B2B Demand Generation vs Performance Marketing: What Actually Works?

Maelien:
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Maelien.

Louis:
And I’m Louis. And today we’re diving into one of those debates that seems to flare up every couple of weeks on LinkedIn — demand generation vs performance marketing. Or, to put it another way, brand marketing vs direct response.

Maelien:
It’s one of those polarising topics, isn’t it? You don’t have to scroll far to see someone bigging up their side and trashing the other – with plenty of arguments following in the comments.

And the question we always ask ourselves is whether this is all for engagement. 

If we were doing this for engagement, we’d pick a side and lean in hard – but because we’re more concerned with transparency, we have to focus on the truth. 

The problem isn’t with which side is right it’s with the fact that there’s a fence dividing them in the first place.

Louis:
If you do 100% demand gen, your marketing team’s like a football team with no strikers. You’re doing a lot of build-up play but nobody’s there to put the ball in the net. 

And if you do 100% performance marketing, you’ve got strikers but nothing else – nobody creating the opportunities to capitalise on. Either way, it makes winning so much harder.

Maelien:
First off, let’s talk about why the big global brands can lean so heavily into brand campaigns and still see results.

Because that’s often where the debate starts, someone points to Coca Cola or McDonald’s or Apple and can easily find a piece of marketing that’s brand- first.

And the reason they can do this is pretty simple. If you see a Coke ad, chances are you’ll be near a shop selling Coke that same day. 

McDonald’s is the same – you’re never far from a drive-thru. 

And Apple have built a fan base so loyal that just telling them a new product exists is enough to get queues outside stores.

The key point here is that brand advertising is direct response – because they’re all already a household name.

When you’ve got that kind of brand awareness and activation, you only need a much smaller nudge for people to take action.

And that’s what most SMEs in B2B don’t have – we’re starting from a relative standstill.

And that’s why it’s dangerous for smaller brands to copy the big ones. We can’t copy-paste their playbook, because it won’t work.

Louis:

Now I just want to quickly cover category maturity to illustrate this point. 

There’s a great book called Blue Ocean Strategy — by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne — which basically says there are two types of markets. Blue oceans and red oceans.

Red oceans are crowded and competitive, there’s plenty of market demand but you’re fighting against lots of competitors for the same customers. 

And then Blue oceans markets are the opposite. Where you create a new category, and competition is irrelevant because you’re making the rules as you go.

In a red ocean, where the market’s mature and competitive, performance marketing plays a bigger role because you need to capture demand that’s already there as efficiently as possible.

But in a blue ocean, you’re creating a new category, so the product or service doesn’t exist yet – and you’ve got no demand to capture, so you’ve got to generate it yourself, which makes brand awareness and activation critical. 

Most B2B companies are somewhere in between. That’s why both demand generation and performance marketing have to work together.

Maelien:
So this leads really nicely into talking about something we’ve seen first-hand time and time again. 

When we’re working with a new client, one of the first things we check is how many monthly branded searches they’re getting organically. 

If it’s 2,000 or more, and they’ve got a ballpark budget of around five grand a month, we know we can almost always turn their ads around even if performance hasn’t been great in the past.

And that’s not because we’ll just pile spend into branded keywords, we kinda see that as a cop-out, and it’s something a lot of performance marketing agencies get a bad rep for doing.

It’s actually because branded search is a signal of brand awareness and affinity.

If people are already searching for you by name, that shows you that you have a level of brand awareness and positive affinity.

And also that there are a lot more people out there who know you, like you, trust you and are on the edge of being brand-activated. 

Which means that the opportunity is ripe for ads.

Louis:
When we talk about this internally, we call it “tapping brand equity”.

Let’s try and illustrate how this works using a metaphor. 

Imagine your brand is an empty barrel when you start out. And by brand, we don’t mean logos or colour palettes. We mean what the business stands for, how people feel about it, what they’d say about you unprompted to someone else.

As the business grows, and more people know who you are – that barrel starts to fill up with awareness. 

And people are either going to have a positive or a negative experience with the brand. 

How much that barrel fills is your brand awareness. And what it fills with – positive or negative – is going to be your brand affinity. And it’s going to determine whether the content will be sweet or sour. If you’ve got a nice full barrel, you’ve got loads of brand awareness and the content is sweet – you’ve got positive brand affinity. And that creates brand equity you can tap with performance marketing.

Maelien:

And here’s the bit that’s so easy to forget — a lot of what fills that barrel never shows up in your dashboards. 

It’s happening in what people call the “dark funnel”. 

Conversations in Slack communities, word of mouth, WhatsApp group chats, someone recommending you over a coffee. 

The stuff that’s pretty much completely invisible to reporting and attribution software.

Now we’re big advocates of setting up your conversion tracking properly to help with optimising your ads and for more insightful reporting – 

but  this is a big part of the reason why you can never take your performance marketing data as the full truth, at face value.

It’s also a big part of the reason that some businesses can launch ads and see great results quickly and for others it takes more time or creates the perception that ads don’t work. 

Naturally both of these scenarios come with the caveat that the ads have been set up properly with a solid strategy behind them.

Louis:
So where does this leave us? For me, it comes back to this notion of using a promise or using an offer.

At the extremes, an offer-led approach is all about creating irresistible deals — where you’re shooting for snap decisions based on the offer being “too good to refuse”. 

These are great for short-term wins, but it’s often really hard to turn that into lifetime value. 

Whereas on the flip side the promise led approach is all about speaking directly to your ICP and demonstrating a strong level of alignment by promising something they care about. 

You will naturally encourage higher quality and longer term enquiries, but it can be hard to get a decent conversion rate and push the volume of enquiries up.

The trick is to leverage the bit that makes both of them work. 

The first is in really thinking about what your ICP is looking for – what they need help with, what challenges are they facing? What emotions are they going for? What past negative experiences might they have had they won’t get with you?

And the second is in how to convey that in content on your landing page. Using the ‘show don’t tell’ principle and also providing value in your conversion mechanism.

Because you usually need a foot in the door. 

It’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to get a long-term client from a one-shot visit. But you can make them more likely to enquire. 

Maelien:

There’s this concept called the sales ladder where you think about how a client might graduate up through your services.

 So for us at Web Marketer, it might start with our £99 power hour consultation, followed by an ad account audit, followed by an initial three months of our advertising services, followed by a longer term relationship.

Naturally the sales ladder will be different in your case. But the principle’s the same. 

Give people a way to move up step by step without compromising your value. 

Be careful about asking for too much on the first interaction, it’s like proposing on the first date.

And when you get that mix right, brand and performance stop working in silos and start to work together.

Louis:

I remember running a campaign for a university – to recruit undergrad students.

They gave us this powerful video of a student who’d woken up disabled after a car accident, and then showed their story of starting to play wheelchair basketball, playing for the university team and then going on to represent Team GB.

On the surface it looked like a brand play — pure storytelling, with no hard call to action. But in performance terms it was unbelievable. Less than a penny for each video view with the cheapest cost per enquiry of any ad we’d seen before.

And it also really nicely positioned the culture and brand values of the university – so what they stood for.

This goes back to Maelie’s point about the two sides playing nicely together. It’s a great example of how powerful storytelling – which is usually a brand thing – can really heavily influence results from a performance perspective.

Maelien:
That brings us to one of the most controversial topics in performance circles – boosting posts. 

Boosting social posts is something that a lot of performance marketers frown upon.

Because if you look at it from a purely data-led perspective, you’re paying for engagement and there’s no tangible commercial value.

But actually boosting posts can be really effective.

In Demand Generation, you hear a lot about optimising content for native engagement. So not worrying about sending people to your website and converting.

Focusing only on what happens directly on the post.

The idea that better content means more meaningful engagement, which has a longer term benefit.

So from this perspective – what’s the harm in boosting posts? 

Our take on it is that there’s no harm in boosting posts. But we would definitely advocate for doing in a way that gets the most out of it.

So we’d suggest an always on strategy to be running in your ads. 

And you can build retargeting audiences of anyone who’s engaged with your page or your content. 

That way, anyone who engages with your posts, boosted or not can be added to your always on campaigns.

you increase the number of brand touchpoints by doing this too – and we all know it takes a lot of those before people make any kind of purchasing decision – especially in B2B.

To add to that, the new LinkedIn Thought Leader ads take this even further.

So with Thought Leader ads, you take the top-performing organic posts from employees or influencers, and boost them from your company page.

 So it still looks like it came from the person who posted the content but it’s got the benefit of having the ad spend and infrastructure behind it. 

So content that looks native, but with the leverage of also being an ad.

Louis:
I think that’s a good point to end on – so let’s look at the takeaways –

• First, brand and performance aren’t enemies — they’re teammates. Lean too far into one on it’s own and it makes it much harder to win.
  
• Don’t copy the big consumer brands. Their distribution and awareness make brand ads work like direct response. In B2B, you’ve got to build and capture demand at the same time with the same amount of TLC applied to both.
  
• Think about your market maturity. If you’re in a red ocean, you’ll need strong performance tactics to capture demand. If you’re in a blue ocean, you’ve got to create it. Most of us sit somewhere in the middle, which means we’ve got to find a balance of both worlds.
  
• Use branded search as a signal to gauge brand equity. A full barrel of positive awareness makes your performance campaigns work harder. Remember that a lot of that awareness builds in the “dark funnel”.
  
• Promise vs offer isn’t a binary choice. While we’re not saying that you always need an offer – the blend of the two principles is really important. Demonstrating you’re the right fit for your ICP and giving people a reason to act now, or at least not making the first step too much of a commitment.
  
• And finally, don’t underestimate softer brand tactics. A powerful story can convert way better than direct calls to action 
• And finally feel free to boost organic-first posts as long as you’re building retargeting pools or using them as Linkedin Thought Leader ads.

Maelien:

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