We've Heard Your Feedback

We get it—there's a ton of great content out there, but who has the time to sift through it all? That's where Maxwell, our DemandGPT search partner, comes in. In the past 90 days, Maxwell has tackled over 500 of your demand generation-related questions that helps expedite searching 1,000’s of pages of our GTM content to help you find answers quicker.

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

Top Questions Answered

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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That's only the tip of the iceberg. For more of these top answers and to discuss them with over 5k+ B2B professionals, join us over in The Vault!