The New Normal for Marketing and Paid Media

by Hanna Buckland | Aug 23, 2022

The term “Demand Gen” has been thrown around several times in our Syrup Slack channels and has appeared frequently on LinkedIn influencers’ posts over the past few months. Why?

This method of marketing is more focused on meeting the customer where they are – creating the realization of needs, guiding them through how their needs are met through the benefits of your product or service, and ultimately driving pipeline metrics for business growth. Hubspot provides an excellent definition for demand gen in their playbook: “Demand generation marketing creates the need for a product or service with the goal of passing qualified leads to the sales team.” This changes the way we look at paid media.

Paid media has traditionally been leveraged in a direct response or lead generation strategy. You go right at the target with a form or download and try to capture information, an email, etc.

Paid Media in demand gen, on the other hand, is about pushing the right content, ungated, to that audience to establish trust and a need for your product or service.

Here’s what it might look like when creating a demand gen campaign on paid media. 

Your audience needs time

And you (the marketer) need time to understand your audience. It’s valuable to first be well-versed in who your audience is, where the gaps in their processes are, and deeply understand how you can fill those gaps. The sales team and Google Analytics are AMAZING at giving context and detailed demographics of who and what your audience is, and what their pain points are. 

Your paid media campaign should focus on spreading initial awareness to your audience at first, creating a context of who you are and what you do. No need to push downloads or meeting requests down their throat, until you feel confident that you have that awareness and outreach.

Learn from that initial data

Once your paid media campaign has had time to allow users to learn more about your brand and/or product/service, you can utilize retargeting to provide further credibility to this more engaged audience. This encompasses statistics, showing off why and how what your company does provides value and fixes the common problems in the targeted industry.

This looks like gathering audience information to further push them down the funnel. This could include: 

• Delivering valuable content pieces (i.e. white papers)
• Pushing for email subscription enrollment
• Boosting relevant blog posts

Nurture your audience

At this point, your audience has been introduced to your brand, you’ve learned from the data, and you’ve continued to provide them value. Likely, your audience has seen a landing page you created for them, but maybe they’re not converting (even though the data shows they’re clearly interested since they are downloading and viewing your resources). At this point, it’s important to keep your audience small and clearly defined. Continue to focus on delivering more valuable content that you might have previously gated (webinar clips, surveys, assessments, etc.).

This should be a highly nurtured audience at this point. You want this audience to be at the point where they have seen your paid media ads 5-10 times. You need to clearly guide them to understand why they need your solution. You should see higher levels of engagement, conversions, and clicks. At this point, your audience is engaged and aware, likely ready to speak to sales, visit the website and/or immediately click that contact button. 

It’s important to remember that paid media in demand gen is not a rushed process, but a series of phases that lead your audience into an understanding of who you are. It’s a process that should be constantly improved upon and consistently repeated. It’s a continuous cycle of showing your audience their needed solution and showing them why you’re the best fit. 

When done right, paid media in demand gen is powerful.