I’m not going to go into the whole “demand creation versus demand capture” debate here. We’ve all talked about it enough, and most of the arguments center around semantics and not first principles.
What is true and somewhat common sense: at any given moment, some percentage of your target customers is in-market, meaning they are actively looking for a solution like yours, and the rest are not in-market but may eventually be.
So, for the sake of this essay, when I say something like “demand creation,” I mean targeting out-of-market people, and when I say something like “demand capture” or “harvesting demand,” I mean targeting in-market people.
What we focus on at Omniscient, principally, is driving performance for clients by first saturating in-market surface areas and the middle to bottom-of-the-funnel.
We then work our way upwards to comprehensive customer journey coverage, TOFU education content, etc. (this is a general heuristic – every engagement is different).
An isolated focus on BOFU SEO traffic, however, is tough if not impossible nowadays, especially if you’re an earlier stage challenger brand.
It’s actually much easier to drive performance with SEO (and ads and sales and any performance channel) when the brand side is locked in.
Thus, the preeminence of the “barbell portfolio strategy.”
But it’s also true that you can crush it at targeting out-of-market audiences and still fail to capture demand and revenue when they’re in-market. Happens all the time. Eric Doty left a comment on Josh’s post above to that effect:
“Also common: company creates a big linkedin brand -> creates category awareness -> people search the category -> whoever’s winning search goes into the consideration set.”
So for those with solid brand efforts who want to be more salient to in-market buyers, where do you start?
Mindshare and positioning
Foundationally, you have to understand the category you play in. This is a function of positioning, namely the defining of your “market category.”
Positioning is too deep of a topic to cover in this essay (listen to April Dunford’s podcast), so I’ll simply say that clear is better than clever, even if you’re “creating a category” (and I’ll cover an example of a client who is doing just that and how SEO can play into it).
For example, I could define Omniscient’s category as something like “Holistic Audience-Centric Organic Growth Marketing,” but no one understands that, there’s no budget for it, and no one is searching for it.
So while our messaging can hinge on differentiation and get a bit creative, we ultimately sell as an SEO agency (and sometimes a content agency, though to a lesser degree).
What you want is mindshare in relation to a big category. Salesforce = CRM, Mailchimp = email marketing, Unbounce = landing pages, Ahrefs = SEO platform.
Threshold effects and repetition
In your demand creation or brand marketing efforts, it’s important to understand “threshold effects.”
It takes several messages, usually heavily repetitive on the same thing, to rise above the noise and cause someone to think “huh, that’s interesting,” or “wow, that sounds awesome, I should look into that.”
This is true even in “classic” channels like SEO (and was, in fact, the central thesis to the Surround Sound SEO strategy).
My co-founder David mentioned this on our last podcast. He had seen a brand come up over and over when searching in a specific topic area and eventually was triggered to sign up for their email list.
Assuming you’ve got your market category, messaging, and mindshare initiatives down, how can you capture some of this buzz and recognition when buyers are, indeed, in-marketing? I’ll focus on SEO strategies here.
SEO as a landing pad
I like the idea of SEO as a “landing pad,” something that kicks off the customer journey and has the potential to bring readers down the funnel to more interesting and product-centric content.
John-Henry Scherck talked about this in his Goldenhour presentation. Effectively, you can get in front of an audience who are already searching for a topic, capture their information and turn them into an “owned audience,” and then write whatever you want on your newsletter to make them love you more.
As he said, “SEO is a landing pad, and if all you can do is send people to more SEO content – YNGMI.” I agree.
Inversely, it’s also effective to look at search as a way to “harvest” some of the demand you’re creating on social media or podcasts or whatever.
If you spend a ton of time and resources talking about “data contracts” on LinkedIn and at conferences, for example, it would naturally be a good thing to rank for this term when someone searches for it.
Gated assets and the value of an email address
Next note here: it’s pretty valuable to have someone’s email address.
“The reports of [the MQL’s death] are greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain (probably)
Certainly, downloading an ebook on “the ultimate guide to content marketing” does not indicate that someone is ready for sales to contact them.
But so what?
They’re on your email list now, and now you can do all kinds of fun segmentation, targeting and personalization, nurturing, and continuing campaigns so that when they are in marketing, you’re the obvious choice and right in front of them.
You can use additional website behavior signals to trigger a sales email or to personalize a website experience to drive a demo or product signup.
So don’t sleep on gating some assets or collecting emails (through valuable content of course!)
Don’t overthink it: Pain points and BOFU saturation
One way we harvest demand is by saturating the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel.
There’s a lot of ambiguity in those terms, so in layman’s terms, you should try to be found for these types of search queries:
- Jobs to be done (“I’m trying to do something”)
- Product queries (“help me find a product in this category”)
Product queries are pretty straightforward, though still underinvested in.
- “Best [category] software”
- “[competitors] alternatives]”
- “[competitors] vs [us]”
Jobs to be done are equally lucrative. Because AI content writing was relatively new when we began the engagement, we indexed heavily on these queries when working with Jasper.
Think and ask and research, “what would someone want to accomplish that is related to our product?”
An AI writer can write, well, anything, so the surface area is pretty big:
- how to write a brochure
- LinkedIn bio examples
- Rewrite paragraph
Even better if you can build product-led tools or templates for these types of queries.
For an agency like Omniscient, we want to be present when someone is searching for an SEO agency, but also when someone is searching for high intent MOFU queries like “SaaS SEO.”
And while people talk smack on “what is X” keywords, those can be incredibly valuable, too. Especially in technical and emerging spaces.
I asked Ryan Baum his thoughts on this topic earlier today, and he gave me the example of searching for something like Clearscope, which is pretty technical and could be found by several routes and phrases, especially when on-page SEO tools like this were new and not well understood.
His first thought would be to hinge on their core messaging, which is likely “content optimization.” So owning that term is not a bad idea (plug: we’ve got a great guide on content optimization).
Ask; what do people already know they want and how can you tap into that? Wade Foster talked about this when building out Zapier’s GTM:
“We knew that people already wanted integrations, right? Integrations was the thing when Zapier started. I remember going to basecamp.com and you could go to their ‘extras’ page and see cool little ways that you could find little add-ons for Basecamp that made Basecamp extra good.
The fact that people were already searching for integrations and proactively seeking out solutions for us, the marketing piece didn’t have to be as novel. It was like people are already looking for this stuff. It’s just not provided very well…I really looked at the initial parts of Zapier as demand harvesting more than demand generation.”
It’s boring, but really effective. The demand has already been created, you just need to solve the problem that people want solved through your content.
When creating a new category: a client case
We’ve got an awesome client who is building out a new paradigm within the broader data quality and data operations categories.
The terms they care to own are small, but growing, due to their amazing thought leadership. They literally wrote the book on the term they want to own.
Everything they’re doing on their side – brand marketing, book writing, organic social, newsletter publication – is helping scratch an itch and educate the market on a problem they sort of know they have but don’t have the language for yet.
How does SEO fit into this context?
Well, there are hundreds or thousands of search queries that are adjacent to or broadly cover the novel paradigm that they are building. Our job is to own those. Stake a claim and build “landing pads,” from which we can convert them to the newsletter and further educate them.
Category creation doesn’t mean that no demand exists. It means tapping into existing nomenclature and adding information gain, subtly winding the path towards your unique solution.
You may think, “we don’t merely make personalization software! We do so much more, like X, Y, and Z, and we call it [obscure clever category].”
Okay, cool. But your prospects call it personalization software, and you can write about how awesome your new way of doing it is in your content about personalization software.
When dominating a saturated category: another client case
We’ve got another client who has been around for years and operates in an incredibly competitive and saturated space.
Their competitors are great at search. It’s a head-to-head battle in an SEO red ocean.
Luckily, they’ve also done very well at TOFU content – in fact, they run one of the best blogs in the industry. They featured guest authors who are actually practitioners, which matters a lot for the type of software they make.
They’ve also got a remarkable brand that people love. Word-of-mouth is rampant for them.
But they simply don’t appear at the bottom-of-the-funnel.
Our job is three-fold here:
- Which gaps exist where we can create content and win?
- Which existing assets can we leverage (prune, update, merge, change)?
- Which queries represent Surround Sound SEO and AIO opportunities?
In the competitive gaps, some queries will be highly competitive, and we’ll still stake a claim, hoping that link equity and high quality content will, over time, usurp lazier competitors.
But we’re also looking for wedges, a flanking strategy, where we can compete in purple oceans. Smaller features, emerging and trending terms, overlooked queries. We can scale these faster and get pretty fast returns because of how niche and targeted they are.
Along with the new content creation and existing assets, we’re also looking at their SERP coverage for core terms. Meaning, instead of just looking at where their own website ranks, we’re also looking at how often they are mentioned on the top 10-20 search results for core categorical queries.
Even for the most competitive terms, a company like this, with a stunning brand and a wide reaching partner network, can start to claim some real estate on the SERPS – even if it’s not their own site ranking, yet.
For consumers, AI search is pretty damn useful here
I’m a dummy, and I often forget the names of concepts or frameworks I’ve learned. Products, too.
Which is a real problem when you’re writing a weekly essay about concepts, frameworks, and products to use in case studies.
This is where AI is amazing!
Imagine I’m looking for a personalization product (Mutiny), but I can’t remember the brand name. I saw Stewart or Jaleh post awesome stuff on LinkedIn, and I’m like “what was the name of that product?!”
Well I can just ramble on and on about everything I remember and ask ChatGPT to tell me:
Unfortunately (or fortunately for Intellimize or PathFactory), it didn’t get it on the first try. So I just asked it for more alternatives, and BAM:
Kind of neat. Imagine doing the keyword research or post-hoc analysis of that customer journey!
How do brands get included in these AI generated answers? Some variables (and their weighting) is still a mystery, but by and large by quality content creation and the ubiquity and weighting of brand mentions in relation to categorical queries. Very similar to what good SEO has always been.
Fun fact: if you read last week’s issue on False Consensus Effect, you should know I also used ChatGPT to remind me what the name of that bias was:
Behold my second brain!
And isn’t this a way better use of AI than prompting it to write you a LinkedIn post that sounds like Gary Vaynerchuk?
Want more insights like this? Subscribe to our Field Notes.
