particularly brand) wasn’t being seen. As a result they’re oscillating between attribution models, making measurement more guesswork than science.

Meanwhile, issues with GA4 are making it trickier to track campaign conversions. Attempts to hit marketing KPIs were also blamed for creating back and forth between sales and marketing over who had contributed what.

Measurement Fixes 

The fix suggested by some attendees was both teams trying to hit one revenue shared goal. They had seen this approach remove contention with sales while also creating more alignment.

Another smart suggestion to measure marketing’s impact (from a 6sense customer), was using 6sense buying stages to track accounts progression through the buying journey.

Measuring quality of traffic against target audience and filtering out irrelevant traffic (careers page etc) were other top tips.  

Go deeper: Why misaligned marketing KPIs are hurting revenue teams

Topic Two: Mastering Campaigns

The second key topic up for discussion was mastering campaigns, this included:

  • Structuring campaigns
  • The best kinds of content for conversion
  • Deciding the mix between ABM and traditional demand generation

Repurpose and Reuse

The idea of squeezing the most out of content and campaigns was top of mind for most workshop attendees. 

Most teams are looking at what has performed in the past – whether content or campaigns – and reusing and repurposing to get maximum impact. 

This included reproducing the structure of previous campaigns to save time and tweaking messages for specific verticals or personas to hit the target market. 

Making the most of pillar campaign content (guides, reports, research) by repurposing access editorial, events, videos, and social was also seen as essential with seemingly fewer leads up for grabs than usual.

Campaigns centred on getting MVPs up and running and learning from the output. Do we have enough content to cover off the topic (and the personas)? Great, let’s spin up a landing page and use Linkedin, Google ads, and targeted email to drive traffic. 

Jobs to be done included mapping content to the buying journey to fill in any gaps and help both marketing and sales access and use relevant content.

High-Converting Content

In terms of highest-converting content, it wasn’t the type of content (guide, video, webinar etc) that mattered.

Instead, the consensus was that the best content shared unique insights. Whether that’s through new research or having genuine thought leaders providing interesting takes. 

Educational content, aimed at target audiences’ pain points, was much better received than sales pitches masquerading as thought leadership. 

One new user of 6sense had also seen the fruits of sales people using targeted content. Within a week of using 6sense, a salesperson had done account research, found an account’s topics of interest and narrowed it down to the right contact. One email with relevant content later and the account was engaged. 

Go deeper: The perfect guide to lead generation strategy

Topic Three: Scaling Demand Gen

This was one for the tech enthusiasts and process aficionados among the group, topics covered included: 

Adopting new technologies within your current tech stack

  • Balancing long-term growth with the pressure for short-term results in demand gen
  • Scaling demand gen 

One of the main areas up for consideration was: where do you start when you have a niche ICP?

The approach championed by the group was to look at revenue team jobs to be done. All the way from defining your target market, through to closing deals. 

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Get started with as much as you can manage, ideally at least getting to the point where you’re building awareness with your TAM:

  • Define and acquire your target market – building contact and account data
  • Create (achievable) pipeline plans – look at past pipeline, customers, and score your accounts to set realistic targets 
  • Build your reputation in TAM

The further you can get along this journey the better. But it’s smart to get a solid foundation in place with your target market and plan how you’ll influence them before moving to the next steps.

Go deeper: Revenue technology guide

Conclusion

The consensus around the tables was that demand gen teams – and marketers in general – are spread thin.

But our attendees were a savvy bunch. Limited budgets have only led to greater focus on audiences and smarter use of campaigns and content. 

Our only regret was that we didn’t have more time! We’re already looking forward to our next get together for more shared insights, new perspectives, and a bigger, stronger network of demand gen practitioners to lean on for advice.

We’ll see you there.

For a great read on the state of marketing and B2B revenue teams today, check out our report, The State of B2B Revenue in the Age of Intelligence

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