Introduction to Omni Channel Marketing
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Believe it or not - but generating qualified leads as a B2B company is more of a science than you may think. When crafting digital marketing campaigns, there are ways to strategically test different ideal customer profiles, positions, designs, and creative systematically to better understand what objectively “good” ads look like for your brand.
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How is this done you may ask?

It’s actually pretty simple - much like other individual digital marketing channels - there should be a process that is followed. When you follow a proven process, you can eliminate the risk of not knowing if the messaging/positioning/design is going to work - and instead you can just know that on a 90-180 day time horizon you will have the outcome of knowing what your best ads are - and then that’s where you can keep experimenting and drilling down more with them.
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But hold up, I feel like I am getting wayyyy ahead of myself here. You came here with one goal in mind.
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To generate more qualified leads from your ideal customer profile.

And if I remember correctly, you were promised that this system would work on a long enough time horizon. So let’s start to introduce what pieces are at play here.
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The Different Kinds of Demand

Before we can talk about the tactical systems for driving clicks, generating leads, and closing new business - we first need to talk about the roots of marketing. And that can be summed up simply with two words…
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SUPPLY + DEMAND

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Yes. If you remember back to your economics class with the supply & demand charts - oddly enough, marketing is very much summarized with similar charts.
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I like to categorize demand by the number of people that are already interested in your solution and are actively looking for ways to solve their problem. Meaning, these folks have already gone through all of the steps of being…
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• Unaware they had a problem
• Aware that they have a real problem
• Researching solutions to their problem
• Finding vendors/companies that provide the solution
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Demand comes in at the bottom half of those steps - and as you can imagine - that bottom half of the steps is where most companies focus their attention. This is because there is a lot of intent behind these steps. These folks are already educated on their problem - they don’t need convinced that they have a problem.
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The area of each piece of the funnel is roughly speaking, proportional to the percentage of your ICP that is in that stage. Meaning at any given period of time - there are more people that are unaware they have a problem and significantly less people that are in vendor finding mode. (more on this later)
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I like to categorize the people towards the top of these steps as the supply portion of the economics graph we are hypothetically speaking on. Meaning, the folks that are unaware that they have a problem and/or aware of their problem but unaware of solutions are the folks that still fall in your ideal customer profile - it’s just that there is much less intent behind their actions because… well, they don’t know they have a problem.
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It’s crucial to understand this basic marketing concept because it lies in the background of every marketing strategy created for your business. And if it isn’t - well I am afraid you aren’t marketing… you are just running ads… and believe it or not… those are actually very different. One is strategic - the other is just a tactic. Strategies work well with tactics. Tactics can’t work well without a strategy.
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The Foundational Understanding of What Intent Means in Marketing
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So we just discussed supply & demand. And you’re probably wondering?
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Is this article going to talk about Google Ads, SEO & LinkedIn Ads? Am I wasting my time?

We are close to talking about them, I promise! You are really in for a treat! But so far, you are also learning foundational marketing strategy that I feel like most marketing experts forget to talk about… but it’s crucial to understand because it feeds into the systematic nature we use to run our campaigns.
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So before we get into Google Ads, we first have to understand what intent means.
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What is intent?
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High intent, in marketing, is defined as people who are problem & solution aware. Meaning they are in the bottom half of the funnel we covered earlier. So, as discussed earlier, this is a smaller percentage of your ICP at any given time.
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This is important to understand because tactics like Google Ads & search engine optimization essentially operate off of high intent actions that your ICP is taking. These actions just so happen to be in the form of typing in your question like…
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What are the best digital marketing agencies in Augusta?

We know that the modifier +best and companies/agencies/vendors etc. informs us that this is a “high intent” search and that this person is aware of the problems their business faces (ie lack of consistent inbound leads) and is actively looking for solutions to that (ie a vendor to help capture high intent people from their ICP).
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What is Demand Capture vs Demand Generation
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This is a great segue into the final topic we need to discuss before getting tactical and that is the concept of capture vs generation. Simply put, the high intent/demand that we discussed earlier can be “captured” via mechanisms we discussed like Google Ads (Pay per click advertising) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
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Meaning, Demand Capture is a marketing strategy that positions the client’s brand in front of folks from their ICP that are looking for vendors to service their solution. Again, this is the smallest portion of your service addressable market at any given time. If you remember back to economic class, what happens when you have high demand, and low supply?
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You have a high cost.

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Yes, in the advertising world - these people are the most expensive to market too because they represent high demand, and just so happen to be in low supply at any given time. Meaning, you have yourself & your competitors constantly vying for their attention & ultimately their business.
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This is why marketing can be viewed as “expensive” or a “cost center.” Which, to be fair, when done poorly or incorrectly (cough cough … just running tactics without strategy cough cough … what a lot of inexperienced marketers do…) is very true.
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So what can you do about this?

Well, when supply is low and demand is high, the only other place you can go is to where supply is high and demand is low. Which is where demand generation comes into play.
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Again, if you remember our funnel from earlier, we outlined that a large percentage of your ICP is not aware they have a problem or if they are aware, they aren’t necessarily aware of the solution that exists for it. And even if they are aware of the solution, they aren’t necessarily aware of the vendors that can help them with the implementation of the solution.
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So the best way to spend less (in the long run) with marketing is to allocate marketing budget towards demand generation… which is the systematic nature of positioning your brand in front of your ICP - calling out a problem they have & educating them on the solution that exists to it.
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This is what TRUE marketing is. If you ever watched Mad Men, where Don Draper and the team would present different slogans, mockups, jingles to their clients in board rooms - this is essentially the modern day version of that.
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Yes. LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, X Ads, and heck… even Reddit Ads are all the modern day version of the billboard & radio ads that the “mad men” where proposing to their clients 50+ years ago.
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And these are all versions of demand generation.

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Similarities of demand generation tactics
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Tactics that are classified as demand generation all have 1 thing in common, and that is that…
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The ad is meant to disrupt the attention of what the client’s ICP is doing.

Meaning, the LinkedIn ad is not something that the ICP asked for. No. The marketer is putting that in front of the ICP hoping it breaks through the noise of the feed & creates a sense of urgency/understanding/action from the ICP.
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And much like most parents know how hard it is to train their kids not to do things you tell them not too… it can take many, many times telling them… it’s the same with your ICP.
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The second underlying factor with demand generation activities is that they require a lot of touchpoints. A HockeyStack report from last year reported that it usually takes nearly 200 touchpoints from your brand in varying capacities to go from ICP who isn’t problem aware to closed won for your brand.
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That means they have to see ads, blogs, emails, sales outreach, employee posts, though leadership, conference presentations, word of mouth/referral, and finally high intent Google Ads/SEO to finally convert into a marketing qualified lead for you.

Which as you can imagine… takes a lot of time. And depending on what your buying cycle looks like, you may need even more time…
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Which leads me to my third and final commonality amongst demand generation tactics - and that is that…

They take a long time. It’s very common to spend 6-12 months on brand and not see a large uplift with “results” like closed won deals. That’s very normal.
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Which obviously is very hard for small startups or consulting firms with limited budget to justify. Most of these companies will say “marketing doesn’t work for us” and just write it off wayyy to soon. Which is why marketing get’s the bad rep of being a “cost center.” When in reality, it’s just something that requires consistent investment that pays dividends in multiples far higher than the input amount - much like traditional investing.
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So How Can You Generate Qualified Leads
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Well we like start every engagement with demand capture marketing first… for the simple reason that our clients like to see that they can turn a system on that starts to generate more qualified leads “faster” than they were doing in the past.
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I quote faster because it still takes time. It’s not as simple as creating 1 Google Ads campaign and voila, you now have consistent leads… (that does sometimes happen, but we never project that to be the case - because 75% of the time it isn’t)…
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So each of our engagements begin with discovery of problems, an understanding of your ICP, and finally a custom strategy pieced together that usually includes Google Ads & High Intent SEO.
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This allows us to capitalize on the small, but high intent piece of your market. We are able to get in front of the people that are raising their hand and asking for help. As I mentioned before, just because this is a small piece of the market doesn’t mean that it is also cheap.
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It can cost the same, if not more, to get 100 qualified clicks to your website in 1 month compared to the 500-1000 you could expect from higher up in the marketing funnel from demand generation tactics.
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But that’s the price to play. It’s all a balancing act in the marketing world today. Because digital marketing gives us so much insight on who, what, when, where, and why your ICP is viewing your ads - we can very confidently inform our tactical campaign strategy and steer things in the right direction.
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How we systematically make improvements over 90-180 days
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Whether it’s demand capture or demand generation, there is a system that we follow to ensure the best possible results for our client’s overall marketing performance. And it can be broken down into 3 key buckets.
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1. The Target
2. The Ad/Initial Placement
3. The Landing Page / Experience

These are the 3 major areas that we have control of as marketers - and each one is crucial to capturing intent. So let’s dive into each one now.

Target
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The target is what we claim as your what your ICP is doing - searching in Google, following competitor companies, or attending conferences… these indicate a level of high intent. We can systematically target keywords in Google Ads, develop plans for organic ranking strategies via blogs, outreach to specific ICP members on whether or not they follow your competitor, or have a booth at a conference based on the intent we deem as high enough to pursue…

The Ad / Initial Placement
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Once we decide on where our ICP is & what they are doing that we deem is high intent… next is the ad or medium. This is usually in the form of a Google Ad or potentially a high intent social media ad - but the process is much of the same. Before we launch any campaigns, we have a creative session to walk through 5-10 messages we are trying to push to your audience. From there, we iteratively decide how we will test out all of the approved variations and what each variation accomplishes in testing over the course of the next 90-180 days - that way we will strategically begin to develop a bank of ads that are “good” and break through the noise.

The Landing Page
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Last, but not least is the website/experience the user enters after deciding to click your ad/respond to you. It’s crucial that this experience is monitored and crafted just as meticulously as your ad experience is. This is because they need to work together - otherwise, you will recognize a falloff. Gone are the days of just turning ads on and generating leads just because you were in the right time and place. Now you not only need to have good targeting, good creative, but also a great website experience. We iteratively AB test our client’s landing pages & implement qualitative tracking systems to see where drop offs occur and implement “hot fixes” on a weekly basis. This keeps us improving the overall conversion rate of the experience - which over a long enough time horizon improves the overall performance of the demand capture mechanism we are running.
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These 3 pieces are systematically tested & refined so that every client always knows what’s coming next whether or not the campaign is crushing it, or it isn’t where we want it.

What happens after 90-180 days

At this point, we are driving consistent qualified leads into your sales funnel. We are working collaboratively with your sales team to understand the quality of the leads - and implementing feedback/improvements to our demand capture funnel to help optimize all 3 parts we just discussed.
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Once we are attributing revenue to the marketing we are doing, it’s time to set our eyes on the coveted demand generation arm. We always want our clients to continue growing… and yes, growth can be recognized via demand capture mechanism - but real, high growth can only be recognized once your brand is viewed as an authority in the space.
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And the only way to do that is through good ole fashion marketing - aka demand generation.

And much like you’d expect, the same 3 pieces we covered earlier: The Target, The Ad/Placement, and the Landing Page/Experience take place here too.
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However, the targets, the ads, and the landing pages all look different. In fact, each part of the funnel we discussed at the beginning of this article essentially has it’s own 3 pieces. Meaning people in your ICP that are problem unaware have their own target, ads, and landing pages. Then people that are problem aware have their own target, ads, and landing pages. Finally people that are solution aware have their own target, ads, and landing pages.
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So as you can expect, this takes much time to plan out, mock up, and overall get setup. This is why we like to focus on building out this demand generation strategy early (after revenue is recognized from high intent demand capture) because quite frankly the strategy itself takes a significantly longer amount of time compared to demand capture.
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Because it’s 3x the amount of work - and as you know with a lot of things in life - it’s not a linear amount of time allocated for each part of the funnel.

I am not going to go through what each phase of ads looks like and feels like in this blog, but I most certainly will in future ones.
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Wrapping up

There you have it. That’s our process - along with a comprehensive “spark notes” version of what actually marketing is. I take the time to educate each and every one of our clients on this (especially if they aren’t marketers themselves) because that foundational knowledge truly does help with understanding of what we are building for them, along with where we are going.
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Without taking the time to explain the foundations of demand capture results in clients getting upset 30-60 days into an engagement when the ads haven’t driven as many qualified leads as they were hoping.
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As with everything in life, you can’t go from zero to hero in a couple short months. The time and investment of budget into building a system that captures high intent folks from your ICP is well worth the cost of building it - you just have to be stoic enough to see the process through.
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And candidly speaking, too many business owners/CEOs aren’t. And they aren’t the clients we want to work with. We like to work with the clients that appreciate the foundations of strategy all of our decisions are rooted in - and how everything rolls up into a greater plan that is there to positively shape the overall brand of their company.
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I hope you enjoyed this blog - if you have any questions - please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn!

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