How to balance Brand vs. Demand
There are few B2B marketing leaders who haven’t encountered the dilemma of Brand vs. Demand.
Conventional wisdom suggests that these efforts should be employed separately at different stages of the business lifecycle.
Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, disputes this wisdom.
In his recent conversation with Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO here at Dreamdata, Andrew offered a compelling case for thinking about brand and demand as “two sides of the same coin” which can be used concurrently from the earliest stages.
In this post, I’m covering the biggest takeaways from the conversation:
What is the difference between Brand and Demand marketing?
Brand and Demand scale differently.
How to split the marketing budget between Brand and Demand.
Demand marketing: 3 key elements
With competition increasing, make the brand muscle work.
Producing WTF type of reactions.
3 real-life examples of WTF brand marketing efforts.
Key takeaway: start thinking about bold, thoughtful, ‘WTF’ actions you can (cheaply) take to make your brand stand out from the crowd.
What is the difference between Brand and Demand marketing?
While there are tons of Brand and Demand definitions out there, Andrew considers the split more as a timeframe to show results than anything else.
Demand marketing - definition
According to Andrew, Demand is “revenue marketing”. Which entails, identifying an ideal customer profile in a serviceable market and then “influencing them to sign up for your service or product, or to raise a hand to speak with a sales rep and then making sure that you can move prospect accounts towards that process of decision at scale.”
A process which is normally short-term, i.e. you've got to produce results in a quarter or a couple of quarters.
Brand marketing - definition
Branding is “positioning yourself in front of a wider ideal market for a year or two's time.” Efforts here are more about how you're perceived and valued by the wider market, including your target market - and beyond.
It's what people think you represent and it normally has a longer-term payoff on the investment, “although it certainly helps with demand.”
Brand and Demand scale differently.
Demand scales linearly
Demand generation scales in a more linear fashion, with a reasonably linear correlation between investment and growth.
“When it comes to your demand infrastructure and your target account go-to-market, it scales reasonably linearly with your growth.”
Brand scales exponentially
Brand investments tend to be a slow burn, more of an exponential curve. You plant some seeds now and they can pay off big later.
And so it's those outside results. And fundamentally, the way I think about it is that if you don't invest in your brand, you're always going to be paying the price in your CAC.
”So if you invest in your brand that pays off, it'll lower your customer acquisition cost for eternity. And if you don't always be struggling with that kind of that payback period because you haven't made those investments upfront.”
But how do you go about working with these? How should you split your efforts, and crucially, your budget?
How to split the marketing budget between Demand and Brand?
The big caveat is that how you split your budget depends a lot on your business. However, there are some constants in the B2B space.
According to Andrew, how you split the marketing budget between Brand and Demand depends on three primary elements:
1. Business Stage
At the early stage, you should be spending almost all of your budget on demand because that's how you get an instant response to and prove the validity of the entire business. i.e. the value proposition, your product market fit, etc.
“It's no good at the early stage unless you're extremely well-capitalized and can take a long-term view.”
For Andrew:
Early-stage (during his time with Idio), it was approx. 80% demand budget /10 brand budget /10% tooling budget.
Later-stage (e.g. Paddle at the time of writing), the split is about 60% sitting in the demand function, 30% sitting in the brand teams, and then probably 10% or so for tooling.
2. Audience size
You need to keep in mind the size of your audience. The larger this is, the greater the long-term return of any brand exercise.
So, ”if you are a business where you serve a large audience rather than a small subset of that audience, that's where it’s worth making larger investments into your brand play earlier.”
Which means:
The bigger your audience the larger your brand investment, and the earlier you can start.
3. Justification
No matter what, you need to justify your spend to the C-suite.
You can read more about planning your marketing budget here.
On the demand side of things, with its short-term return, this is easier to do. Brand, is much harder.
However, Andrew points out that demand, in proving the validity of your go-to-market, audience, etc. can be used to ‘earn the right’ to longer-term brand marketing.
Demand marketing: 3 key elements
On the demand side of things, Andrew describes his demand marketing team at Paddle as consisting of three key elements:
BDRs sit in marketing
“Having BDRs in marketing because it means that everybody in the whole marketing function understands the output of their work in the quarter is producing a number of opportunities with a pipeline dollar value.”
Demand team working on paid and emails
The demand team works on campaigns that are primarily distributed by across: paid, paid social, emails and newsletters.
Field marketing to shmooses in person
The field marketing team works with pop-up events, dinners, drinks, etc. both virtually and physically around the world.
It’s here too that there is a cross-over with Brand.
So let’s move onto Brand.
With competition increasing, make the brand muscle work!
“There are companies launching into every one of our spaces every day. Competition is increasing, whether it is your air, your no code or any of the other kind of platforms, the shoulders of giants that people can build upon launching a product is becoming easier and easier, and therefore the pressure is on distribution, the pressure is on marketing.”
Andrew’s colleague Patrick Campbell makes another great point about growing competition in his fascinating convo which you can find here —>
It’s because of this competition that we are starting to see a shift towards “a stronger brand muscle” in many businesses.
It’s impossible to cut through the noise by running “the same outbound SDR cadence playbook alongside another 200 stores that are doing the same thing.” |
Instead, your brand marketing should focus on:
being helpful
producing a quality experience
providing insight for the customer
Think of brand as trust
“I think about brand in the same way as I think about trust. It's having a positive experience consistently and if you consistently have a positive experience with Paddle, then you are much more likely to firstly get into the consideration phase with Paddle and also you're likely to move faster through those steps.”
And this experience spans the every interaction target accounts have when engaging with the business as a whole - not the product proposition, not the pricing page, but the entirety of interactions.
This kind of quality, helpful brand experience the way we are being helpful then enables you to demand reciprocation over time, i.e. getting over the line, and so help increase those conversion rates through the funnel.
Brand makes Sales’ work easier
“I know that my sales team would be utterly delighted if every prospect they call, pick up the phone or get on that meeting saying, Hey, I love your Paddle content.
If that was the reaction in that first meeting, my Sales team would have it easy.”
And, making your Sales team’s life easier means more deals, more value, more revenue, and ultimately more budget to carve an even bigger slice of the digital mindshare.
But brute force and providing quality brand experience alone doesn’t get you anywhere near the top of the brand game.
For that, you need thoughtfulness and boldness.
Producing WTF type of reactions with thoughtfulness and boldness
One of the things that Andrew wants to constantly be doing at Paddle, is producing things that get a “WTF type of reaction” from the market.
This is not only because it makes the brand engagement more memorable for your audience, but because there are very few marketers that have the kind of custom thought going into brand experiences at the moment.
This makes the effort stand out that much more from the crowd and therefore doubly worthwhile.
There are two critical ingredients for this according to Andrew:
Thoughtfulness - the customised angle that is targeted to your audience and their brand experience.
Boldness - being overtly different and experimenting with extraordinary activities.
“Sometimes this is actually about boldness. It's about kind of overcoming the fear of what will happen if that fails. You know, I think things like that documentary, things like that, little custom audio rap, things like a podcast, an event, things like putting bit extra time into a swag, into swag design.”
Here are three real examples of WTF moments the team at Paddle have ran to get you inspired 👇
Real-life examples of Brand tactics from Paddle
Having a little bit more insight and a little bit more thoughtfulness and not really much more budget.
Example 1: Behind-the-scenes documentary of acquisition
“This year would be when we acquired profit. Well we filmed the documentary. It was three behind the scenes in the deal room and the due diligence with the lawyers talking about price, talking about the negotiation, the human story, because our target customer is the CEO or executive of a software business that probably either have been through acquisition or wants to go through acquisition.
And so by revealing behind the scenes what's going on there, it's helpful, it's inspirational, it's useful. Does it tell them anything about Paddle? No, not at all. But it starts their journey with our business and it's being thoughtful. It didn't cost that much, but it's being thoughtful based on a fundamental insight.”
Example 2: Setting up podcast stage at their SaaStock booth
“At SaaStock over in Dublin, we did something that the ProfitWell team have been doing for a few years. We had a podcast booth, a stage at our booth, and so instead of us hard pitching a bunch of people, we had the top keynote speakers from the event come and sit down and have a 1 to 1 conversation with Patrick or Neil, our product manager or myself, about a topic that was interesting and gathered people who were wandering around looking for coffee to go and deep dive into a specific subject and ask questions.”
Example 3: Surprise pre-webinar rap
“Another silly example. I did a webinar a while back with Adam Schoenfeld, who's a researcher, you know, three-time SaaS founder turned researcher of PLG. And so in order to make that webinar a bit different and special, we custom created an audio intro like a rap about PLG that was funny tongue in cheek.
It was done by a producer I knew, and we played it before the webinar. I didn't tell him about it and played it before the webinar started. Just as a way of livening up the audience right? Again, didn't cost that much money. It just needed a bit of insight on what we were talking about and a bit of creativity and thoughtfulness.”
Bonus (Dreamdata) Example: Memes on Linkedin
We’ve had huge success with our LinkedIn memes. These have now become part of the brand marketing motion at Dreamdata and hinge on two main elements:
Humour
Relevant (targeted to our audience of B2B go-to-market teams)
You can read all about our meme story in this post —>
