Liam Moroney

When it comes to email personalization, the standard that audiences expect is much higher than the standard that B2B usually engages with. Simply having tokens like name, company, etc isn't personalization, it's automation and tokens. Personalization is about relevancy in the message, and feeling like it wasn't sent to 1,000 other people with a word or two removed. This doesn't have to mean that everyone gets their own email, but rather one that fits their journey. A relevant message based on timing or engagement matters just as much in feeling tailored to the person. Think less about how do I show them words that will catch their attention, and focus on showing that the message was sent to them because of them.

A very important lesson in demand gen is that it is not the result of a tool. Running a demand generation program can and usually does depend heavily on the resources you already have. The secret to finding and generating interest doesn't come from tools, especially the ones that promise it, like intent tools. These are all additional ways to improve your chances but they are not silver bullets. Those who look to tools as a solution generally underperform against those who roll up their sleeves and learn about their target audience. Once you have a good foundation, you can scale it with tools, but they should follow strategy and not create it.

In programs that we audit for customers, a very common scenario we come across is either target audiences that are too broad, or too many different audiences. You may have a large TAM (Total Addressable Market) but that doesn't mean you can deploy your budget to that entire group. Demand gen spend, especially now that the VC funding is harder to get, means that your budget has to go far, but it also has to go deep. You can't create awareness with a budget that is thinly spread across a very wide selection of audiences. It's much better to take a small subset of that group through a complete journey with you than to get all of them to see just one ad.

The idea of optimizing content for SEO can be intimidating for a lot of marketers, and I've certainly fallen victim. There are a lot of ways to apply technical SEO skills to content that make it a specialized field, but for many teams there is huge benefit in basic optimization which is readily available in free or low-cost tools. For example, just following the guidance of a free CMS plugin like Yoast can help make sure you do the minimum to make your content searchable on Google and Bing, and that act alone can produce dramatic improvement - especially if you're accidentally made your content hidden from search engines by forgetting basic tags and fields.

Repurposing content requires a clear understanding of the type of content that works on different channels. There's an easy narrative around repurposing that talks about all the ways you can carve up big content assets like podcast interviews, but a key part of repurposing is actually about fitting the content to the channel. The kind of content that works on Twitter/X is not the same as what works on LinkedIn, and before you try to simply push as much content onto each channel, stop to see what content types work best first. That will help you develop a strategy that's rooted in the audience and channel, and not in maximizing the output of content production - a common pitfall for marketing teams.

I would caution leaders starting too quickly when it comes to metrics and content within a demand generation program. The danger that I've seen frequently is treating each piece of content as a separate tactic that either succeeds or fails. What ends up happening here is three things: 1. You begin to find ways of generating bigger metrics and risk gating content that doesn't warrant it 2. You create a program filled with bottom of funnel content for leads/demo generation, but it ultimately doesn't succeed without the top of funnel content that paves the way 3. Budget inevitably gets over-allocated towards the content that generates the biggest results. In truth, content works when in concert with other content.