Loading

The Case for Early Demand

There's More to Engagement Than a Form Completion

Making a case for the value of "early demand" indicators

Consider this common marketing scenario: a B2B brand is looking to run a series of webinars introducing new products to engage and convert prospective customers to buy.

In planning that campaign, an important question arises about qualifying target customers: what constitutes an acceptable level of engagement?

More specifically, do you accept or reject any prospect who won't fill out a complete (and often laborious) form to attend your online events? Or do you want to keep them in your prospect list for future engagement if you have partial data short of a fully completed form?

The answer to the latter question seems like an obvious yes. However, the typical practice in marketing today is an all-or-nothing approach: anything less than a form completion ends the 'conversation' with a prospect, who may be deemed as unqualified even if there has been engagement with a message, landing page, or related content in some fashion but did not follow through to the final step of completing the form.

In our view, that's a mistake because it leaves lots of opportunities (aka, marketing targets and potential revenue) on the table.

You can capture many other engagement indicators from those prospects and use them to drive marketing outreach that could ultimately lead to "conversion" – even if they need many engagements to complete or never complete the form.

The Evolving Sales Process

This eBook makes the case that you can and should continue to engage those who show signs of interest but don't complete a form.

Let's review relevant data points that support this thinking:

These two figures speak to a complex, prolonged sales process. They make it seem abrupt to reject a prospect who decides not to complete a form, especially when the form is gating access to the first piece of content they receive.

The typical buyer's consumption of 13 content elements over a nearly six-month period before a purchase speaks to the need to nurture those buyers. Walking away from those who don't complete a form flies in the face of sound marketing practice and building relationships to drive revenue.

Our experience in marketing to B2B buyers over more than a decade shows that the more substantial the requirements you impose in the qualification process, the fewer users will meet those requirements. The most significant number of users will engage at the most basic level, a subset will move forward to the next level of engagement, and so on through the campaign, with the pool of prospects becoming ever smaller.

Finally, there's this point to consider:

This percentage paints an unflattering picture of the quality and utility of the typical form (or is it the marketing message, the targeting, or something else?). The picture becomes more unflattering if you consider that many marketers have forms that perform at such a low level but still throw out the 97+% of prospects that didn't convert on the first try.

This draconian approach requires you to massively increase the universe of names you target, which means more cost, time, and work.

Do you have the luxury of leaving that potential revenue on the table or significantly expanding your marketing costs, all because of the outcome with a single form that's designed to help a sales team more than the marketing prospect?

Buying Committees Expand

Evolving B2B buying behaviors have created an added challenge for marketing and engagement: a customer is typically not a single person but a group of individuals that collectively make buying decisions. The typical buying group for a complex B2B product includes 6 to 10 decision-makers. The relative influence of any one individual in the group shrinks as the size of the buying group increases, so a single form completion becomes less and less valuable.

When your marketing needs to reach, or at least influence, six to 10 people, it's illogical to render a definitive, exclusionary decision about the buying group or even just one member of the group based on one member's response (or lack of response) to one piece of content. Consider the possible matrix you need to manage: 13 pieces of content over 5+ months, involving six to 10 people. That's a lot of content, many communications, and a lot of nurturing. Making snap decisions based on a single response seems quite abrupt in that context.

Plus, consider that information sharing within a buying group makes it possible for the various members to gain access to gated information without ever completing a form. That makes it especially important to have visibility into the overall engagement from a company or domain to understand the buying group and its readiness to pull the trigger.

Insights from Engagement Data

When you're building, expanding, or nurturing a marketing database, a healthy body of engaged contacts requires ongoing care and feeding, not rejection at the first hint of resistance or hesitation.

The good news is that with today's marketing automation stack, we have the foundation to provide that care and feeding and to prevent losing loads of valuable prospects from the campaign funnel, provided we don't choose to eliminate those prospects.

Now we'd like to share what we consider the optimal way to use data on engagement that precedes a form fill, which we call early demand.

Marketers must be able to identify a lead's location in the funnel and then engage based on the context of that location. That means marketers can benefit from information on the activities, even before a form has been completed.

Early demand involves capturing, and utilizing, many data points that are generated based on the marketing target's behavior:

  • Opens of email messages and clicks within those emails
  • Page impressions and clicks on digital ads
  • Views and clicks on social media ads

Our homegrown approach to early demand: tracking clicks generated from emails targeted to our database members. We identify those who click via a unique identifier matched to each contact.

That identifier enables us to utilize historical behavior, company firmographics, LinkedIn profile details, or available relevant data points. Our customers who've embraced this strategy, which we call Campaigns for Early Demand, say it gives them additional prospects to engage at various funnel stages.

Getting back to the key point of this eBook, building and nurturing a marketing database requires thoughtful approaches to engagement, and it does not support the notion of dropping those who don't engage at the first pass.

Utilizing your marketing database and martech stack for contact-level insights, by contrast, represents a modern, user-friendly approach to identifying early demand. Such insights can be leveraged to drive a nurture program's details (timing, content, cadence).

We believe early demand data rounds out traditional marketing/demand gen campaigns while delivering these benefits:

  1. It's more affordable. If you engage with a partner for your demand gen, your cost is lower than for full form completes. You get indicators of early demand on prospects that you can feed into your martech stack at a lower cost than for prospects who completed a form.
  2. Your funnel is fuller from top to bottom because you haven't eliminated the high percentage of visitors who don't complete a form. Your nurture/retarget candidates go up dramatically.
  3. There's less "waste" or lost contacts in your demand gen campaigns because you retain and work to nurture more names. Campaigns for Early Demand can introduce hundreds if not thousands of contacts into your system.
  4. You have a robust and regular flow of contacts to nurture instead of always starting from ground zero.
  5. Enhanced ability to reach more members of the demand unit.

We're not suggesting this early-demand alternative is a full-on replacement for the classic lead gen approach centered on form completions. We view it as a supplementary approach that B2B brands should test and evaluate to accelerate their campaigns and demand gen strategy, rather than putting all their eggs into the basket of form completions.

As buying behaviors and groups continue to evolve, it's necessary to remain agile in marketing practices to ensure your tactics evolve to align with your prospective buyers and that you are ready to respond when they are prepared to purchase.

Credits:

Created with images by Bertrand Godfroid - "Sunset over river Eyrieux, Saint Laurent du Pape, Ardèche, France" • Seventyfour - "Portrait of African-American man using wheelchair working from home with wife looking over his shoulder, copy space" • Flamingo Images - "Smiling businesspeople working on a laptop in an office lounge" • Tierney - "Yellow light bulb pattern with shadow - flat lay" • rawpixel.com - "Business people discussion" • rawpixel.com - "Business people handshake"