The “Value in the Feed” Framework for Modern Demand Gen Marketers

Demand generation has always been founded on the well-known formula. A marketer provides some value, puts it in front of a possible customer, and motivates the person to click and move to a website, landing page, or gated content. The feed was seen as a hook, while the website – as a place where real work starts But the above approach is losing its relevance.

Today, people can make decisions when scrolling LinkedIn, social media, search results, newsletters, communities, and even AI-driven environments. A person can get in touch with a brand without ever landing on the website of the company. People can get an insight, realize the problem, evaluate different ways of solving the issue, and make up their mind without following the journey created for them by the marketer. And so emerges a new demand generation rule: value needs to be delivered in the place where attention is.

The concept of “value in the feed” is based on this idea. Rather than relying on the feed as the means of provoking people’s interest and driving clicks, demand gen professionals today have the opportunity to provide value right from the start.

The Feed has Gone From Promotional Highway to Destination

For years, the feeds of social media were considered by many marketers to be a kind of promotional highway, with the destination somewhere else. A post led people to a report. A video pointed to a webinar. Statistics pointed people to an article. The true value was elsewhere.

This mentality assumes that the audience is willing to disrupt their present engagement in order to go down the promotional highway.

It is not always the case nowadays. The audience scrolls faster and makes decisions on how much more time they are going to spend. Unless a post makes them realize something useful, they have no reason to stop scrolling unless the topic is extremely relevant to them. The value within the post creates an entirely different purpose of the feed. It turns into something useful in and of itself.

An efficient post is able to point to some pattern, question an assumption, introduce some research, provide a framework, or solve a part of the problem without the necessity of further actions from the audience.  This is how zero-click demand generation works.

Starting From the Audience’s Immediate Issue

It all starts with a basic question: What do we help someone understand right away? It is not the same question as what asset we need to promote.

Let us say that a business has put together a well-researched piece on decreasing customer retention. The traditional way to generate demand will be to write a blog post saying that this piece uncovers five reasons behind the issue and offering readers the chance to download the report.

The new approach will focus on extracting just one key finding and explaining it. This could include an explanation of why seemingly dormant customers are actually engaged, or how a common pitfall in analytics results in the wrong interpretation of customer retention data.

Again, there will be a report to read. There will be more detailed analysis on the website. But the reader does not have to leave the feed to get to the core idea. And it makes the content valuable rather than promotional.

Create Social Posts From Insight Density Points

Every long piece of content does not need to become a long social post. The objective is not to make the entire document fit in your feed. Rather, you should determine the points with a high density of insights.

Insight-dense content provides the audience with a new level of understanding of something in a minimal amount of attention. It cuts out all unnecessary background and moves towards the essence of the matter.

For instance, rather than introducing a study with a few sentences about the importance of a certain trend in a specific industry, a marketer could start with a surprising insight followed by the explanation of why it is significant.

This forms a different kind of attention dynamic. You do not have to convince the audience first of the importance of the material and only then provide your content. You show your insights immediately. Strong social posts therefore operate more as excerpts from an expert discussion than trailers.

Instead of the Teaser, Make the Post a Fully Developed Statement

Since teasers were created to evoke curiosity, they became very popular in social media marketing. However, curiosity not based on value becomes redundant.

The social media feed loaded with phrases like “Three things that marketers should know” with a link prepares people for the next promotional interruption. It is different with a fully developed statement.

In this case, one can state an observation, the reason behind it, and the practical implication. A user gets a clear start, continuation, and a useful ending. Further clicking will be left up to the reader.

This is important because this way of interaction has a different psychological motivation. One who clicks because he found something useful acts differently from the one who clicked because he was deprived of information. The modern generation of leads can still benefit from traffic. The thing is that now traffic will be the result of interest and not the only indicator of success.

Create a Ladder of Value

The “Value in the Feed” doesn’t mean that all content will be shared everywhere. Content can actually become a ladder. The first step gives an instant insight. The second gives context—the third, practical application. The fourth may give a product, a service, consultation, tool, or any other kind of commercial approach. That way, the audience can go further into it whenever they consider it relevant for themselves.

So, there’s a blog post about a common problem with demand attribution. There’s an article explaining the reasons why it happens. There’s research giving more examples. And a product or service is solving this operational problem. Each step is valuable in itself.

It is more robust than having a system in which each and every interaction on the open platform is aimed at leading the person to the conversion point.

Show Expertise Before You Know the Intent

Historically, lead gen is extremely reliant on identifiable prospects. People want to know who downloaded something, visited a page, or filled out a form. But sometimes demand arises before a prospect is ready to identify themselves. There could be many interactions with a brand where a potential customer is not clicking anything and maybe just learning about an issue. This is important since demand gen is not only about capitalizing on existing intent. It is also about educating prospects about the issues and solutions available to them. Having value in the feed enables brands to do this without the need for a conversion event. The expertise is known before the intent is measured.

Measure Influence in Ways that Extend Beyond the Click

Any measurement framework that is based on the premise of feed-based value will necessarily be more expansive. There will certainly be a place for clicks, where the goal is traffic or direct response. However, clicks alone cannot adequately determine whether content is driving demand influence.

There are other metrics marketers might consider, like engagement, saves, sharing, direct responses, repeat engagements, branded search, inbound conversations, assisted conversions, and qualitative feedback. None of these metrics will be considered to prove revenue alone, but each one tells its own story about audience behavior. The key change will be in concept.

If the marketing approach intentionally delivers value before demanding an ask, then the measure of success cannot simply lie in how many people exit the feed at a certain point.

Connecting the Feed Back to the Larger Content Strategy

Value that exists in the feed must never be a social media tactic that stands on its own. Its greatest strength comes when the larger content strategy revolves around the same concept.

Research can yield multiple insights. Customer interaction can produce common questions. Sales teams can uncover common objections. Product teams can expose misconceptions. Long-form reports can lend credence to brief insights. All of these sources produce a well of valuable insights. The feed then becomes one place where these insights are put to use in creating immediate value.

This approach also enhances consistency. Rather than always questioning what to post, marketers will start asking what insight from all of their knowledge should now be shared within the context of the audience’s world.

Let the Audience Determine the Next Step

The fifth principle in our framework is arguably the most crucial one: never force the same response on all interactions.

A person who only requires some insights needs to have the chance of walking away happy and fulfilled. The one who would want to dig deeper into the research needs to see the way forward towards it. The one who is evaluating the solutions offered needs to have an opportunity to investigate the product being offered. All this is necessary for the flexibility of the demand generation process.

Now, the job of the marketer changes from pushing the audience in the desired direction to presenting them with an opportunity for the next step.

Conclusion

“Value in the Feed” is a broader paradigm shift about how demand generation can be done. Attention is fractured, journeys are non-linear, and audiences are able to ingest valuable insights without going to a company’s website.

It doesn’t render owned content and conversions obsolete. It just changes the nature of the value being created before the click.

Contemporary marketers have the ability to go into existing environments where the audience spends time and bring their best thinking there. Give them an interesting insight. Give them clarity on a topic. Help them solve a portion of their problem. Disprove a commonly held notion with facts. Let the next action be a choice.

If each engagement through the feed offers something valuable, then demand generation stops being a series of enticements to click and becomes a demonstration of expertise. The feed isn’t just where the audience is compelled to proceed from. It’s where the relationship begins.