What is your favorite childhood snack? What just gives you like a nostalgia bomb? Gushers. That was very just iconic every day after school.
I remember going home and opening up a pack of those, healthy pleasure for sure when I was a kid and probably still to this day if I allowed myself to buy them. Welcome back to Snacking Girl Snacks. I'm Steph Crenula and I'm here with Evan Hughes, the VP of Marketing for Refine Labs to talk about the Refine Labs philosophy on demand and media. So last time we defined demand generation, we defined creating, capturing and converting demand.
And today we're gonna talk about how B2B buying has changed. How has marketing changed? How has buying changed? What's the evolution of buying behavior been from your observation?
Really when we think about it and zoom out, whether it's B2B, B2C, access to readily available information is a primary driver change of buying behaviors. Especially for B2B, we think about technology forward companies, technology for buyers, it's at our fingertips every day. We can self-educate, we can connect with peers, we can read reviews, it's all at the access of whether it's our phones, our computers, our laptops, on the go, there's no longer dependency of a sales motion. So the buyers are actively able to do self-discovery.
So it had to shift, right? Our approach had to shift to marketing. In 2015, this whole concept of lead generation was all the hype, but that was because it was primarily that it could be measured. That's how people had to get their information through gated resources and teams with gate resources so they could have that conversation.
But now knowing that we no longer have to wait for that, we're able to surface it ourselves and identify different communities and peers. That's the evolution of buyers. And that's why our philosophy is so pointed to really educating through demand creation and demand capture and making sure that we are able to identify these individuals and or just message to them in these dark social communities. It's a driver of growth for us.
It's been a successful playbook that we've initiated is really identifying how to message correctly and strategically to these buyers. You touched a little bit on the independent buying process. Why is that so important? And how can you cater to that?
I feel like all of us do this to some degree, whatever purchase we're making. We read reviews, we talk to our friends who may be interested in product. The same is true when you think about a B2B software. A lot of the individuals in the decision making process are they're putting their neck out there, right?
Taking a risk of saying this is a solution that we want to pay, it's quite expensive. There are a lot of different factors that come into play. So when you think about like the independent buyer journey and how they're identifying, they want to have trusted resources to rely on so they can confidently go to their leadership team and or their peers or the board and say that I have a peer that has proven this to be effective for a similar ICP, where I found content that case studies that are effective and show like it's illustrating our similar problems and challenges. So the independent buying motion is really, how do you get your message as a brand in front of that individual, wherever they are at, authentically?
How do you kind of identify their problems and reach out to them with this is a case study, this is a review relevant to you knowing their ICP, you knowing their business, you know potentially their problems because you're looking across different industry verticals. So I think it's all about just kind of dissecting and understanding what the message is so that buyer just pulls in the information and is excited to learn. And you're getting to this concept, you've got all the buzz words in your series. So congratulations for being the definition guy.
What is dark social? So we've talked about the independent buying journey. How does dark social contribute to that? So I think the best way to think about dark social and I'm sure I'll get a little bit of flack for this to some degree, but it's really just a non-tractable or attributable environment where content's being shared.
So you know, in its simplest form, it's a dark environment. So it's similar like the dark web where you don't know where things are coming from, you haven't heard about it, things are being shared that aren't trackable because you know, UTM's are stripped or any sort of marketing attribution, tags are stripped from that as it moves between different communities. So that's kind of how I would define dark social for our philosophy of demand creation. We're very much centered around educating consumers as mentioned prior in feed.
So for all of our content that we put out there, it's for in feed consumption. And how to think about that is we are conditioned just as a generation of like kind of scrolling in social media, we're just looking at what different friends are doing, but then we move it to like a Facebook, or excuse me, from like a Facebook Instagram to more of a LinkedIn, which is heavily more B2B focus buyers, it's still the same mentality. There's kind of scrolling through what our peers doing, what our different industries leaders are talking about. We want to be able to reach those individuals with authentic content that they are just scrolling by and happens to catch their attention.
So like that's part of our core philosophy is creative is an absolute key component to success here, right? It has to catch attention. It has to be something that's interesting, but it also has to add value so that an individual doesn't click. Nobody wants to leave a platform to go learn about a 30, 40, $50, $50,000 service, but if it catches their attention consistently enough, then that's where we started to generate that interest.
That buzz, that's where demand generation and demand creation all kind of come together in an ecosystem. So as we roll that out with clients, or that kind of that mindset in there accepting that narrative of, oh, we can't necessarily track this, it's not attributable, it's harder for them to think about the success criteria there, but we have to change that narrative. And it's about getting that message in front of the right audience and looking at demographic, demographic insights from the creative that we put out there, it's educating them through different social channels, would be like the paid motion, but there's also elements of like organic that are very kind of tangential to like our philosophy overall is you have to be in these communities or buyers are buying. So we talk about the evolution of the buyer, well, the evolution of the buyer means they're in these different, you know, sub Reddit, private, sub Reddit groups, private meta groups, there in Slack communities, there are different zoom meetings that aren't necessarily tracked and word of mouth is such a key driver and growth for a lot of business.
So having an organic like flywheel of content that's educating and immersing themselves naturally in those environments is key. Amazing. Thank you Evan. Next time we are talking about results.
So I'm excited and ready for that, but we're gonna let you go for it today and we'll see you all next time. Awesome. Thanks everyone.