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Money is tight. Budgets are squeezed. You simply don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s decision time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the attendees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have chosen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of bin­ary terms. Brand or demand. Stra­tegic or tac­tical. Even mar­ket­ing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never bin­ary. Every piece of demand activ­ity you pro­duce is an embod­i­ment of your brand. Like­wise every brand com­mu­nic­a­tion should drive demand.

To focus on demand gen­er­a­tion for a moment – there is a tend­ency in the industry to think purely in terms of the num­bers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this com­mu­nic­a­tion achieve? It often leads to a nail the prob­lem, ham­mer the offer, for­get the brand approach (well, we did fol­low the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The prob­lem is that this tends to focus so heav­ily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end oblit­er­ates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we gen­er­ate demand and what it means for the brand, some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

For one thing, the cus­tomer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the prob­lems they face and less about simply what car­rot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the res­ults – we still need to hit the num­bers. But we begin to con­sider the leg­acy of what we cre­ate. What effect will it have on our repu­ta­tion? What will the recip­i­ents say to friends and col­leagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see some­thing from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand gen­er­a­tion here, the bene­fits also extend the other way. By mak­ing more brand-focused com­mu­nic­a­tion respons­ible for grow­ing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands try­ing to cap­ture lofty ideals that are irrel­ev­ant to the con­text their cus­tom­ers find them­selves in (the world peace syndrome).

The res­ult will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loy­alty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedi­ous topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many cli­ents have sep­ar­ated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­at­ive and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­ig­a­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pan­ies want them to take. Altern­at­ively, it could be that the cli­ent has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an external agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spect­ive and addi­tion­ally, external host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secur­ity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­at­ively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the primary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial customers.

Changes are afoot though, driven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop cre­at­ing cam­paign sites in favour of driv­ing people to their social media com­munit­ies on Face­book and You­Tube instead.

Uni­lever is fol­low­ing suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Shar­ing cam­paign last year were already driv­ing people to their You­Tube com­munity as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gear­ing up towards the trend: the latest news from Face­book is an Omni­ture part­ner­ship to provide (among oth­ers) cor­por­ate Face­book com­munit­ies the web ana­lyt­ics expec­ted before for cam­paign sites. Why the change? Well, mar­keters have had enough of cre­at­ing dis­pos­able cam­paign sites (which I whole­heartedly agree with) that are dumped after the com­pany has moved to the next quarter or the next big push they are focus­ing on. Secondly they want to drive people to exist­ing com­munit­ies where their audi­ence is already, in a mind­set ready to share and engage. I get that too, how­ever am in a quandary about driv­ing the organic rank­ings of social com­munity site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of cer­tain size and don’t neces­sar­ily sell online would want to do that.

We are test­ing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our cli­ents (cam­paign due to launch in a couple of months, will keep you updated on the pro­gress!): instead of the usual cor­por­ate land­ing page, we are cre­at­ing a socially super­charged aggreg­ator site. The site com­bines cli­ent and user cre­ated social con­tent from You­Tube, Face­book, Slide­share, Scribd etc with the client’s cor­por­ate con­tent (trial down­load offers, reviews, webinars and tutori­als). This way, the exper­i­ence for the user com­ing to the site is much more valu­able, the social back-links are build­ing the SEO rank­ings for the cli­ent, not for social sites and hope­fully, with the improved exper­i­ence, the con­ver­sion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of cam­paign sites is social and that long-term, “green” think­ing needs to be integ­rated into marketing.

Ever since we held the last (and first) European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back pro­cess on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see covered.

Per­haps pre­dict­ably, it was the day’s agenda and cal­ibre of the speaker line-up that attrac­ted most people to the first event. Not to men­tion it was free to our invit­ees. Of course our speak­ers scored very highly, but com­ing away from the day almost all com­men­ted on how much they’d val­ued the oppor­tun­ity to net­work. I’m sure they found it cath­artic to share some pain and under­stand that oth­ers out there were try­ing to over­come the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feed­back came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in put­ting together the agenda for the forth­com­ing summit:

1. People want more prac­tical con­tent and less of the the­or­et­ical. There’s an appet­ite for stor­ies of blood­ied knuckles, as well as a hun­ger for real learn­ings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very con­scious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side mar­keters telling their stor­ies. This time round we’re try­ing to encour­age our speak­ers to tell their suc­cess stor­ies, and what mis­takes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is com­ing along to tell the story of how he and other mar­keters trans­formed sap.com from a largely bro­chure­ware site to a ‘demand gen­er­a­tion machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more oppor­tun­ity to net­work and learn from their peers. We had some great table con­ver­sa­tions at lunch­time last time round, and we tried to allow gen­er­ous breaks. For the most part people res­isted the lure of their Black­Ber­ries, made con­ver­sa­tion and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit fur­ther and we’ve made the after­noon ses­sions entirely inter­act­ive. Attendees will have the oppor­tun­ity to attend three out of four work­shops on social media, accel­er­at­ing sales, using web­cast­ing and online video, and meas­ur­ing and optim­ising cam­paigns. We’re going to have people cap­tur­ing learn­ings from one group to another so that through the course of the after­noon we gen­er­ate a body of know­ledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the con­tent, there was a lot of call for tips on mak­ing the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and prov­ing a return on mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cas­sidy, is an ex IBM mar­keter now at European com­pany Step­Stone. In his pre­vi­ous life with a budget of mil­lions, his greatest chal­lenge used to be how to spend mar­ket­ing budget fast enough. He’s now in a pos­i­tion where every penny (cent) has to be accoun­ted for. Jim will talk about what he’s pri­or­it­ising, how he’s mak­ing a case for spend with the board, and how he’s mak­ing his mar­ket­ing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Job­bins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hope­fully that gives you some­thing of a taster for what’s to come on the 30^th April. If you need any more encour­age­ment, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stun­ning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remem­ber, we’re only accept­ing regis­tra­tions from client-side mar­keters from the B2B ser­vices, tech­no­logy and tele­coms sec­tors. No offence inten­ded to oth­ers, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hope­fully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twit­ter­ing kind, you can get reg­u­lar updates by fol­low­ing us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or sub­scrib­ing to the RSS feed