Hey everyone, I am here to chat with you guys about creating demand with your target accounts. Super excited to be here and chat with you all. So my name is Sydney Waterfall. I'm a general manager here at Refine Labs.
Basically, what we do at Refine Labs is help companies create and capture demand to create a more efficient marketing go-to-market. So let's jump into it. Okay, so the agenda for today's talk, I'm going to talk a little bit about demand, how I think about demand, how I think companies should start thinking about demand in three separate buckets. We're going to talk about reach and then also tactics.
So I love to leave presentations with some inspiration or ideas that then I can think about and research if it would make sense for me to implement at my business. So hopefully at the end of this you have a couple of ideas that you can think about and maybe potentially launch. So let's jump into it. Okay, so I want to go over types of demand because it really kind of levelsets the conversation for what I'm about to talk about.
And when you say demand generation, just like when you say ABM, right? People have very different definitions, thoughts, experiences and there's a ton of different points of views floating around out there, which makes sense. But for the sake of this presentation, I'm going to kind of break it down into these three categories. So we've got create demand, capture demand, and demand.
For this presentation, we're going to be mainly focused on the first category, which is capture demand, which is educating your market about your category problems, challenges, and solutions so that the buyer understands the category and the solution, take your solution to that before they even have a need to purchase, where a need to start researching to buy. And then you've got capture demand, which is what most marketing programs and channels are focused around due to attribution, which is buyers who are already solution aware and actively looking for a solution. And you can determine this by intent, like signaling their intent. I think that's the main difference between all of these three categories.
When you're creating demand, nobody has intent to buy the product. You're out there trying to create the intent, right? Capturing demand, these channels, you can channels, programs, and activities are really around gathering that intent, converting them, and then driving a sale. So you think on Google Search is primarily a capture demand channel, you can tell because they're typing in intent through keywords.
So meeting booking software, that is going to be a high intent term, and you want to capture that, right? That's an example. Review sites, things like that. People are actively searching for a solution.
So you want to be there, you want to optimize, you want to be capturing that demand. But the reality is that most people treat all channels and they take a capture demand strategy or approach. And they don't really use, really think at all about creating demand because it's hard to measure and it's hard to see the impact, right? And a lot of marketers need to show ROI, need to show clicks, need to show engagement, all of this kind of stuff.
So we'll get into that more throughout the presentation. But just to kind of level set when I mean by creating demand, then you've got the demand, which is a little bit newer concept term floating around out there. But essentially what that is, is it's telling buyers who are actively searching for one solution or one thing, like meeting booking software. And then you're saying, no, you actually don't need that to solve your problem.
You need this instead. So it's kind of literally damning the demand and rerouting it. So that's also a type of demand. Okay.
Now that we've covered that, let's get into one of the big components of creating demand, which is actually how you create demand. And the best way to create demand is through dark social. So what is dark social? Specifically dark social is what I'm focusing on.
It's different than a turning man per dark funnel. So dark social is a word of mouth channels powered by the maturity of the internet that's scale advocacy, sharing of content and other forms of digital word of mouth that don't get tracked by attribution software. And also don't create in 10 data. So those two things are key.
You can't really track it through software and it doesn't actually create in 10 data. So we'll go through some channels and examples of this, but all of these companies on the right here in the logos that you see really have no incentive to give that data to advertisers or to other data aggregators. And also with privacy and security laws, they just can't. So yes, I would love more data to be able to say who exactly did what and they saw this and then they came back and did that.
But unfortunately, in the world we live in today, that's just not a reality. So forms of dark social networks, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, right? You don't know what those people are doing on that platform. You can't really get much analytics besides if you're running capture demand strategies.
You also have content platforms. So the top three are definitely going to be YouTube and then podcast networks. So Spotify and Apple podcasts. I would love to get more information on podcasts listeners.
How long may I listen? Who listens to what type of material? But only they have that and they're not willing to publish it. So communities is a huge one.
A lot of these communities are private or semi-private communities that even if they're hosted on your own domain or something, many popular communities that people actually adopt and get a lot of value out of are not hosted on a domain that companies own. They're hosted through tools like Slack, Discord. There's even some community tools in place. Like GainSight has a community aspect and there's other third party tools that have these community platforms.
But you can also have a community on Facebook. You can also have a community on Reddit. And you can Reddit to the community of communities essentially. So social media can also host these communities.
This screenshot right here on the right is just a snapshot of four communities that I'm in on Slack that I check in on. You also have direct word of mouth. So this is going to be text message, social media DMs. I get a ton of DMs on LinkedIn.
People asking questions. I'm asking people questions or preferences or help with certain things. None of that's going to be able to track obviously one to one conversations. Third party events, just like this one.
So an event you don't host, you don't know who's listening and say you don't get the leads or anything like that. Then if I were to mention something on this top about another company that has nothing to do with this event and the advertisers or sponsors or people speaking on the event. And then you went to the company and looked it up. They're never going to know that it was driven by this third party event from a software attribution standpoint.
And then you have internal company communication. So I don't know about you, but I dropped a lot of stuff in Slack. I dropped LinkedIn posts in Slack. I dropped this article out.
I dropped YouTube clips in Slack. So there's a lot of miss tracking there or teams or whatever communication platforms that you guys use. So that's a little bit about Dark Social and it's important because I want to make sure everybody's level sets on the concept before we get into the next part of the presentation. Okay, let's talk about actually reaching your target accounts on social.
So most people are advertising on social, but I would say most B2B companies, majority of them are using social, like it's a conversion channel. Like it's a place where they can capture demand from people. They can get in front of people and they're going to capture demos and signups and lists engagements and things like that. Well, I think that's the main problem is when I think about reaching target accounts on social, the objective changes.
And I think you should think about the objective of your campaigns and how you go about reaching your target accounts on social. So when I think about it, I'm trying to distribute key messages, guarantee views to my target account list and the right people at the list. And all I'm trying to do is distribute content so that they engage with it specifically content around your category, problems that they may have, whether they realize those problems are not currently right now. And also like what your product does.
I'll give you an example of this on the next slide because a lot of people I get the question like, well, what do you mean? Like what does your product do or what do you mean about problem type of content? And then the last type of content that always does super well and gets probably like one of the most engagement is subject matter expert content. So if you do not have a subject matter expert creating content for you right now, that's like step one, you need to start doing that.
If you don't have that in house, I would highly suggest either hiring that person or figuring out how to partner with someone and then taking that content and just running that to your target account list. The other things I like to optimize for or think about is again, that concept I mentioned it before about focusing on reach and engagement versus conversion. So this comes down to a campaign of objectives. So focusing on brand awareness, reach, impressions, maybe landing page views, depending on the type of content or video views, if it's a video, you know, content piece that you're running.
And the main reason is because most people are optimizing for conversions or website engagement. But that limits the algorithm to show your ads to lower amounts of people. Your reach is going to be lower when you do that and you pick those objectives. So if you're trying to reach the widest, the widest percentage, which kind of we call share voice, like you want to increase that share of voice in your target account list, like that's what we should be focusing on increasing the share of voice and then increasing that engagement.
So share of voice, I'll just get into it, is reach divided by your audience size. So you can run a campaign for 30 days, take the reach, divide that by the audience size, and then you're going to get a percentage. And that's like your percent share of voice, kind of how we calculate it, and we can use that as a benchmark. So your share of voice is going to be a lot lower when you're focused on conversion and lead gen, rather shifting your strategy in the way you use the channel, it's going to be a lot higher.
You're going to get a lot more eyes on your brand, a lot more eyes on your content, and you're going to educate a lot more people in your target accounts. And also the CPMs are a lot lower when you use these objectives. So that's really the goal. And also one thing to keep in mind, I was like to shout out here is ad frequency.
So these are like the three things that you should be optimizing for when you're optimizing to reach your target accounts. You want to look at ad frequency by the like logo frequency, like in a rolling 30 days, like how many times through all the campaigns is your logo being shown to an audience versus like a theme or campaign level. So okay, we've got three campaigns running, but this campaign has this ad frequency versus that. And then even at the ad level, like you don't want one ad running and it has a frequency of 10.
You want to mix up ads, multiple ad variants running, and you definitely want to keep that a while lower. So those are the three things to keep in mind reaching your target audience. Now, let's go into kind of an example. So the main thing when you're focusing on reach and engagement is the creative and the messaging has to be optimized for in-feed consumption, right?
We already know 99% of people are not going to click. You get a 1% click-through rate, most of the time less than that, if you're really lucky or using a lead gen, like type of click objective, you'll probably get a little bit higher than 1%, but very much very subjective. But this is what I mean. I wanted to show you an example.
So the goal of the creative and ad, so there's we've got three carousel ads here, two carousel ads, three tiles, and then this is like a story placement. But you can place these in different places, however you want you the designer to kind of update this. But the concept I want to go through is you could read this ad and you could understand what we're trying to get across without having to click. So searching for revenue growth, yes.
And how do I do that? Powerful search APIs to help content users code, right? Very simple concept. I'm not even in this target market for this product I'm showing you, but it's very kind of easy to understand quickly what this ad is trying to get across.
Same thing at the carousel. Stop letting tycos cost you revenue. Algolia provides typo tolerance search out of the box. Boom, I have the problem.
I have now I know this tool does this. And now I can see now correct in direct scenarios. So these are just some examples to give you some inspiration of how you could tell the story about your category or the story about a problem and how your product solves that problem in a feature. One, two, three, this is what the four features of product are in a fun way.
Copulating and the design are so important. So when you're running this type of strategy, so make sure to really focus on getting your point across and can the user like quickly understand, oh, I kind of know what they do now. So maybe in six months from now, when this is actually a problem for me, I just know that Algolia already does this and I don't have to type into Google something around, you know, tolerance search or something like that. So just an example I want to show you guys.
All right, let's keep moving. Let's go into some tactics and ideas. And one thing I'm going to say here is these are not like revolutionary ideas, but they are very effective if done right. And not a lot of companies are doing them, I would say effectively.
So first and foremost, you definitely need no matter what you do here. You need to have someone with subject matter expertise that can write content, can answer questions that in the right way for your audience, you need that person. So if you don't have anyone, that's step one is figuring out how you can use someone in your company or how you create a space for people in your company to do this and leverage that for marketing. So here's just four ideas and I'm going to walk through these.
So a subject matter expert asking anything weekly live event, not huge revolutionary but very effective. We've seen this be super, super effective for our own business here at Refine Labs, but we're also seeing this effective for other companies. And the reason is is the intent and the subject matter expertise. So you have a subject matter there.
The live event allows you to go back and forth with people, answer their questions, have follow-ups, really like deep dive or personalize kind of your answers to the audience, which is very valuable. And then you can, with that pillar, you can do a ton of stuff with that. That can be your content pillar and then you can spin that off into a ton of different things. You can spin that off into podcast episodes.
You can use video clips and distribute that on different social platforms, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn. This can fuel honestly like customer research. You can start asking audience questions as well and prompting them and getting their response and feedback and kind of going back and forth to understand if your audience understands this concept. Are you explaining it right?
You need to change how you're wording it, things like that. And this honestly is like the easiest hack to get micro content for social. So you have an hour long event. You can get probably six to 10, if not more, like little micro pieces of content that can then bloom into other types of content.
So super effective. A lot of companies are even using some of this in there, you know, doing on the podcast, putting video on social and then even writing up like question and answer type of blog, short form blog format into their website as well. Second one, so podcast or event series where you invite people from your target counts, obviously with no intent of selling them or doing anything like that. Again, this is not revolutionary, but people that do this really well, it becomes very effective.
And then this can also fuel content distribution on social. So the whole goal is you would need to structure like, you know, is it an interview series? Is it an event series where you guys talk about certain topics that is relevant to the person that you're the guess that you're having on? You definitely need to structure what that looks like, but just you even talking to people at your target accounts is going to give you better awareness.
And you distributing, hey, like I'm talking to this person at this company, distributing that to your other target accounts, the companies like them also goes a long way for engagement. Last one, this is, I mean, there's a third one, this is a free one. And it's very easy and effective, but participate in communities or forms that your customers already in. And again, this is more when your subject matter expertise or someone that has some subject matter expertise and can chat around whatever your prop is, can solve.
This is free. Obviously, it's not free rates, this person's time, but it's not a paid, it's not a paid play. And it can be very effective. People trust people in communities if they are providing value and not trying to sell them.
So again, it all comes back to intent. And then last on, I'm not least this one is super interesting. There's a couple of top brands that are doing this really well right now and I encourage you to go check them out, which is a brand ambassador or like B2B influencer partnership. Cognism is one brand.
You should go check out like they have a couple brand ambassadors, you see what they're doing for content and how they're distributing it and everything. It's really smart. One of their personas is sales and they have a brand ambassador on the sale side that is producing content that's valuable to their audience on their behalf. It's really basic and smart and genius at the same time.
So this is, this is one where you really have to identify the right person and it has to make sense and it's going to be a unique partnership and a unique set up to each company, but can be very effective, especially if you don't have that subject matter expertise in house or you're trying to build that in house. And my last thing is that none of these tactics are specific to ABM, but the distribution can be right. So obviously, you know, number two, invite people from your target accounts, sure, you can buy other people that are not from your target accounts, but all of this can create content that then you can distribute organically or through paid or through email or through other channels to your target accounts. And really, that's what I wanted to kind of get across.
And I hope that through that, you kind of now have some inspiration and understanding of how to create demand through your target accounts. And as always, if you have any follow up questions or want to chat more, find me on LinkedIn. Always happy to chat in the comments or to the end. All right, thank you.
All right. Thank you.