Explore top demand generation questions answered, from dark social to calculating customer acquisition costs, and how to align your strategy with modern B2B buyer behavior.
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The primary focus of these questions revolves around various aspects of demand generation, lead generation, and marketing attribution. Here are the topics that sparked the most interest:
1. Getting Started with Paid Social and Search Campaigns
2. Understanding Dark Social and the HIRO Pipeline
3. Measuring and Reporting KPIs
4. Developing Content Strategies
5. Tracking and Analyzing Metrics
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What is Dark Social?
Dark social refers to hidden word-of-mouth channels that drive brand advocacy, share content, and influence others with interactions never being tracked e.g. internal Slack communities. Sharing posts internally. Facebook grounds. These moments where B2B buyers learn about problems, explore solutions, research suppliers, and make decisions are referred to as ‘dark’ because they’re not tracked in the traditional attribution tools. The challenge: companies misalign their GTM strategies based on attribution vs. tangible data that aligns to the buyer journey.
Word of mouth channels powered by the maturity of the internet that scale advocacy, sharing of content, and other forms of word-of-mouth that don’t get tracked by attribution software and don’t create intent data.
Dark social channels fall into these main categories:
- Social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, etc.)
- Content platforms (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, etc.)
- Communities (Slack, Discord, Facebook Groups, Reddit, etc.)
- Direct word of mouth (texts, phone calls, Zoom meetings, direct messages, etc.)
- 3rd party meet-ups or events (physical, virtual, and hybrid)
- Internal company conversations (Slack, email, meetings, etc.)
These channels are where critical activities in the B2B buying journey happen, including problem awareness, problem verification, solution exploration, requirements gathering, supplier research, supplier selection, decision validation, and more.
As suggested by dark in dark social, these touchpoints, while highly impactful, are not measured appropriately by software-based attribution. And because companies can’t measure activity in these places as they’re accustomed to, many executive and revenue leaders don’t understand how meaningful this new buying behavior is and how much of a growth opportunity they’re missing by ignoring it.
Is your strategy aligned with today's buyer behavior, or are you over-relying on attribution software?
How to Calculate CAC
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of gaining a new customer through marketing and advertising. Businesses must gauge how effective their customer acquisition strategies are to determine if their GTM strategy is sustainable.
Advertising CAC: This is the cost of getting each customer through specific advertising platforms. Tracking these costs by platform helps identify which channels work best.
Formula: Advertising CAC= Total Advertising Spend / # of Marketing Sourced Customers
Marketing CAC: This metric includes all marketing overhead costs like salaries, benefits, and marketing technology. It gives a full picture of what it takes to acquire a new customer.
Formula: Marketing CAC = Total Marketing Costs / # of Marketing Sourced Customers
Blended CAC: Included all marketing overhead costs and all sales overhead costs too.
Formula: Blended CAC = (Total Marketing Costs + Sales) / # of Customers Acquired
Bonus: Acquisition Cost Payback Period: How long it takes to break even on each new customer, based on the amount you spent to acquire them.
Formula: acquisition cost payback period = customer acquisition cost / (annual contract value / 12) * If using annual contract value divided by 12 months
Today's B2B buyers are heavily influenced by peers, and not all channels can be tracked by tools and software. Recognizing this, understanding true CAC is essential for determining program effectiveness, especially with 2025 planning just around the corner.
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