The changes taking hold in the world of demand generation have largely been driven by the way B2B buyers themselves are evolving.
We know that corporate buyers do a lot of the legwork for themselves, researching products and solutions long before they are ever ready to speak to a vendor.
Indeed, we know that buyers nowadays carry out roughly three-quarters of their research independently.
By the time they turn to a vendor to request a demo or find out more about a specific product or service, 94% of them have already shortlisted their preferred vendors.
As such, demand generation is moving increasingly up the funnel in a bid to try and win attention and gain the trust of increasingly savvy and research-focused buyers.
In this post, we take a look at how demand generation continues to adapt against the backdrop of changing patterns of B2B buying behaviour.
Brand as a Publisher
In a world where buyers are researching solutions long before they are ready to buy, you can’t afford to simply push out ungated research, blog posts and clever social media memes in the hope of eventually filling the CRM with leads.
Instead, lead generation is moving from a numbers game to a velocity one – it’s no longer good enough for a voluminous number of leads to be generated of varying quality, but rather a consistent pipeline of valuable accounts needs to be nurtured with quality material.
To this end, original research, practitioner-led podcasts, and truly useful tools and tips, all given away for free to chosen accounts, establish the vendor as not just a self-promoter but a source of authority and value.
Dark Social
B2B buyers are not looking for the hard sell in the early stages of a buying cycle, but they’re looking increasingly for input from their peers and users active in the online communities they frequent.
The trouble is that traditional third-party trackers like 6Sense don’t reach into niche community threads and online professional groups.
As such, a large part of demand generation going forward will be figuring out how to illuminate the conversations and buying signals that lie latent in online spaces like Slack communities, Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp groups.
The trick will be in not reading the signs but informing the debate that takes place there, by focusing on feeding these communities with valuable input and conversation points.
Hyper de-anonymisation
A mix of 6sense-style external account intelligence and traditional CRM-native automation, powered by agentic workflows, is also set to revolutionise demand generation going forward.
Marketing has already started to lean heavily on IP de-anonymisation and intent data tools like 6sense and Demandbase to understand which companies and who among their staff are browsing content and why.
In the future, there will be more joined-up thinking on this front as de-anonymisation is increasingly paired with agentic automated workflows based on the behaviour users exhibit,
From Funnel to Loop
The funnel is familiar to anyone in B2B sales, but that paradigm is set to change.
That’s because the funnel tends to be a linear, process-based paradigm that sees leads working their way down the funnel and eventually to a sale.
Going forward, a different geometry will be needed to describe the sales and marketing paradigm, as the funnel circles back on itself to become more looped and feedback-focused.
Atomised Content
The problem with the valuable content that the next generation of demand generation requires is that it’s costly to produce.
That’s why the next iteration of demand generation professionals is starting to embrace the idea of atomised content – giving away prized content but in an atomic way across a multitude of platforms so that it can be breadcrumbed across different channels.
That means that, for example, a workshop, podcast or industry report can be broken down into several LinkedIn posts, community discussions, or published piecemeal by a trusted content syndication specialist like Headley Media to establish affinity and authority across a multiplicity of channels and touchpoints.
Conclusion
Many of the changes that are set to revolutionise demand generation are nascent, and it will take the widespread rollout of AI and ML to really ramp up and supercharge the changes.
But the signs are already there that demand generation promises to move definitively to an AI-powered multichannel endeavour that learns, adapts, and optimises demand generation in real time across the entire funnel.
