Key Success Criteria for Marketers Interested in Brand-to-Demand (B2D) Tactics

Brand-to-Demand (B2D) is an integrated marketing strategy that promises to connect marketers’ branding and lead generation investments and provide clear attribution to the full-funnel tactics and channels leveraged to generate revenue.

For Demand marketers, measuring Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is straightforward—the connection clearly can be made to paid leads who convert from pipeline to opportunity and, ultimately, revenue outcomes. However, the opposite is true for brand marketers, many of whom rely on disconnected reach and frequency metrics (impressions and clicks) as well as soft ‘brand lift’ KPIs such as awareness, affinity, and consideration—measured by post-campaign surveys—to determine whether their campaigns were successful.

B2D is a better, smarter strategy that solves attribution disconnect. It allows marketing leaders to track account and prospect engagement from upper-funnel brand exposure to top/mid/bottom-of-funnel lead generation to pipeline through to deal closure.

Success hinges on several critical factors that must be in place for B2D to deliver maximum impact and results. Without these, marketers should steer clear or work with an experienced partner (like Activate) who can assess your readiness and collaborate to ensure your B2D investments are successful.

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Collaboration Means Co-investment

For B2D campaigns to have maximal impact, collaboration and co-investment are essential between brand marketers and demand marketers. When both parties bring investment weight to a B2D strategy, branding efforts can deliver meaningful daily frequency across target accounts, keeping brands top of mind among buying committee members, influencers, and key decision-makers throughout the campaign flight (whether monthly or quarterly). Lead generation programs, meanwhile, run in parallel to capitalize on the heightened brand awareness and accelerate time-to-pipe.

Working with the right media partner allows marketers to tie their brand and demand investments to quantifiable leads in the pipeline, through to deal and revenue conversion.

Meaningful Impact Requires Meaningful Budget

Dedicated brand and demand budget investments are crucial for B2D to be impactful and drive accelerated pipeline success. A rough media math calculation illustrates this well:

Consider a modest Target Account List (TAL) of 1,000 accounts, 15 personas, and a three-month flight: that combination equals 15,000 prospects a company needs to get the attention of and make an impression on every day for the next 90 days—15,000 B2B prospects who are bombarded endlessly with digital ads, email, and telemarketing calls.

Apply a conservative daily frequency of three to five ad exposures, and you’ll find this investment must deliver between 4.05 million and 6.75 million ad impressions across the target audience over the flight to have any impact. Pro tip: A three-to-five daily frequency cap pairs best with top-of-funnel lead generation that route to nurture, such as MQLs. However, for mid-to-bottom-funnel lead generation, such as HQL and SQL leads that route to Sales pros, a higher daily frequency (up to 2X) is recommended to surround/saturate and maximize recall.

Now apply a cost-per-thousand (CPM) media cost of $20—a reasonable ballpark for high-quality publisher websites guaranteed to be brand-safe and brand-suitable—for those ad exposures and you find the brand budget for a successful B2D effort starts at between $81,000 and $135,000.

If budget constraints are an issue, marketers are better served to skip spending on ad impressions that won’t have an impact and instead focus their investment on high-quality demand generation until the strategy and budget stakeholders better align on an integrated approach/collaboration.

Successful B2D Requires Partners with Full-Funnel Capabilities and Attention to Quality

Regardless of whether third-party cookies become less prevalent across the web, media companies that possess full-funnel capabilities, a permissioned audience, and the ability to engage prospects in an integrated fashion across brand and demand channels—and provide the associated brand-to-demand reporting—are increasingly important to marketers as internal pressure to justify paid media investment continues.

Without full-funnel partner alignment, it is next to impossible to know which leads from which programs also had a brand touch and to attribute brand investment to pipeline, opportunity, and revenue.

To help marketers in B2D media planning and brand budget allocation, full-funnel media partners should be able to quickly and easily run brand inventory availability using the marketer’s lead gen targeting details such as TALs, job functions, titles, and/or ICP/firmographic details to show how many prospects they can reach over the flight and at what frequency.

Additionally, media partners should be able to provide transparent publisher/site lists showing where the marketer’s ads will run, either on request or proactively, and support a marketer’s “allow lists.” These capabilities are table stakes in B2D, as is the ability to readily support all major third-party verification vendors that marketers use to track delivery, brand safety, ad fraud, and other critical quality metrics.

Finally, in addition to standard campaign and account-level performance, full-funnel B2D reporting must show marketers which leads from which programs also had a brand touch. This data is key for marketers to attribute media spend to pipeline, and equally valuable to the Sales teams as they score leads and prioritize their follow-up outreach.

The Power of B2D Offers a World of Possibilities

B2D is an empowering tactic, allowing marketing leaders and practitioners to up their game and achieve outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Marketers can build upon their initial B2D foundations, adding tactics like “always-on prospecting,” to engage with accounts to qualify and/or transition them for all funnel stages. Likewise, advanced marketers may leverage creative sequencing, along with progressive demand generation programs that send prospects down different lower-funnel paths based on how they engage. The possibilities are exciting when launched from a sound B2D foundation.

Whatever the strategy, be it single or multi-threaded, marketers are increasingly challenged to stay front and center in buyers’ minds as they navigate their buying journey and tie that media spend to revenue outcomes. They can rely on B2D to deliver on that mandate.

Build Your Brand Today – Find Out More About Activate’s Full-Funnel B2D

Engage buyers at the top of the funnel with a B2D discussion (and campaign) today. If you have any specific preferences or additional details you’d like to ask us about, don’t hesitate to contact us now.