When looking to grow your brand within the scientific community, is it better to focus on brand or demand marketing?
With digital ad spend reaching $455.30 billion globally in 2021, demand generation remains a key driver of actionable sales. But when it comes to long-term sales success, brand awareness is also a crucial component that shouldn’t be overlooked.
In fact, demand marketing and brand marketing are becoming increasingly more interdependent — and equally as relevant. So, as part of a well-rounded, full-funnel marketing strategy, businesses should employ both demand generation and brand activation campaigns.
Demand generation initiatives, such as product pushes, help to generate leads that fill your pipeline, while brand awareness advertising keeps your brand top of mind. Leveraging a strategic mix of both — boosted by the right tech solutions and marketing channels — is a powerful strategy to drive leads and sales.
A LinkedIn study shows that B2B marketing works best when brand building and demand generation are working together. When the balance is right, each enhances the other. The best results seem to be achieved when a bit over half (around 54%) of the budget is allocated to demand marketing, with the remainder allocated to brand awareness.
So how can you use demand marketing and brand marketing to ensure that researchers recognize your brand and are aware of your offerings?
Brand awareness marketing increases the likelihood that scientists recognize your brand, products, or services. In this case, success is measured by brand recognition and loyalty.
Having a clear brand positioning and successful brand awareness marketing builds mental availability. Mental availability is the probability that a prospect will think of your brand in a buying situation and is incredibly important, acting as brand equity —advertising works better when there are existing memory structures in viewers’ heads. This means that succeeding in sales isn’t just about your physical products; it’s also a question of gaining the valuable mental real estate required to keep your brand front of mind.
For B2B brands, lack of brand awareness is a much bigger problem than negative perception. So, higher brand recognition means that more users will likely buy your product.
Successful brand activation campaigns help you:
Given the increased importance of building trust and relations with prospects and clients in recent years, brand awareness is crucial in the path to conversion.
However, a study found that 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your products. Therefore, if you are running demand generation campaigns but preaching to the non-interested, your short-term activation messages are not only ineffective — they lead to budget waste.
Brand-building takes time, consistency and repeated exposure. It works on an emotional level, engaging the audience so they pay attention and remember your brand. Think of it as more of a marathon than a sprint.
You can build a loyal following by positioning yourself as a thought or category leader. Focus on creating and maintaining a trustworthy reputation by offering valuable content over time.
Promoting your content to a scientific audience with a brand awareness campaign on ResearchGate, combined with sales activation, can lead to a CTR 10 times higher than the industry average.
Demand generation focuses on getting traffic, nurturing leads, and passing qualified leads to the sales team. The goal is to move prospects through the buyer’s journey until they become qualified leads.
Campaigns are usually optimized towards short-term KPIs such as conversion rate, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and customer lifetime value (CLV) — and ROIs can be high.
A report from the University of South Australia found that when brands stop advertising for a year or more, sales often decline year-on-year (YoY) — 16% after one year and 25% after two. Small brands typically suffer greater declines than bigger brands. The reasoning for this is that “without refreshment, mental availability erodes”.
Simply put: out of sight, out of mind. During gap periods, prospects are less likely to think about your brand and more easily swayed by a competitor’s advertising – especially those who are considered “light brand buyers”. Typically, they make up the biggest group of any brand’s customer base and are the most important group for brand growth.
So, to summarize; mental availability via brand equity means that customers are aware of your brand, while product pushes through demand generation advertising help you acquire customers.
This means that demand generation is essential for driving customer acquisition, while continuing to build brand awareness.
To avoid any losses in market share due to decreased mental availability, running targeted demand generation campaigns on a niche platform like ResearchGate can connect your product with its ideal audience, helping you make the most of your marketing budget and boosting conversion rates.
The average length of pre-purchase for researchers is at least 1-2 months: 45% for consumables, and 65% for lab equipment. So, campaigns must start early and continue working throughout the customer journey, providing full funnel coverage. Also, the messaging should change throughout the funnel based on the action you want your audience to take.
For example, start by targeting scientists with a series of personalized in-network product ads to increase product or brand awareness. Then, follow up with sponsored content — perhaps an article, webinar, or video content — to generate leads.
ResearchGate Marketing Solutions proprietary data, which analyzed thousands of marketing campaigns across ads and emails, reveals that lead generation campaigns are the most popular on the platform. In 2021 the majority of advertisers ran lead generation campaigns, making up nearly 22% of all campaigns. These were followed by on-site leads campaigns at almost 17%, and off-site leads campaigns at 11%.
Meanwhile, just over 10% of total ResearchGate marketing campaigns in 2021 were optimized toward generating traffic, followed by awareness at nearly 9%; clicks at nearly 7%, and downloads/sign-ups at just over 5%. Finally, sponsored events and external landing pages make-up the smallest percentage of all marketing campaigns. The remaining data analyzed is made up of other types of campaigns.
Ultimately, reaching scientists at the right time and in the right context makes your content relevant to their research activity. It leads to higher click-through rates (CTR), greater customer engagement, and higher conversion rates down the sales funnel.
Successful B2B brands must find interesting ways to mix brand and demand. They should design campaigns that resonate emotionally, reinforce mental availability at moments of consideration, and provide compelling reasons to act.
Both brand awareness and demand generation campaigns share the same goal: to drive action. Brand awareness advertising keeps your brand top of mind, while product pushes (demand) help you generate leads to fill your pipeline.
Employing the right mix of both in a holistic way, supported by innovation and trusted marketing partners, enables you to successfully scale your brand and achieve your business goals within the scientific community.
Connect with scientists where they do their research online, on the most visited platform in science worldwide, via ResearchGate Marketing Solutions.
