Balancing Brand Building and Demand Generation in B2B SaaS
TL;DR: The current state of B2B marketing, particularly in SaaS, can be characterized by rapid evolution, short-term focus, and prioritizing demand generation at the expense of brand building initiatives. Yet, lead generation and commonplace tactics are not working anymore. Saas companies require a new approach to marketing. This guide introduces the Brand & Demand Campaign approach, a strategic methodology for B2B SaaS marketing that balances long-term brand building with short-term demand generation.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
The importance of mental availability in B2B contexts
Leveraging category entry points to increase brand recall
The three-component framework behind the Brand & Demand Campaign approach
The guide offers marketing leaders actionable insight to transform your marketing strategy and achieve both short-term results and long-term brand value.
Introduction: The B2B SaaS Marketing Dilemma
For more than a decade, B2B SaaS marketing has been on a journey of evolution, constantly adapting to new technologies, changing buyer behaviors, and increasing pressure for measurable results. However, this evolution has led us to a crossroads where the very foundations of effective marketing are being challenged by short-term thinking and misaligned metrics.
If you've been listening to the chatter on LinkedIn over the past two years, you've likely noticed a growing dissatisfaction with traditional demand generation approaches. What was once a lead generation and nurturing function has now been rebranded into a full go-to-market (GTM) approach, often owning most of the budget, especially in smaller tech companies.
The trouble is, as an industry, we haven't prioritized brand building in decades, and so the realization of its importance hasn't hit. Instead, what is happening is that demand generation is filling that vacuum itself, assuming the missing brand marketing role. Which, while coming from a place of good intent, is ultimately a bad idea.
This guide aims to address this dilemma by introducing the Brand & Demand Campaign approach - a methodology that balances the need for short-term results with the crucial task of long-term brand building. By understanding and implementing this approach, which draws from established marketing principles and our experience at Storybook, B2B SaaS marketers can create sustainable growth strategies that align with fundamental marketing principles and economic realities.
Brand Marketing and Demand Generation: Complementary Forces
Brand marketing and demand generation can be seen as competing forces where one must be prioritized over the other. However, Mark Ritson coined the term “bothism”, urging marketers to find the AND rather than focus on the OR with brand marketing and demand generation. While brand and demand serve distinct purposes and operate on different timelines, effective marketing depends on leveraging them together to optimize their synergistic potential.
Rather than viewing brand marketing and demand generation as competing strategies, successful B2B SaaS companies recognize them as complementary forces. Here's how they work together:
1. Priming the Market: Brand marketing creates familiarity and positive associations, making prospects more receptive to demand generation efforts.
2. Increasing Conversion Rates: A strong brand can significantly boost the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns by increasing trust and perceived value.
3. Lowering Customer Acquisition Costs: As brand awareness grows, the cost per lead and customer acquisition cost for demand generation efforts often decrease.
4. Extending Customer Lifetime Value: Strong brands typically enjoy higher customer loyalty, increasing the long-term value of customers acquired through demand generation.
5. Enhancing Content Effectiveness: Brand-building content can support demand generation by providing context and credibility to more product-focused materials.
By integrating brand marketing and demand generation in a balanced approach, B2B SaaS companies can create a powerful flywheel effect. Strong brand presence makes demand generation more effective, while successful demand generation campaigns provide opportunities for brand reinforcement.
Remember, the goal isn't to replace demand generation with brand marketing, but to create a harmonious strategy where both elements support and amplify each other's impact.
The Science Behind Effective B2B SaaS Marketing
Before we dive into the Brand & Demand Campaign approach, it's crucial to understand the scientific foundations that underpin effective B2B marketing. These principles, drawn from respected marketing authorities and extensive research, challenge many of our industry's current practices.
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Byron Sharp's research, primarily outlined in "How Brands Grow," emphasizes the importance of mental availability - the likelihood of a brand coming to mind in buying situations. While his work primarily focused on B2C markets, the principles are equally applicable to B2B.
In the B2B SaaS context, mental availability means being easily thought of when a potential customer faces a problem your product solves. It's not about being top-of-mind all the time, but about being associated with key Category Entry Points - the moments or needs that trigger a buying journey.
This concept challenges the notion that we can create demand through persuasion. Instead, it suggests that our role is to ensure our brand is remembered when the need arises.
Additional reading: "How Brands Grow" by Byron Sharp
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Les Binet and Peter Field's seminal work, "The Long and the Short of It," provides crucial insights into the balance between short-term sales activation and long-term brand building. Their research shows that the most effective marketing strategies employ both approaches, but in different proportions depending on the industry and context.
For B2B SaaS, this often means a 50/50 split between brand building and sales activation. This balanced approach ensures both immediate results and long-term growth, challenging the current B2B obsession with short-term metrics and lead generation.
Additional reading: "The Long and Short of It" by Les Binet and Peter Field
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Category entry points (CEPs) are the cues or needs that prompt customers to choose a brand in a given category. In B2B SaaS, these might be specific pain points, business challenges, or situations that lead a company to seek out a solution like yours.
Understanding and leveraging CEPs is crucial for building mental availability. It's not enough to be known; you need to be known for solving specific problems. This principle challenges the generic "awareness" campaigns often seen in B2B marketing and pushes us to create more targeted, relevant messaging.
Additional reading: "How Brands Grow" by Byron Sharp
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Philip Kotler's work has long emphasized that B2B buying decisions, despite their apparent rationality, are heavily influenced by emotional factors. This insight challenges the purely feature-focused messaging often seen in B2B SaaS marketing.
Effective B2B marketing needs to address both the rational and emotional aspects of decision-making. This means going beyond product features to tell compelling stories, build trust, and create emotional connections with your brand.
Additional Reading: "Marketing Management" by Philip Kotler
By understanding these scientific principles, we can see why many current B2B SaaS marketing practices are falling short. The Brand & Demand Campaign approach, which we'll explore in the next section, is designed to align our marketing efforts with these fundamental truths about how B2B buying decisions are really made.
The Brand & Demand Campaign Approach
Drawing from established marketing principles and our experience at Storybook, the Brand & Demand Campaign approach addresses the shortcomings of current practices while leveraging the power of fundamental marketing science. This methodology consists of three key components that work together to create a balanced, effective marketing strategy.
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The first component of the Brand & Demand Campaign focuses on establishing strong brand foundations. This is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process of refining and reinforcing your brand's position in the market.
Key elements of this component include:
Identifying and mapping category entry points: This involves a deep dive into the moments, needs, and situations that prompt potential customers to seek solutions like yours. By understanding these entry points, you can ensure your brand is associated with the right cues in your customers' minds.
Conducting a comprehensive brand audit: This step involves assessing your current brand perception, messaging, and positioning. It's crucial to understand where you stand before you can effectively plan where you need to go.
Creating a mental availability blueprint: Based on your category entry points and brand audit, develop a plan for increasing your brand's mental availability. This blueprint should outline how you'll consistently and persistently show up in ways that reinforce your brand's association with key category entry points.
The goal of this component is to lay the groundwork for strong brand recall and preference. It's about ensuring that when a potential customer faces a problem your product solves, your brand comes to mind easily and positively.
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The second component focuses on designing integrated campaigns that build brand and drive demand simultaneously. This is where we put the principles of Binet and Field into practice, balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation.
Key elements of this component include:
Designing integrated campaigns: These campaigns should seamlessly blend brand-building elements with more immediate call-to-action components. The goal is to create a unified narrative across all touchpoints, reinforcing brand associations while also driving near-term results.
Crafting a unified narrative: Develop a core brand story that can be told consistently across all channels and touchpoints. This narrative should tie back to your key category entry points and emotional drivers identified in the Brand Foundations stage.
Balancing long-term brand metrics with short-term performance KPIs: Establish a measurement framework that captures both immediate campaign performance and longer-term brand health indicators. This balanced approach to measurement helps resist the temptation to focus solely on short-term metrics.
The Strategic Campaign Architecture component ensures that every marketing effort contributes to both immediate business needs and long-term brand building. It's about creating a cohesive, strategic approach that moves beyond tactical execution to drive sustainable growth.
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The final component of the Brand & Demand Campaign focuses on bringing your strategy to life through compelling content and effective activation. This is where the rubber meets the road, translating strategy into tangible marketing assets and activities.
Key elements of this component include:
Developing multi-format content aligned with category entry points: Create a diverse range of content types (blog posts, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, etc.) that address the key category entry points identified in the Brand Foundations stage. This content should reinforce your brand's association with these entry points while providing genuine value to your audience.
Leveraging thought leadership to build brand authority: Develop a thought leadership strategy that positions your brand as a trusted advisor in your space. This might involve ghostwriting articles for company leaders, creating in-depth industry reports, or participating in speaking engagements.
Optimizing paid media for both brand building and demand generation: Design paid media campaigns that balance reach (for brand building) with targeted activation (for demand generation). This might involve using broader targeting for brand awareness campaigns and more specific targeting for direct response efforts.
The Content Creation & Activation component ensures that your brand consistently shows up in relevant, valuable ways across multiple touchpoints. It's about creating a persistent presence that builds mental availability over time while also driving short-term engagement and leads.
The Brand & Demand Campaign Approach in Action: A Strategic Look at Starbucks’ Mental Blueprint for the Fall
Brand Foundations:
Think of back-to-school shopping. That’s a category entry point for Staples. The first of fall and a strong urge for pumpkin spice? That’s a category entry point for Starbucks. These brands have capitalized on these seasonal needs, so when they come around annually, their brand is at the top of consumer’s minds for fulfilling the need for fresh notebooks and comforting pumpkin drinks.
Strategic Campaign Architecture:
Starbucks used Pumpkin Spice Lattes as a category entry point for creating a brand association with fall. This year’s campaign messaging features taglines like “yays for fall days” and “fuel your fall”, which not only drive customers to purchase a PSL today, but also reinforce Starbucks as THE place for fall-themed drinks.
Content Creation & Activation:
To fuel your fall, Starbucks launched in-store advertising, social media pushes with influencers, and targeted paid media, as well as leveraging email and app notifications for brand loyal customers. Keeping the exact date each year a secret generates interest from news outlets to cover the arrival of the PSL.
Through this activation, Starbucks’ continues to solidify their brand as the go-to destination for PSL, while also driving immediate sales once the drink officially launched. A balanced approach to brand and demand marketing.
Implementing the Brand & Demand Campaign
Implementing the Brand & Demand Campaign approach requires a shift in mindset and often, organizational structure. This section will guide you through the key considerations and steps for putting this methodology into practice
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One of the biggest challenges in implementing a balanced brand and demand generation strategy is overcoming internal resistance to brand investment. This resistance often stems from a focus on short-term metrics and a misunderstanding of how brand building contributes to long-term growth.
To address this:
Educate stakeholders on the principles outlined in Section 2, particularly the work of Binet and Field on the balance of brand and activation.
Present case studies of successful B2B companies that have invested in brand building.
Propose a phased approach to implementing brand initiatives, starting with small, measurable projects.
Remember, changing organizational mindsets takes time and persistence. Be prepared to continually advocate for the importance of brand building.
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The Brand & Demand Campaign approach requires close collaboration between brand, content, and demand generation teams. In many organizations, these functions operate in silos, which can lead to disjointed messaging and inefficient use of resources.
To create alignment:
Establish cross-functional teams or regular meetings between brand, content, and demand generation teams.
Develop shared KPIs that reflect both brand and demand generation goals.
Create a unified content calendar that balances brand-building and activation content.
The goal is to create a seamless experience for your audience, where brand messaging reinforces demand generation efforts and vice versa.
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One of the challenges of brand building is that results often take longer to materialize than traditional demand generation efforts. It's crucial to set realistic expectations with stakeholders about the timeline for seeing results.
Consider:
Establishing a mix of short-term and long-term KPIs to track progress.
Implementing regular brand health surveys to measure changes in brand perception over time.
Using proxy metrics (like share of voice or branded search volume) to indicate brand growth in the shorter term.
Be transparent about the fact that significant brand impact may take 6-12 months or more to become evident, but that these efforts lay the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth.
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Effective measurement is key to the success of the Brand & Demand Campaign approach. This requires going beyond traditional demand generation metrics to capture the full impact of your marketing efforts.
Consider implementing:
Brand health metrics: Awareness, consideration, preference
Mental availability metrics: Brand associations with category entry points
Content engagement metrics: Time on page, return visits, social shares
Demand generation metrics: MQLs, SQLs, conversion rates
Long-term business impact metrics: Customer lifetime value, market share growth
By blending these metrics, you can create a holistic view of your marketing performance that reflects both short-term results and long-term brand building.
The Takeaway: By implementing all three components of the Brand & Demand Campaign approach, B2B SaaS marketers can create a balanced strategy that drives both immediate results and long-term growth. This methodology aligns with the fundamental principles of how B2B buying decisions are made, setting the stage for sustainable success in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Because brand building can take significant time, do not push it off until short-term metrics are reached. There are small, impactful ways to implement brand initiatives while still driving short-term results.
Conclusion: Embracing the Brand & Demand Mindset
The Brand & Demand Campaign approach represents a fundamental shift in how we think about B2B SaaS marketing. By balancing brand building with demand generation, we can create sustainable, long-term growth while still driving short-term results.
Key takeaways:
Shift from short-term tactics to long-term brand building: Recognize that sustainable growth comes from building mental availability and brand strength over time.
Embrace the competitive advantage of a strong, mentally available brand: In a crowded SaaS marketplace, a strong brand can be your most powerful differentiator.
Balance brand and activation in your campaigns: Use the principles from Binet and Field to create integrated campaigns that build brand and drive demand.
Focus on category entry points: Ensure your brand is associated with the key moments and needs that trigger buying journeys in your category.
Measure holistically: Implement a measurement framework that captures both short-term performance and long-term brand health.
Taking the first steps towards implementing the Brand & Demand Campaign approach may seem daunting, but the potential rewards are significant. Start by educating your team and stakeholders on these principles, then begin with small, measurable initiatives that demonstrate the power of balanced brand and demand generation efforts.
Remember, this is not about abandoning demand generation, but about creating a more effective, sustainable marketing approach that drives both immediate results and long-term growth. By embracing the Brand & Demand Campaign mindset, you're positioning your B2B SaaS company for success in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Additional Resources
To further your understanding and implementation of the Brand & Demand Campaign approach, consider the following resources:
Useful Tools and Templates
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About Storybook Marketing
Developed by former in-house marketing leaders and built with your business in mind, Storybook Marketing solves your most pressing marketing challenges through custom consulting. We ensure your brand is a natural choice when buyers are actively seeking solutions, while enhancing your current marketing efforts through our Brand & Demand Approach.