If your tech firm is new, or is entering a new category, you’re anxious to start lead generation. In my experience, before launching any B2B lead generation efforts, building awareness comes first. With limited awareness, even a great digital marketing campaign asking a person to do something important can miss the mark. Let’s look at how awareness built one person at a time factors into lead generation.
Take a real-world example we can all relate to. You’re in the market for a car, and suddenly you notice car ads everywhere you look. Those ads were there all along. You just didn’t notice them in the barrage of advertising we’re all subjected to daily, but you probably know the brands from a sum of prior advertising. Occasionally, a superbly creative (or annoying) campaign gets through even if we’re not interested. When we’re ready to decide on something we want, we start paying more attention.
A right person, not random people
Marketers work extremely hard to develop great content, whether in written, spoken, graphic, video, or other formats. It’s discouraging when that content doesn’t seem to be getting through – especially if you’re paying for it.
If it were only about attention, everyone would be creating viral posts. Why do posts with videos of puppies, car sing-alongs, laughing babies, and other light-hearted material instantly go viral? They make a low-risk emotional connection with one person first. That person amplifies the content by sharing it in their networks. If others connect emotionally, they amplify it too. Soon, a viral post can be in front of thousands or millions of people.
But, are they the right people?
Most viral posts don’t ask for any action beyond viewing and sharing. Who doesn’t love puppies, or singing, or babies? Low-risk, low-cost decisions can reach a lot of random people quickly. Your B2B lead generation campaign is asking a specific type of person to decide on an investment significant to their business – and yours. If you haven’t established a need and prepared that individual to decide, they won’t.
Your audience and AIDAS stages
Most B2B audiences are relatively small – perhaps tens of thousands of people nationwide. Defining your positioning and your audience is critical to finding one person who decides in your favor. You need way more than attention; you should be building awareness.
There’s an industry-standard marketing model for how people engage and decide about your firm and your product or service: AIDAS. Each person thinks about their decision in stages:
Awareness: Who are you? Why do you exist? What do you stand for?
Interest: What do you do, and how is it different from my other choices?
Desire: I like your firm, and I’ll consider what you offer when I’m ready.
Action: I’m ready to try or buy your product, let’s talk about specifics.
Satisfaction: I’m ready to share my personal experiences about you.
These decisions are intensely personal. The first two stages, awareness and interest, are all about unanswered questions. This is where someone learns about your brand, your team, your vision, and your offerings. The next phases depend on timing, and in a long sales cycle stages can be separated by months. Fully answering the questions and watching for someone who indicates desire affirms the right alignment between positioning, audience, and campaigns.
More than one awareness train
Classic discussions of lead generation draw the digital marketing process as a funnel: impressions, clicks, leads, and acquisitions. Teams measure these variables and work on creating tenths of percentage point changes in conversion rates from one phase to the next. For more leads, you can improve your call-to-action (CTA), or you can widen the top of the funnel by creating more impressions and clicks.
Funnels work when awareness exists in a large enough audience that is not yet saturated. Paid digital marketers want to understand what percentage of an audience they’ve reached and if incremental spend upholds the funnel percentages. Ineffective campaigns have often skipped building awareness, or don’t understand their audience well enough. In those scenarios, funnel behavior is more serendipitous than causal.
The small B2B campaign audience is a challenge. These individuals are often more experienced and need more information before acting. Think about it: if I offered you 50% off services today, but you had zero idea who I was or what I had done for others, what would you do? If you want those services right now, you might do more research on me first. If you don’t need those services, or you’re happy with your current supplier, it’s just noise and you move on.
A better metaphor in building awareness is a train system, where people enter and exit at stages. A person rides your awareness train, and competitive awareness trains, before they get to the interest stage. They may start out on yours, or your competitor’s. They then select the right interest trains for their need, again from yours and competitors. When they get to the desire stage, they’ve formed a short list, and you want to be on that before asking for a sale.
Aligning campaigns across stages
Only when you’re sure you’ve got one right person to the desire stage should you start driving action stage campaigns. Using early access or beta customers during a product launch is a great idea. It affirms your story versus the journey someone took to get there.
Summarizing, here’s what a B2B lead generation effort should look like:
- Define your positioning and your audience crisply
- Create messaging, stories, and KPIs for each AIDAS stage
- Launch and test awareness and interest campaigns early
- When someone indicates desire, validate their audience match
- Replicate desire campaigns matching that person’s journey
- Bring up action campaigns focused on “I want this now”
Building awareness first pays off later with effective action campaigns. Don’t worry that you’re not reaching masses of people – worry about reaching the right people, one person at a time.
What’s your lead generation challenge? Find out how we can help your tech firm or agency with a messaging architecture, market and audience definition, competitive analysis, campaign strategy, and analytics that can help your B2B marketing team be more effective.