How much demand does demand-gen really create?
Unlike doctors or engineers, marketing has always carried many unproven, yet accepted assumptions about itself. I’m starting to believe assumptions about demand generation are one of them. If the assumptions about demand-gen are wrong, the revenue potential marketers are missing out on could be high.
The accepted demand-gen assumptions
If you spent at least a month around B2B marketers, you would get the gist of what demand-gen marketing is accepted to be, how it works, and what it’s expected to achieve.
Here are the spoken and unspoken assumptions about demand-gen:
More education, more demand. The biggest reason why people aren’t buying right now is that they lack information and reassurance. Therefore, your job is to make buyers more educated about their problems and needs. You do this by using more webinars, more subject-matter expert LinkedIn posts, and more educational content in general.
In other words, you use a series of rational messages and content over time to make buyers realize they need and want your product.
Become a thought leader for your category. If you do that, buyers will trust you more, you will build rapport with them, and your brand will become buyers’ go-to resource for your category.
Buyers start their buying journey by educating themselves about the problem they’re facing. Your job is then to distribute relevant top-funnel content on channels where buyers do their homework. This content will give your brand a chance to be discovered early, help buyers understand the problems they’re dealing with, and position you as an expert for their problems — all of which should create demand for you.
This can also be serendipitous. Sometimes buyers don’t even know they have a problem, so they won’t go out of their way to research it. But they might randomly come across your content on channels where they spend most of their time (like LinkedIn), and by consuming your content, slowly realize they have an important problem. This realization should create demand for solving the problem.
Demand generation marketing should be about your customer’s problems, or the pains/needs your offer can solve (unlike brand marketing, which focuses on making your brand remembered, known, liked, and trusted). If you control the narrative about the problem, buyers will assume you’re the solution.
Content is the main tool by which demand is created.
DISCLAIMER: Before I dive into my counterpoints, I must note that I am not completely disagreeing with things we all believe about demand-gen! But I will explain why I think they’re overemphasized and don’t tell the whole story of what creates demand.
Whether I’m right or wrong, remember that this is just my opinion.
Counterpoint 1: Demand-gen nurtures existing demand, rather than creating demand from thin air.
When someone says “I create market demand”, my mind goes to a brand like Yeezy. I imagine an uphill battle to make an obscure product become wanted by many. To make a buyer go from “What the hell is this garbage?!” to “I need it now!”
When Adidas Yeezys first launched, most people called Yeezys ugly, outrageous, and overpriced trash.
So how did Kanye West and Adidas create demand for Yeezys? I’ve no idea. This isn’t a Yeezy case study. But I know two things for sure:
Yeezy succeeded in creating demand where demand didn’t exist.
They didn’t use a bunch of rational blogs, podcasts, and webinars to talk people into wanting Yeezys.
For older marketers who may not know what a Yeezy is, here’s an image.
In contrast, B2B demand-gen marketers are not creating demand from thin air. Potential buyers exposed to your educational content already have some demand, otherwise, why would they consume it? If they truly had no demand at all, then they would completely tune out of your educational content. They are swamped with their own responsibilities. If they need your educational content, then that in and of itself is proof that these buyers aren’t completely cold.
To make more sense of this, think about yourself. How much time do you spend consuming educational content about some random category like cybersecurity? Unless you work in that industry, or unless your company plans to buy a cybersecurity product soon — then you probably spend little, or no time at all consuming content about it. That’s perfectly normal. For you to willingly consume that content, you have to be somewhat invested already.
Demand-gen marketers like to think of the market in a binary way. They frame it as a line between “in-market” and “out-market” prospects. Others say it’s “demand creation” vs “demand capture”. But I imagine it as a spectrum. There isn’t a 0 → 1 switch that takes the buyer from “no demand” to “have demand”. It’s a gradual, slow burn. It’s more like the demand evolving from 0 — >1000. If demand is a spectrum, then most prospects your educational content reaches are one foot on the “in-market” side of the spectrum.
This doesn’t mean that you aren’t contributing to creating demand, but it’s not the 0-to-1 story we’ve been taught to believe. A more realistic way to think about B2B demand-gen would be this: ”I know companies like yours often have a need for my solution, but I know you don’t need it today. My job is to stay in front of you until you’re ready to buy so that you don’t buy from my competitor.”
This means you’re nurturing demand, increasing awareness about the demand that already exists, or maybe capturing demand better than before. But saying you’re CREATING demand is a huge stretch.
This isn’t to say educational content doesn’t contribute to demand — it obviously does! But it’s a small factor in the grand scheme of things. Educational content takes care of those who are already invested (have somewhat of demand already), but how do you reel others into your brand? Those who have no problem right now, no need, and haven’t heard of you? That calls for a completely different marketing game than just blasting people with dry-ass educational content. Here’s where thought leadership about your buyers’ categories comes into play. Thought leadership can be a powerful way to grow brand awareness and insert your company in buyers’ daily conversations.
You also need to attract attention and be memorable in other ways. This is why companies like Geico spent millions on their memorable ads and mascots. It’s also why modern SaaS companies like Lavender, ClickUp, and Hockeystack do funny, memorable, and/or creative videos people want to share with others — because buyers who are completely cold don’t need your educational content yet.
Demand-gen should be more open-minded, instead of assuming educational content and thought leadership is the end-all-be-all of marketing. More often than not, the barriers stopping people from buying are not always rooted in a lack of information, they are rooted in other things. Sometimes those things are impossible for marketing to influence, such as a lack of budget, a season of layoffs, new internal priorities emerging, and so forth.
And sometimes, the solutions to creating demand might be grossly different than any kind of content. A prospect trying your product and seeing how amazing it is (PLG, anyone?) might just create more desire to buy than listening to 10,000 of your podcast episodes would.
Counterpoint 2: If people move through the buying journey in known patterns, then by definition, demand already exists.
This is very common in mature B2B categories. If there’s a known formula for how people buy brands in your category (or just your brand), then it’s not about creating demand, it’s about timing when demand is triggered, and being present when it does. If you already know which problems buyers face in each journey stage, if you know what questions they have at every step throughout the entire funnel, and if you know what content will likely convert, then all you’re doing is distributing the content until those windows of relevance happen, and your content becomes very impactful.
I see this as a form of demand capture, although demand capture is often thought of only in the context of bottom-funnel activities that lead to pipeline and won deals.
This takes me back to my personal framing of demand-gen: it’s not about creating demand from thin air — it’s about staying in front of your buyers until they become ready to buy.
This is why you write blogs with SEO for specific keywords. You already expect buyers to start their journey by looking up the problem you just wrote a blog post about, and you want to be discovered on Google when that happens. That’s a smart thing to do. The brands easiest to discover early in the buyer’s journey have a good chance of being bought.
Counterpoint 3: Being a thought leader over indexes on knowledge-based products.
If I’m considering hiring a team of knowledge workers, maybe a law firm, I would be happy that those people are the thought leaders of their field. I would feel confident and even proud seeing them headline an industry event. I know I’m in the right hands. Safe to say, my levels of demand for them would go sky-high.
After all, that’s what I’m paying for. Their knowledge. Their knowledge, confidence, expertise, and subject-matter authority ARE the product.
I wonder if this creates as much demand for other categories where human knowledge isn’t the primary selling point, like SaaS. As a brand marketing play that supports your demand-gen efforts (build trust, establish rapport with buyers, grow awareness, etc.), thought leadership is awesome and essential. But I think its impact on demand is overrated past that point.
Suppose you’re considering buying a MarTech platform called RevenueX…
RevenueX’s founder is a LinkedIn celebrity— is that the main thing that influences you to buy the RevenueX platform?
Does the fact that RevenueX’s CCO speaks at industry events turn you from a “no” to a “yes” on buying RevenueX?
Do you feel more interested in RevenueX after listening to its team’s opinions and industry commentary— or do you feel more interested in RevenueX after experiencing how the product looks, feels like, and what you can achieve with it?
I’ll leave those answers for you.
I’m not saying thought leadership is useless for non-knowledge-based products like SaaS. It’s a great amplifier.
All I’m saying is, if you were to put thought leadership in a vacuum and benchmark it against other drivers of SaaS demand (like for example, PLG motions), then I think thought leadership’s effect on creating demand would be weak in comparison.
Wrapping up
I’ll end this by saying I believe demand-gen suffers from a ‘when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’ problem. It needs more diversity of thought, rather than only following the common formulas down to T.
I can already sense the “Well if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell us what a better way is?” lingering in the air. To tell you the truth, I don’t know a better way yet. But I‘m open to whatever comes next that changes how B2B demand-gen operates.
My name is Haris Spahic (few of you might remember me as “Calvin Blanc”) and I’m a B2B content marketer. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.
P.S. I’m currently open to full-time, remote B2B content marketing opportunities.