Hey everybody, welcome to the Stack and Growth podcast. My name is Tori Kinlick. I am your host for this episode, and I am a VP of Demand Generation at Refined Labs. On today's episode, I sat down with Liz Spector, Director of Demand Generation at Refined Labs, and Miles Madden, Performance Marketing Manager at Refined Labs, and we unpacked demand creation versus demand capture.
The episode is filled with tons of information, everything from the right way to balance your budget for demand creation versus capture, the impact of marketing attribution, and even a little bit on some of the key performance indicators, both kind of the leading and lagging KPIs that you should be looking forward to ensure that your demand creation and capture efforts are making the right impact for your organization. So thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy. Hey everybody, this is your host Tori Kinlick. Welcome to the show, my friends Liz and Miles, two of my colleagues here at Refined Labs.
Liz Miles, would you both please just introduce yourselves briefly? Yeah, hi everyone, I'm Liz. I'm a Director of Demand Gen here at Refined Labs. My biggest day-to-days are working with various staff companies at different stage growth stages and also across different industries.
And also moving them away from lead gen programs to demand gen programs. So excited to get to get into this topic. All right, now Miles, I'm one of the performance marketing managers at Refined Labs. My primary responsibility is to take care of the tactical execution of paid media, as well as helping in the strategization of paid media in terms of demand creation and demand generation.
I'm excited to be here with you guys. We've got a VP, a DDG, and a PMM. So a few different perspectives on a topic. So this will be fun.
A few different perspectives, but one that I feel like we're all very aligned around. And that is exactly why I wanted you both to join me today and talk through our topic, which is demand creation versus demand capture. So to me, one of the biggest and most impactable changes I made in my marketing career and my demand generation career was starting to look at these two things differently, because within this demand generation umbrella, we have our demand creation and demand capture. And that's what we're going to be unpacking today.
But these are not necessarily familiar and native terms to everybody. And there's going to be some of our listeners out there who are hearing these concepts for the first time. There are also going to be some listeners out there who have been practicing things like this for the past couple of years. And so hopefully, we'll be able to provide some good, tangible takeaways or just different ways of thinking about things for each of those two respective audiences and maybe anyone else that falls in between in that really broad spectrum.
But to me, the really it comes down to thinking about buyers today. So our common talk track here at Refine Labs, and one that I know many other marketers, demand-gen marketers are out there sharing with their colleagues as well, is that at any point in time, there might only be between 1% and 3% of your total address in the market who are actually in the market and ready to make a purchase today. But that doesn't mean that those should be the only people that we're marketing to. And so when we think about the demand capture, it is focusing on that 1% to 3% of the people that are in market and are showing some form of purchase intent.
And then for the demand creation, it's about finding ways to get your brand in front of that other 97 to 99% and making sure that we are consistently getting our brand in front of them, our message or value props or content and trying to stay top of mind for them so that when that trigger event occurs, when they are in market, when they fall into that 1% to 3% range of people that are ready to make a purchase or engage with a salesperson, that our brand is going to be top of mind. So that's the way that I look at demand creation versus demand capture. I am curious, Liz Miles, do either of you have a different or similar outlook on these things I would love to hear from you on the topic. Yeah, totally.
I love all of that. And for me, my background actually started to be to see. So I started my career in marketing very much thinking I need to grow brand. That was always the biggest challenge, especially when you're working in apparel, and there's so many brands out there, how do you differentiate yourself?
And that's generally done by brand, not by what styles you're making, things like that are important as well, but brand growth is really what plays the biggest primary focus there. So when I moved into the B2B space, I kind of took that knowledge with me and applied that same brand growth and development process to B2B. And that's why the marriage of a refined labs philosophy and my past experience in marketing really just ties itself together. And I think that's the biggest learning for B2B brands is to really stop thinking in the silo view, like we are in the technology sector, let's just see what other technology brands and the same exact industry as us are doing and thinking more macro.
What are other just great brands out there doing period? Whether it's an amazing apparel brand, whether it's a big sports team, whatever it is, thinking about marketing on a macro level. I think most of the both tactical and strategy mishaps that happen on marketing teams is really coming from that micro level mindset and that micro level strategy planning. Yeah, that commoditized industry that you worked in, I would say the brand marketing, the awareness marketing, that creating that future demand is even more important, right?
People are going to inevitably be purchasing your product or your competitor's product. And so how do you really go about separating yourself? It is 100% necessary, even in situations where there is that kind of straight line attribution information available. And you know, you are able to maybe focus a little bit more of your demand capture efforts on things that you know with certainty are working and you can continue kind of investing in some of those areas.
And so on that topic, right, of investment and how to kind of fund the demand creation versus demand capture miles, I would love to kind of pull you into the conversation here. So in your role at Refine Labs, I know that you're working with a handful of clients who are looking for you to answer this specific question, what's the right budget split between demand creation tactics and demand capture tactics? And how do you justify it? Yeah, before I answer that question, I love having this conversation with other Refine Labs employees because we're aligned on the definition of demand creation and demand generation, but we all communicate it just a little differently.
It's like, Tori, you communicated it one way, amazing. You communicated it another way, amazing. How I am about to communicate it is different, but hopefully amazing. And my punchline is saying that is that there's a core definition, but you can communicate it different ways and still have it be the right way.
For instance, I take a very simple approach to it. Demand creation, my communication style is driving an intense reaction to wanting a product or service. And then demand capture is, of course, just actively converting those in time mode. And so bring me back to our right budget split.
Was your question right? Yes, yeah. So a lot of times, with the clients that we're working with here at Refine, many of them come to us and have been a little bit over-indexed on some of those demand capture channels. So I do want to talk about the impact that marketing attribution has on these things, but maybe we'll get to that in a moment.
And so my question for you, Miles, is how do you look at the right way to allocate budget between demand capture tactics and demand creation tactics? Yeah, yeah. That's a really good question. So one thing that we typically see when we bring on clients is that a majority of their budget is focused on demand capture, which are typically things like Google Ads and lead generation campaigns on paid social.
You noted that only 3% of our market is in buying mode. So logically, it doesn't make sense to shift most of our budget on capturing 3% of the market. So when we bring on clients, we like to shift a majority of that budget to create demand, which is actively educating our market and channels that feels intuitive and natural to be educated on, things like LinkedIn, for example. So the percentage that we like to work with, either like 80, 20, or 90, 10, that really depends on how much volume of course is in the capture demand channels.
So you have to work and test that out. But that's typically what we see is a lot significant portion of that budget focused on Google Ads and you end up wasting a bunch of budget, and then you don't establish yourself as a market leader or the solution to turn to, and you almost commoditize yourself among your competitors. So you called out like kind of that 80, 20, 90, 10 split, and I want to pass it over to you on this topic, Liz. When our clients come to us, let's say it's a 50, 50 split, or even more heavily weighted 60, 40, 70, 30, I can do the lose math all day.
But that's a lot of change management that's involved there. And so Liz, what are some of the things that you might look to do to try to kind of ease that transition a little bit when someone is let's say so heavily weighted towards those more attributable demand capture channels. But you recognize that playing the long term game here that we need to be creating that future demand or we can spend all the money capturing it right now. And where's that going to leave us in several months?
The growth trajectory is just probably not going to be there. So what's the way that you've approached this with whether it's clients you work with or in some of your past lives, previous roles? How do you approach any of the pushback around making the shift? Yeah, I love that question.
And I feel like this type of conversation almost starts like intervention style, because oftentimes I think a lot of staff companies don't realize how much of their budget is actually being spent on capture demand, because they don't really truly understand the difference between demand capture and demand creation. So their mindset is, OK, we're spending all of this on Google Search, but they don't even realize that Google Search is not creating demand. They almost look at it as a brand awareness channel. So I think step one in these cases is you already did a great job introducing that, is really understanding the difference between demand generation and demand capture.
When the demand capture is defined clearly and really bringing to light how much money and how much budget is being spent to demand capture, like I've just seen John Shaw. I think when you really say 3% is in market, and that's what you're spending 90% of your budget on, that just creates a whole different rewire. It's like you start thinking differently when you start thinking from that angle. So it is a very dramatic transition in the beginning.
So highlighting the problem. The problem is that you guys are going to market, which is one strategy and that's capturing demand. What about that 99% of your addressable market that maybe is not hand raising right now, but is potentially going to become a prospect down the line. So I think showcasing that definition is very, very important in the transition.
And then when you highlight that problem, you start unwrapping different things. Like, kind of thoughts start running. Like, OK, well, that makes sense. How do I now transition more to the demand gen side?
And once you start that transition to the demand gen side, I feel like it's like a drug. You start seeing that amplification of brand. You start seeing your brand growth up. You start seeing your organic traffic coming in higher, your direct traffic coming in higher.
And that creates a snowball effect of pipeline growth. And that's really where I think that's when the principles are really solidified, because you're starting to impact those bottom line revenue things. But before you get to that point, because that's not immediate too. And we know that too.
We'll riff on that layer. But really starting to see and understand the importance of the brand growth is that first step when you're moving away from demand generation, generation, and demand creation solely, and then start reallocating that budget. I think for brands that are starting out with us, a primary benchmark would be like seeing if you spend 50% or more of your budget on Google Search and starting to kind of reallocate based on that. So making sure that at first you're below 50% on Google Search spend and then figuring out what that perfect mix for you is.
I think there's, we always like to create some guard rails for that. But there's no perfect mix that we can necessarily prescribe here. It's really what works for your brand. But keeping that Google Search spend under 50% is something that I think we generally see.
So if anyone out there that's listening and is like, oh my gosh, I'm spending more than 50% on Google Search, do not panic. This is just a great opportunity to switch your demand capture side to your demand generation side. So Miles, I want to ask you a question here. Let's say you're getting into a new client's AdWords account with the intention of trying to free up some of their budget that can be reallocated towards that true demand creation, that more long-term play.
What's the best way to get started with that? I'll kind of maybe tee it up for you a little bit and maybe help our audience understand how we look at high intent and low intent keywords and phrases, and how you would actually go in and audit an account and figure out which are the campaigns, which are the keywords that we want to continue with, which ones we want to get out of there, are there modifiers that we should be adding? So yeah, talk us a little bit about some of your experience there. Yeah, I'll get into the tactics for how to effectively create demand and capture demand within channels.
But you brought up through topics list that I really want to touch on. The first, you said, not a lot of people understand which channels are create demand channels and which are capture demand channels. And so I'd really like to define those right now both from a paid media side, but also create demand, capture demand is not solely paid media, which I think is a typical misconception. It goes beyond paid media.
If we're talking about paid media, create demand channels are channels that people want to get educated on. They're not there to go and buy something. That's going to be channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, to give a few examples on the capture demand side. That's where people are in research mode and in buy mode.
That's typically things like G2, Kaptira, Google Search Ads, Bing Search Ads, and then Google Video Ads and Google Display Ads, for example, would be other great demand examples. Outside of paid media, things like creating a podcast for creating demand right now, organic social media. We have a relatively nice presence as I refine that company page that we are getting close. That's creating demand.
So it goes outside of that paid media performance. Going back to your question, Tori, with the tactics, what we do on Google Ads and Bing Ads, the search ads, we begin by going after branded terms and high intent terms. High intent terms have what we call high intent tokens. There can be nuances depending on industry, but it's typically things like software, platform, tool that ends the search query, an example HR software, human resources software.
So that's where we start. We like to only focus on people that are research and in buy modes. That's usually where we stay. We'll test competitors, sometimes that works, but any lower, medium intent terms, we typically find that at waste budget, there are edge cases.
We will test every once in a while, but at the core, high intent terms and branded terms. Pate Social, too very tactical. The goal is the educator market. And so there's two things.
What campaign objectives we use and then how do we target these people? Campaign objective that we like to use, reach, or brand awareness. And then the video views campaign, if you're using video, those are two primary campaign objectives. And as far as the targeting, we were collaboratively with our clients to make sure we're targeting the right people.
First off, there's some industry expertise that sometimes is needed. It's not always very, very clear. But we like to use job titles and demographics. Make sure we're targeting companies the right size, the right people.
And we calculate from that the audience size and try and reach as much that audience as possible. And lastly, just continuously adding new creatives. I think that's the real juice of this tactic. If you are running the same message for an entire year, how much did you actually educate your market?
Right? You didn't go to high school to learn about one thing for four years. You had different classes and all this different education. So yeah, any comments on that?
Well, so I think, like I totally follow, right? Everything you're saying makes complete sense to me. When we roll this out to a client for the first time, oftentimes it can be met with a little bit of resistance, understandably so. Right?
And so Liz, I'll send this one over your way. Let's say you're having the conversation with your client, OK, we need to pivot the way that we're allocating our budget. We need to be focused more on that demand creation and focus a little less of our budget on demand capture, ensuring that we're only bidding on those high-10 terms. But with that, we'll ultimately come to question, how long is it going to take for us to create that future demand?
Where are we going to start to see the impact of these things? And so not an easy question to answer, but is one that we always have to be prepared to talk to. So in your experience, what's the best way to handle that? How long is it going to take for us to create demand?
Yeah, that's a great question and one that I get quite frequently. So to piggyback off also what Miles was saying, so when we set up these campaigns and you did a great job defining the creation channels versus the capture channels, so specifically on the creation channels, the first 90 days for us are really about making sure that we're reaching the correct ICP. I think that is a critical part that's often missed, like leaving in a little bit of a time frame to measure if you're reaching the right audience, right? People are like, OK, we're going to launch this week.
Let's see how the pipeline moves. We're generating more MQLs. Let's just get it. But the way that you're shifting your mindset here about thinking about demand capture specifically is making sure first you're reaching the right ICP, because you want to make sure that any budget that goes into those brand awareness channels, you're not so much worried about those vanity metrics if you're 100% sure that you're ICP seeing it, right?
So the first 90 days, let's just make sure reaching the right target audience, the right job titles, functions, whatever targeting you might be using. Secondarily, after that 90 day period is where you can see some of the high level metrics shift a little. So that's where it kicks in your organic search traffic, your direct search traffic. I think I like to do also when looking at organic and direct traffic is looking at home page traffic specifically, because that also filters through anything that's not maybe SEO related or anything like brand query related, things like that.
And here you're looking at solely what's the traffic organically and directly that's coming to my home page. So you can definitely say that that's brand awareness related, right? So that's where we start after that 90 day mark seeing those early indicators. Other early indicators that you can start seeing, and even sometimes in the first 90 days, is the type of engagement that you're getting on your paid social ads.
So if you see, and this is something that's so often missed, and it's so sad because it's such a juicy thing, going into your ad units and seeing who likes your ads. Those are folks that are spending the time to click a reaction on LinkedIn. To me, that's almost like that is the most valuable impression to get. So when you're looking at those folks, are they relevant?
Are they folks within your ICP? That within itself will help you validate that audience. And then when you're going to report to your exact team, or maybe that first 90 days, it's difficult to get by. And these are all little kind of like kill things that you can bring into the conversation and say, we're reaching the right audience.
We're seeing the right metrics on the organic and direct side. And then of course, the actual pipeline results. So on average, we like to say two times your average sales cycle. So for example, if your average sales cycle is 30 days, then you can see pipeline results in 60 days, and so on and so forth.
This is a benchmark, of course. So take with a grain of salt. It could be a little bit different for different stage maturity companies. But the other thing, you're really looking at first that, top of the funnel pipeline.
So first you're looking at how are you growing your meetings booked within the first three months? Are you seeing that increase? Then you start looking at quality. What is the quality of those meetings?
So you can generate 300 MQLs monthly, and your team might be getting a bunch of praise, and it's like you're doing amazing. But what is the quality of those leads? So how many of those are actually converting to a meeting booked? How many of them are tending the meeting?
And then how many of those are actually turning into SQLs or SQLs? So those are the secondary metrics that kind of kick in a little bit over that 90-day period. You can start measuring how that's up with the funnel is converting. And then usually seeing bottom of the funnel metrics around that six-month period.
So you can start seeing more closed one deals, how they're progressing in your pipeline and things like that. And then after that six-month period is where you can go back and start figuring out how to optimize your metrics better. So how you optimize your bottom of the funnel, thinking about which stage in your cell cycle is converting at a higher rate, then you can go in and actually re-optimize your funnel for that specific stage. So now you're not even optimizing for MQLs anymore.
You're not optimizing for SQLs. You're optimizing for stage three stage four opportunities. So when you get to that point of maturity, which could be six plus months, that's where you're getting to the real quirks of what's working. You're actually generating that bottom of the funnel pipe.
Your sales team's happy because they have a bunch of pipeline and they're closing it. And you can really show what marketing efforts are working and which aren't. And I think the other key thing to mention here is that we look at the funnel in a blended way. And this will probably start way into our attribution conversation.
But when you're looking at the funnel, very split. So for example, if you're looking at solely those leads that came in from a specific source and you're funneling them down and trying to figure all that out, it can really start bad behavior. You can start thinking like this specific channel is generating a specific amount. And this is why we should double down on it.
When you look at your funnel blended, so all of your inbound activities, that's where you can start picking out the efforts of other channels and starting to justify those captured demand channels more than you're just buying those capture in-market people channels. I want to quickly emphasize one thing you said too, was I'm super passionate about this. Setting expectations of when create demand is going to start working is up to two times your sales cycle length. That is so important.
It's so wild to me when you're selling an enterprise software that's six foot years, annual contract value, six foot years. And you think this demand creation is going to happen in two weeks, which is so unreal. It's looking at the enterprise level, I'd say they can only budget only freed up in January. Maybe if they have to cut a software, there's so many different variables.
And so a amount of time it takes for create demand to work is so dependent on the ACV and sales cycle length of your product. 10K ACV versus 100K ACV, sales cycle length is going to be drastically different. And the time amount it takes for someone to feel empowered to get that product is going to be so different, very different. Well said both of you.
I think so one thing that I think is interesting is how, Liz, you were talking about, excuse me, some of those early key performance indicators, because that's where a lot of the pressure is going to come. We can get people bought in on the strategy. You can be talking to your CEO, your CMO, and say, this is the way we need to be doing things. We need to allocate our budget here.
And when you're not seeing that immediate return, that's when people start to get a little bit impatient. So Liz, you called out two interesting metrics, in particular, the organic traffic, the direct traffic that we expect to start to see some increases in the early goings in the first few months. And so maybe I'll throw this one to you, Miles, but why just direct an organic traffic? Is that a direct byproduct of demand creation strategies?
And if so, why is it playing out that way? I've got an answer for you guys. I was just building a slide today, answering this question. This is perfect.
I actually use organic branded. I source that from Google Search Console. I source that from Google Analytics, and then I use paid search branded. I source that from Google Analytics as well.
There's a Google Adstrapdown Google Analytics that will give you that and you just set your exact match to your branded term. I use those three channels, if you will, to aggregate the number. And that's what I call back-to-site early indicator. That is indicative of the market being brand aware and going to your website to educate themselves.
It's an early indicator of pipeline growth of a high-income conversion, such as a demo request. They may not be ready, but maybe they're collecting information for a pitch deck to give to their executive team. Maybe they're looking at pricing. They're in this education phase.
So typically what we see is when we create that demand, we see this early indicator of site traffic increase. And then we like to couple it over the next few months with pipeline growth so we can make sure that there's that correlation. But from what I've seen, it's a really good indicator of potential pipeline growth. I feel like we're uncovering some things here that, honestly, it's the first time I've heard of a data point, like the one that you just mentioned there, Miles.
So maybe we double back to that one more time. Give us that formula of the makeup of that calculation, and how all of our listeners here might be able to go about doing the same, because I think this is a very pivotal stage in the migration from doing things the old-fashioned way to recognizing the real impact of demand creation and within your demand generation strategy. So walk us through that one more time. Yeah, we'll call the metric back-to-site users.
And that's calculated by organic branded traffic, direct traffic, and paid search branded traffic. Direct traffic, you pull from Google Analytics. It's very easy to find. You just go to acquisition.
There's a channel that says direct, and there's a user volume. For organic branded, you go into Google Search Console, which is a separate tool. You can go to performance. There's a little thing on the main navigation that says performance overview.
And you basically select your keyword. You set your query to exact match, and then type in your branded term. For instance, for using Refine Labs as an example, or just be your fine labs. And then you set your time frame.
That will give you exactly how many clicks you received from organic branded. And then lastly, there's paid search branded. If you have Google Ads and Google Analytics integrated, you just go to Google Analytics. There's a Google Ads dropdown.
You select that. The keyword to exact match for your branded term. For example, find labs for using us. And that will give you a user volume inside Google Analytics.
And you add those up. You get a sum, and that's your back to site user volume. Man, I love that. That is brilliant.
And so no matter what we come to the table with, some of this next level analysis and new formulas and calculations like you're talking about miles, inevitably, Liz, you're going to get hit with a question, something along the lines of, well, we've seen that our direct result of our spend in Google has led to this many dollars. So why shouldn't we just continue scaling up our Google Ads spend when it's the one that is directly attributable? We know that it's pure dollars in, dollars out scenario here. So why wouldn't we just continue focusing on this particular channel when it's giving us the most clear indicators of success?
Yeah. Yeah. And what I would say back to that is that's the short term strategy. So whenever the brand grows kind of tapers off, so will those search volumes, right?
Especially around brand and specific other channels. When thinking about direct attribution, that's always kind of a hard part of that. It's like you Google search, you see that direct attribution, you feel like you can say, hey, this is the ROI, this is what we got for this type of spend. And I think this is where it ties back to again, looking at the blended funnel.
So not looking necessarily at each line item, like how much is organic, I mean, how much is paint search driving, how much are all of these different kind of pay tactics driving and looking at your overall advertising cap. That will really show you the overall indicators of what your total marketing spend is affecting on your bottom line. And I think a big part of that too is almost like taking even the data out of it. It's kind of the easy way out.
It's the easy way to communicate to executives that what you're doing is working. Because you're like, OK, we have X amount of spend. We got this many leads. This is ROI.
My job here is done. It's much harder to come up with metrics. Like what Miles mentioned, I mean, absolutely brilliant to come up with a metric like that. I would even challenge you to throw in growth for organic social too.
Because a lot of folks are just clicking into that kind of handle. And they see your ad and just going directly from the organic social as well. But it is way, way harder to come up with a strategy to effectively communicate demand creation, which is why I think a lot of marketers default to like that direct return on advertising spend from the direct channels, like Google search and things like that. And also the other side of it is, are you OK as a marketer, only focusing on that 1% to 3% of market?
Do you feel like you're doing a good job just by doubling down on that? And that's really the question that you need to ask yourself and your team and really think about. And when you're thinking about your overall marketing strategy, are you OK ignoring that other 98%? If the answer is yes, and maybe you haven't a volume from what's coming in from Google search, then we're not going to tell you to do it otherwise.
But if you want to focus on that 99%, you are going to have to just break away from those chains of direct attribution, start implementing something like qualitative attribution, which is our self-reported attribution, start asking your prospects where they're hearing about you. Because even with paid search, it doesn't mean the person or the prospect is learning about you from Google search. Like they could have heard about you from a conference or from any other event and went in and searched your brand and clicked on your ad. And now you're attributing that conversion to a paid search conversion when there could have been 25 different touch points that happened that were completely undocumented.
It could have been that somebody dropped in in a Slack community. You heard about the brand. You then saw them at a conference. You engaged with a sales person.
You tabled it for a second. And then 20 steps later, you go in on paid search. You convert. So I think the concept of direct attribution is almost like it shackles for marketers, absolutely shackles.
Like you want to break free of that. You want to hear from the prospect themselves where they're learning about you. And even if it's part of your qualification process, like on the sales side, to ask about where did you learn about us? How did that process go?
It's still super integral to have that qualitative feedback, even on the form level. Because sales teams sometimes, they don't document those things. Or they're not super diligent every time to ask the prospect that question versus if you have it as a required field on your form, you will collect that insight every single time. It's also a free text form field.
That's really the secret sauce there. It's not something that you can go into a Dropbox. I'm definitely guilty of this. Just clicking that first, whatever is first there or other, or whatever it might be.
And just moving on to the process. So free text is really kind of the game changer there. Having a free text required field on your form. This field can essentially supplement any other field that you might have there, like a country field that you can use reverse IP technology for.
Really, I'm sure there's a field you can probably scrap. Because this is very, very important to include. And once you implement that, that in parallel with your direct attribution will really be that missing puzzle piece to kind of painting the picture of where the demand is actually being created. And once you have those qualitative insights, it will completely transform your marketing strategy.
You will start actually understanding where people are learning about you, whether it's organic channels that you've never seen any direct attribution on, maybe it's communities that you actually didn't even know existed. I mean, there's probably a million Facebook groups out there that talked about marketing that we probably don't all know about. You learn so many things just by asking somebody how they heard about you. And it's just an absolute game changer.
And then building your strategy off of qualitative feedback versus quantitative is really the secret sauce to the marketing strategy. And that's how you win versus comparing yourself to just super niche players in your space, looking at their websites, doing all the lurking. I mean, I'm guilty of doing this in my past life too. So not throwing shade on any marketers that are doing that out there right now, but it's definitely very challenging to keep up with the market if you're doing that.
And if you're collecting those qualitative trends, that's something that no other competitor can ever have on you. So not only are you creating a competitive advantage for yourself as a marketer, you're also creating a competitive advantage for your SaaS brand. I'm glad you brought up the attribution topic. And that was super well said, that was awesome.
That is my one concern about the metric I introduced you guys, the Pectusite metric. Everyone gets super excited and it's cool. It's fine when you create this new metric. It's a good indicator, but my concern is that we're going to try and make attribution when you're for something that, as we know, qualitative attribution is the most important in this process.
And so my concern is that everyone gets excited about this Pectusite metric. You use that as your determinant, if it's working or not. And then you run into the same problem as before, we're just trying to completely make this new strategy completely attributable and you run into the same issue. So again, both said, use my metric as an indicator.
Don't marry yourself through it because it could get you into the sex limit problems you had previously. Yeah, that is so well said by both of you. And honestly, I look back in my marketing career to periods where I know I was way overspent on demand capture channels, on search channels. And if I had known then that one of the biggest unlocks could just be adding that additional field to the form, asking how did you hear about us and that that would ultimately uncover all the insights that might help me pivot away from that platform.
Man, who knows, things might have been different. But with all that said, we can't exactly predict the future. It's in hindsight being 2020 and all that. But if you did have a crystal ball and you looked into it and just thought, how might things be different five to 10 years from now?
If we're having this demand creation versus demand capture conversation in five years, Liz, what do you think would be different about the world that we're marketing in and operating in years from now and how might this demand capture, demand creation dynamically a little bit different or not? Or is it going to be exactly the same? And we're just going to have to keep screaming into endless voice. What are your thoughts?
Yeah, so I think it's actually transitioning faster than it even was before. So I think every time we kind of come up for air, and we're like, we got this, it's like, no, no, no. I think that's just the crooks that being a marketer, it's like every day is a different day. I think for me, my biggest thing that I've been doing recently is really following Web3.
And I know everybody has mixed things about this. Whether you like NFTs, whether you want to buy them, whether you're into crypto or not, you can have your thoughts on that. But one thing that I've been fascinated about is just like the market adoption of all of these various products and seeing how people are buying into brands with almost like no channels at all, whether it's word of mouth, whether it's in like Discord communities, whether it's Twitter, like private communities on Twitter, all of these different things. I think the next couple of years will really be a hard lesson for marketers that are tied to direct attribution, because that is going to be completely phased out.
And thinking about all of these hidden communities and everything that's driving this Web3 industry, it's almost like a little bit too ahead, you know, in terms of like maybe B2B and stuff like that. But as a marketer following those trends and understanding where that industry goes, I think we'll give you a lot of unlocks to understanding like how the demand generation kind of cycle will change and it will evolve. I know we're already seeing a lot of this with like a lot of self attribution results, like word of mouth, community, things like that. Like that's just the beginning of that.
Like the level that that's going to amplify on, I think is going to blow all of us away. Like people will be just talking to each other in these like communities that are like somewhere completely decentralized. We will never know that they have the conversation and that's how your brands will grow. So really doubling down on the brand awareness and like understanding that that will really drive your business in the future and that you will never have that one to one, especially in five years from now.
Like I think with Cookie List being, I mean, we're ready, I think basically in a Cookie List world, but in five years it really will be Cookie List like with all these different vendors kind of, you know, playing with data and things like that. Like I don't think there'll be much to work with there. So along with that, like the Cookie List world plus like where web three's going in general. And you know, the type of like market adoption that's going to happen on that side with technology.
I think we can just say kind of away with any type of direct attribution and really marketing strategies are going to be solely based on just the qualitative. So collecting that from, you know, the feel that we spoke about, collecting that like salespeople are really going to have to be more in like consulting type of roles, like really extracting that fine information from prospects and all of that kind of being married together and your marketing strategy. Well, it sounds like there's going to be quite a bit of dark social conversations that are going to be happening in the metaverse. So boy, that's a lot to wrap my head around right now.
So Miles, a similar question for you. You know, how do you see things evolving from here? Five to 10 years from now, you know, what do you think is going to be different about, you know, the way that we're all going to market? Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, yeah, it actually brings me back to our conversation at our beautiful table in San Diego a few weeks. So I think we're, marketing is the go-to-market strategy is latching back to the good old marketing. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, when you were so focused on psychologically persuading individuals and actually for really good marketing, that's interesting and exciting. Everyone says B2B is boring, it's because we make it boring, it's not because it has to be.
So I think in the next five years, we're going to lapse back to the old marketing. I think a lot of, especially with the acceleration of digital and all this data, we've gotten so excited and obsessed with it, we forgot what marketing actually is. And so the approach that I take, especially to marketing, I'm a hockey guy, like, by a hockey's going on right now and the teams I always win are the teams that are cool during the highs and the lows. And so that's how I approach marketing in this accelerated digital world.
New technology comes out, more data, it's exciting. I slow down, analyze it, see if it's actually going to help me, but at the core, I think marketing is latching back to what it should be. So I see marketing much better, much more exciting, especially for B2B. And to this point, there's going to be some amazing technological advancements which are going to be fun for us to experiment with.
So I'm excited, next five years are going to be amazing. That's awesome. So I think in five to 10 years from now, I hope that we are having this conversation again. And I have a feeling that both of you are going to be leading really large teams of marketers and helping continue to evangelize this message about creating future demand and capturing existing demand and that you need to ensure that you're striking the right balance.
So I thank you both for all of your insights on this today. I think that we gave our listeners here quite a bit to think about, some good actionable takeaways as well. So Liz Miles, if you would each like to say a quick farewell and just let people know how to find you, if they want to learn a little bit more about your interesting perspectives on demand creation, demand capture, I don't know, NFTs, marketing in the Great Depression, you name it, but yeah, how can people find you both and connect with you? Yeah, I'm just a Elizabeth Spector on LinkedIn.
So feel free to find me on LinkedIn, add me, DM me, if you have an interesting perspective, if you agree or disagree, I always like to have a conversation. So feel free to drop me a line. And I'm also on LinkedIn. My DMs are open just like Liz.
If you do have questions about marketing in the Great Depression, unfortunately, it was not around, but I can get you in touch with my grant last. So we'll let you know. All right. People are going to be pounding on his door to hear some of those insights.
And so maybe we'll have to get him on a podcast sometime here soon. Well, thank you both. This was awesome. Had a blast recording this with you.
And thanks to all of our listeners. So until next time.