Aloha! We know the importance of demand generation. It’s a buzzword that has rightfully earned its place in product marketing as a sure-fire way to earn your SaaS more qualified leads. How? By generating demand for your brand and product, before you start trying to sell it.

However, structuring a demand generation team that drives results is a whole other ball game. It’s one that many SaaS companies are still learning to navigate. 

Not to worry, we’ve got you sorted, right here. In this article, we’ll explain the best demand gen team structures that are working for companies today—smoothly bridging the gap between marketing and sales teams.

We’ll look at the roles you’ll need and what you should be paying for those roles. We’ll also look at the goals your DG team should be accountable for, as well as explore your options for keeping the team in-house or outsourcing.

When you invest your budgets, time, and effort in hiring a stellar demand gen team you’re actively investing in your business’s growth, longevity, and bottom-line ROI.

Let’s start generating demand! 

What does an effective demand generation team do?

Okay, let’s start things off by getting buy-in to build this team, whether that’s from yourself, or the person in your team that’s got the keys to the kitty. 

An effective demand generation team has the power to: 

Collect and utilize insights: whether your demand gen team does this via a competitor analysis, focus groups & interviews, observational research, or another method, it’s their priority to collect accurate data to fuel their demand generation initiatives.

Build a long-term growth strategy: from this data, your DG team should be putting together a long-term growth strategy that’s in a constant state of flux. This fluid document will guide your demand growth and ensure your team stays on track—as well as your stakeholders stay informed. 

Create and publish content & messaging: an actionable demand generation team will then be responsible for putting together and distributing content that’s designed to pull your ICPs through the door—or through a link in most cases. 

Run and maintain marketing initiatives & campaigns: they’ll then be in charge of ensuring your content and messaging are targeted towards fulfilling specific business initiatives and goals by creating demand generation campaigns that give your SaaS the demand boost it needs. 

Digest and share learnings from analytics: last, but certainly not least, your demand generation team is responsible for gathering your campaign (among other) results and transforming this data to inform future demand generation initiatives as well as inform other departments and aid further business operations. Sales teams, marketing teams, finances teams, and customer care/support will all benefit from your demand generation team’s data sets.

Looking for more? Check out our demand generation best practices. 

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The best demand generation team structure

So, let’s talk about team structure. First up, your demand generation team should ideally sit within the marketing team. This means the first/highest position of your team—director of demand generation—should report directly to your VP of marketing or CMO. 

However, you may not actively need to hire as high as a director of demand generation; especially if you’re restricted by budget, time, or company goals. 

That being said, identify the roles you need now to get s*** done. If you’re a relatively new, scrappy team, perhaps you need implementers over strategists. If you’ve got investor goals to hit, perhaps you need those higher-level roles to flesh out a team that meets what investors are looking for.

What are your immediate company goals? Build from there. Now then, let’s take a look at these demand generation roles on the table for your consideration.

10 Demand generation team roles

In this list we’ve included the roles and responsibilities of each role, key skills and attributes you’ll need in a candidate, as well as the going rate for these roles in 2022. 

If you’d like us to research another role and get it on this list then reach out and let us know! 

1. Director of Demand Generation

A director of demand generation should ideally sit directly under the VP of marketing. This role is responsible for the development and implementation of your holistic demand generation strategy. They’re responsible for automizing flows and processes where possible, and keeping tabs on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and overall demand generation efforts. 

The director of demand generation is also expected to work closely with directors from your marketing and sales team, maintaining feedback loops to ensure everyone has a solid overview of the demand generation process, campaigns, messaging, and learnings to help generate better marketing qualified leads. 

This role will develop databases to target key roles and verticals, drive predictable pipeline activity, determine the best tactical content marketing mix, manage marketing budget allocations across multiple campaigns, head up reporting dashboards, source and implement new technology for the team to utilize. 

Soft skills: Time management, collaboration, communication, problem-solving, leadership, organization. 

Hard skills: 7+ years of digital marketing experience, lead generation & nurturing, strategic, SEO, PPC, lead scoring, marketing, a deep understanding of popular CRMs.

Average salary: $130,000

2. Demand Generation Specialist 

A Demand Generation Specialist is the Director’s right hand. This role aid with the implementation and day-to-day management of the marketing strategy and marketing efforts. The specialist should be able to identify a successful demand generation campaign and repeat its success as suggestions for future campaigns. 

At times demand generation specialists will be expected to showcase thought leadership. However, their day-to-day will be ensuring all marketing automation flows are ticking over, as well as any active demand gen campaigns. They should have great knowledge of email marketing, understanding of the sales cycle, and the brand’s target audience. 

Soft skills: Adaptability, planning, prioritizing, optimism, demand gen idea exchange, questioning, dependability, critical observation 

Hard skills: 4+ Years of digital marketing experience, email marketing, CRM, marketing operations, project management, sales pipelines, lead generation, demand generation tools. 

Average salary: $57,000

3. Strategist/Project Manager

A project strategist or project manager is the glue that holds your team and your projects together. They’ll look to understand the risks and multiple potential outcomes of any project and be able to plan for them. 

Your project manager is responsible for motivating the marketing team, ensuring that any demand generation campaign runs smoothly, and everyone does their part when needed. They’ll report directly to the demand generation manager.

Soft skills: Communication, time management, collaboration, communication, optimism, diplomacy, coordination, organization, planning. 

Hard skills: project management, marketing campaigns, content marketing, lead generation, marketing automation, marketing operations. 

Average salary: $65,000

4. SEO or Content Lead

This role is responsible for creating and implementing your SEO and content strategy to generate demand for your product. They’ll head up your on-page blog, as well as any off-page SEO activities and initiatives deemed necessary. 

This role will lead the content function of the demand generation team, ensuring an understanding of the larger marketing strategy, as well as any content support the sales team may need. Their main goals are lead generation, and winning click-throughs from potential customers.  

Soft skills: organization, goal setting, written communication, brainstorming, decision making, innovation, management skills.

Hard skills: search engine optimization, marketing strategies, sales funnel, marketing technology, CMS, inbound marketing, outbound marketing, writing & editing, social media. 

Average salary: $61,000

5. Social Media Lead

Your social media manager or social media lead—depending on team size—is responsible for all of your social media channels, and sometimes your PR initiatives as well. They ensure your social channels are ticking over, implement strategies, share content, and work on brand partnerships. 

They’re key for building brand awareness, and ensuring your demand generation strategy is followed across multiple channels. They’ll have their ear on the ground for your target market and can provide the entire demand generation department with valuable insights for great lead generation strategies. 

Soft skills: Communication, interpersonal skills, attention to detail, planning, active listening, coordination, imagination, experimentation, empathy, humor, commitment. 

Hard skills: social media management platforms, marketing activities, social sales tools, analytics, lead nurturing, customer loyalty, writing & editing. 

Average salary: $55,000

6. Marketing Engineer/Technologist

Marketing engineers are technology engineers that are specifically working for and with the demand gen marketing team—in this case. They’re responsible in aiding the implementation of demand generation content, and ensuring that should any landing pages, app changes, or other technology be needed to generate leads that the technology aspect of this runs and smoothly as possible. 

Soft skills: stress management, verbal communication, constructive feedback, self-management, logical reasoning, innovation, critical observation.

Hard skills: coding, programming, web development, coding technologies and languages, product management, hardware, technical support, product development.

Average salary: $88,000

7. Technical SEO Analyst

A tech SEO analyst is hyper-important for your demand gen plan. If you’re not on Google, you’re simply not. So, your SEO analyst will give the marketing team the guidance and support they need to ensure your website—and specifically your blog—the best opportunity at ranking in that top spot on Google. 

Product marketing needs a technical SEO analyst to look out for on and off-page content opportunities that will put your SaaS head, should, and link, above the competition. 

Soft skills: Organization, planning, goal setting, presentation, written communication, calmness, observation, brainstorming, idea exchange. 

Hard skills: Technical SEO, CMS, reporting, Excel/Google Sheets, Auditing.  

Average salary:$50,000

8. Long-form & Short-form Copywriter

Copywriting and content writing are such undervalued skills but are absolutely crucial in the effectiveness of your demand generation activities. Words are the make or break for successful customer engagement and loyalty. 

Your copy or content writer will be responsible for communicating all demand gen campaigns across multiple channels; be it email marketing campaigns, social media, web and landing pages, in-product messaging, SMS, or something else—there’s always a whizz copywriter worrying away! 

Soft skills: stress management, prioritizing, written communication, constructive feedback, self-management, self-motivation, imagination, authenticity, humor, cultural intelligence, and empathy. 

Hard skills: grammar & punctuation, spelling, language skills, self-editing, research. 

Average salary: $55,000

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9. Backlinks Outreach Specialist

This role specializes in identifying link-building opportunities on other pages with high domain authority and that are within your niche. They’ll work closely with your SEO lead and content writer to ensure your demand gen strategies remain top of mind and are informed with quality content and an accurate keyword strategy. 

This role is also responsible for managing guest posts, partnerships and PR opportunities. 

Soft skills: Communication (written and verbal), teamwork, self-motivation, attention to detail, creativity, networking. 

Hard skills: SEO, PR, CMS, research, Google tools, email automation, and reporting.

Average salary: $45,000

10. Designer

Last, but certainly not least, no demand gen team is complete without a trusted designer. A designer is a key team member and will either report to the marketing manager, or to the content lead. The designer understands what every marketing campaign is trying to communicate and helps demand gen teams communicate that visually. 

Your designer has a clear overview of the buyer’s journey, market segments, and your audience personas. They design empathetically, optimizing the user’s experience at every brand touch point and leaving them with a positive memory to walk away with. 

Soft skills: stress management, organization, verbal communication, interpretation, creativity, imagination, humor, prioritizing. 

Hard skills: design thinking, UI/UX, graphic design, design software, information architecture. 

Average salary: $47,000

Demand Generation Marketing Strategy Team Goals

What type of goals should your demand generation team be shooting for? There are a few demand gen metrics and goals to pick from. To make your life easier, here’s a breakdown. 

Increase in MQLs: your team should start seeing a pick up in marketing qualified leads; those that are open to receiving marketing materials from your SaaS.

Increase in SQLs: sales qualified leads are those people that are suitable to be sold to, these are lower in the funnel than MQLs. 

Increase in CLTV: you’ll find that customers are more informed about your product and its potential, if your team is doing their job right. In this case, you’ll see an increase in customer lifetime value. 

Increase in Sales Velocity: of course, an increase in demand means an increase in sales. You should see a general up in product sales across all markets. 

Decrease in Churn: more qualified leads means more educated leads and this will leave to a decrease in customer churn as people know exactly what they’re signing up for. 

Decrease in CPA: the demand generation team will invest in evergreen, long-term and low-cost content strategies which will lead to a decrease in cost per acquisition in the long run. 

Increase in Content Performance: you’ll find your team is creating more appropriate and targeted content that resonates with your ICP. It’s going to perform better across multiple demand gen channels. 

Increase in Close Rate: with an increase in MQLs and SQLs, you’ll also have an increase in close rate. This means a higher percentage of leads will close as a sale. 

Increase in ROI: all of this leads to an increase in return of investment. Remember it can take up to six months to see a return on investment from a new hire, however, it’s well worth the wait. 

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Should You Outsource Demand Generation Marketing Efforts?

Great question! And, it mostly comes down to your budget, physical office capabilities if you’re not a remote company, and your dependency on building an in-house team—which is often the case if you’ve got investors snapping at your heels. 

You have a few options here: 

Hire the entire team in-house 

Pros of hiring your entire team in-house are that you’re able to ignite them on your brand mission, and you have undiluted access to them—during company hours of course. However, if you’re looking to hire in-house you’re going to have to get extremely competitive with the offer you put on the table. There are a lot of great brands out there battling for the same talent. 

Outsource to an agency or independent freelancers

Agencies often come at a fraction of the cost compared to in-house hires, and you’ll get a collective team behind doors at the agency. What’s more, agencies tend to be very results driven as they’re keen to keep your contract, as with freelancers, so you may find yourself getting better results from their demand gen efforts. 

Go hybrid 

Hybrid tends to be a good blend of both worlds. When you have a hybrid team you hire management-level positions in-house and they can work and manage your agencies or freelance workforce. It’s a good option if you’re on a budget, but also if you’re looking for expertise and diversity in your demand generation team. 

Demand Generation Team FAQ

A demand generation process is all the steps and actions your business takes to generate demand. In turn, demand generation means luring your potential customers in by educating them not only about your product or service but about their pain points and struggles.

Using brand awareness, thought leadership, and other inbound marketing strategies can get you the customers your business truly deserves. That is what demand generation is all about. 

Before we continue, it’s a good idea to differentiate between demand gen and lead gen. Although many people–yes, even those in successful sales and marketing teams–use these terms interchangeably, they’re indeed very different. 

Demand generation vs lead generation

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Demand generation is about bringing new people into your funnel–ideally, high-quality potential customers. Lead generation is about driving those already in your funnel lower down to the point at which they make a sale. 

Demand gen is turning strangers into leads. Lead gen is turning leads into customers. 

What is a demand generation process?

Demand generation is no easy task–we know that. 

It’s hard to get someone interested in your product or service if they don’t even know what their problems are, or aren’t on the same channels as you. It’s even more difficult when there are so many players in the market–after all, 23.6% of all businesses in the U.S. are in the B2B industry. 

This high competition and bounty of channels make it difficult to know what the best demand generation strategy to use is. However, using a demand generation process that guides you from start to finish is everything you need to make demand gen a smooth ride for your team. 

What does a B2B demand generation process look like?

As Martín Durán, SEO Strategist @ Hubspot, points out “there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. The best demand generation process and strategy will vary depending on your product, target market, and business goals. Ultimately, the best way to generate demand is to create value for potential customers.”

B2B demand generation tends to differ from B2C demand gen thanks to the needs it fulfills. A customer that’s looking for a new swimsuit because they’re going on holiday has a very straightforward problem and the solution is simple: a swimsuit that fits and they like. It’s a one-time purchase that only affects one person. 

However, the problems and solutions of B2B companies tend to be a bit more complicated. For these, an important step will be to research not only the potential customers they want to attract, but also, understand the different problems that might be created in the industry or area they’re in. 

For example, in SaaS, repeat purchases like subscriptions are the norm, and this can bring its own set of challenges. 

The overall B2B demand gen process should look something like this:

• Identification of target audience: those you can solve a problem for
• Brand awareness: showing your target audience valuable content that aligns with their problem and industry
• Reinforcement: the gentle reminders and more information that further convince audiences you understand their problem and can help 
• Conversion: this is where the marketing teams will nurture prospects, and once they’re turned into leads, the sales team will convert them into customers. All the while, you’re still creating demand.

For Padmaja Santhanam, Growth Manager @ FirstPrinciples, the demand generation process typically entails the identification of specific business needs, the assessment of customer preferences and needs, and the formulation of creative solutions that meet those needs. 

6 Core elements of a SaaS demand generation process

Every SaaS demand generation strategy will be slightly different for each B2B SaaS company and their niche. However, there are six core elements that all SaaS demand generation processes should have. 

Let’s take a look:

1. Define your demand generation aims

No demand gen plan will ever be complete without a clear aim–one to which you direct all efforts and goals. 

To define your demand generation goals and aims, you’ll need to understand your product or service inside and out. Additionally, you’ll need to know what would be the ideal outcome of your demand generation efforts–which demand gen metrics would you like to see improve?

Use these questions to think about what you’re trying to do:

• Are you trying to get more potential leads in? 
• Are you trying to attract only a few of really high-quality leads? 
• What defines high quality in a lead?

It might not even be about the number or quality of leads you attract but more about the positioning of your brand and thought leadership in the industry. Demand starts by winning clicks and brand recognition after all.  

After all, demand generation is much more than just attracting new people to the top of your funnel. As Padmaja Santhanam says, “demand generation can be used in various ways to reach customers. It can be used to identify new markets or expand into existing markets. It can also be used to attract new customers or retain current customers.”

2. Define your target audience

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The next core element of your demand generation process will be defining your target audience. 

Performing thorough market research that involves identifying current and potential customers and understanding their needs is the next logical step in creating a successful demand generation strategy. 

Without understanding who you want to attract you won’t know what kind of content they like, nor which demand generation channels they use regularly. Remember, it doesn’t matter how good your brand or product or service is, if your customers can’t find you. 

A clever way of defining your target audience in a more helpful manner is by building user personas. User personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer. This user personas guide will help you better understand and create them. 

Neelabja Adkuloo, Marketing Manager @ Mailmodo says, “a thorough understanding of your target audience and their pain points will help you break the ice with your audience and generate demand for your product or service.”

3. Create your demand generation campaigns

In this part of the demand generation process, you’re fleshing out your demand gen campaigns; and launching them.

Campaigns are timely marketing efforts to push demand. As Martín Durán says “you need to create targeted content and messaging that resonates with your market and drives them towards your business.” So, it’s crucial to create high-quality content that your target audience needs. 

Content is King, because without it, you won’t be providing great value to your prospects–so create it thoughtfully using all the previous research. 

It’s also important to point out here that the type of content you have, the budget you use, and the length of your campaign will all depend on the aims and goals of your demand generation strategy. Content for thought leadership and educating your audience is completely different from that looking to be more focused on overall brand awareness or to reach new market segments. 

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Content creation is the crux of your demand generation efforts, and is the part your audiences will actually interact with, so make it count. 

4. Optimize your distribution channels

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Now that you’ve done your research and have created killer content, you want to make sure you’re placing it on the right channels, otherwise it might go unseen–yes, even if it’s amazing content! 

A saturated market has converted marketing strategies to focus on digital real-estate above all else—location, location, location. Find out what channels your target audience uses and how to optimize them to make the most out of your demand generation campaign. 

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5. Refine your lead nurturing flow

Demand gen strategies will flop if they don’t consider their lead nurturing strategies too. A recent report showed that companies whose marketing and sales teams nurtured their already active leads generated 50% more qualified leads at 33% less cost.

Lead nurturing is the process of educating, informing, and involving the users at any point in their buyer journey. This is an important stage in demand generation because understanding how to nurture your leads–and doing it properly–will help you understand how to drive strangers into leads, and keep them interested as they move down the funnel. 

Take a moment to research and understand what kind of content those that already know about your brand wish to know more about. How would they feel more connected and understood by you? What knowledge gaps do they still have about their pain points and the solutions you offer? 

6. Measure your success

Without measuring your demand generation programs you won’t if they are a success or not. Which presents the question: how do you measure them?

Some companies like to measure only one North Star metric, for example the number of new customers, or clicks on a webpage. At Mailmodo “measuring our demo booking numbers reveals how effectively we’re at targeting the right prospects on LinkedIn and Twitter,” says Neelabja Adkuloo, Marketing Manager @ Mailmodo. 

There are many other key metrics that you can use, but here are twelve demand gen metrics that we think are the best ones for you to look at:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) & Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
• Cost per Acquisition (CAC)
• Activation & Signups
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
• Payback period
• Days in status
• Marketing sourced pipeline
• Average deal size
• Contribution to total revenue
• Content performance 
• Brand sentiment

Whichever you think is best for measuring your demand gen success, “you need to measure performance regularly so that you can make changes as necessary to thrive in success.”—Padmaja Santhanam.

Last but not least, if all of these core elements ever feel like they’re too much work and you don’t even know where to start, don’t forget there are tools available to help you out during the process. Check this handy demand gen tools article where we break down the tools you definitely want to have in your demand gen toolkit. 

SaaS demand generation process: tips & best practices

Besides the six core elements that a demand generation process should have, there are some additional demand gen tips and best practices to keep in mind. 

Here are three top tips and best practices to take into account when establishing a winning demand gen strategy:

Focus on organic search

Organic search is one of the best ways to increase demand and brand awareness. It’s usually a long-term, low-cost strategy that—when done properly—can create a solid online brand presence. 

How can you capitalize on the potential of organic search? We’re pleased you asked. By having an incredible SaaS SEO strategy—of course! 

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is now mandatory to be where your customers are looking for you. There’s no use in being on the last pages of Google–after all 95% of online traffic goes to the first page of Google. 

If you’re looking to get the most out of your organic search, our team of SEO experts is here to help. 

Become an authority brand

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There are many ways in which you can gain the trust of your potential–and current–customers. For example, having a high-quality blog that other authority pages link to, hosting online events where you give expert insights into the topics your customers care about, or even organizing a one-hour long–the most effective length–webinar to get your potential customers to really understand specific topics and pain points within their niche. 

This will be crucial, especially for SaaS businesses looking for a perfect solution to match their unique problems. With authority-building content, potential users will better understand their problems, see you empathize, and—in turn—trust your solution. 

Optimize conversion rate and the user experience

For a SaaS business, you’ll know your website is your first handshake. Make sure those that visit know where to go, and are having an experience that will turn them from first-time visitors to recurring customers. 

Conversion rate optimization and improving your overall user experience is key for the success of your demand generation strategy–and the success of your business, too. 

The benefits of a great demand generation process

Implementing a great demand generation strategy isn’t just a great thing to have, but nowadays, it’s a must. Especially if you want your business to thrive in a world where thousands of competing businesses are reachable with a click or two. 

Let’s take a look at the many business-thriving benefits that demand gen can bring your SaaS:

Improve brand awareness:

Constantly creating high-quality and valuable content will improve your brand awareness. When done right, a demand gen strategy will see more and more people start reading your blogs, or attending your online events, or more.

This will help increase your reach, and strengthen the brand awareness you already have.

Three brand awareness statistics for you to keep in mind:

• 46% of customers say they will pay more for a brand they trust. 
• 88% of customers say that authenticity is an important aspect they look for in brands. 
• Consistency in the way brands present themselves increases revenue by 33%. 

Attract more qualified leads:

The process of crafting a winning demand gen strategy will enable you to understand your leads better, translating to better content creation which is more likely to pull people your way and, ultimately, convert. 

Demand gen isn’t just a quantity game, it’s mostly about quality. The more qualified your leads are, the higher the chances of them turning into customers–in fact, 68% of B2B professionals say generating high-quality leads is their top priority. This also translates into a better ROI and reduces the cost of acquiring new customers, since more of your resources and efforts will bring real results. 

Increase overall revenue:

Demand generation strategies and campaigns bring many benefits to those that know how to implement and run them. In fact, demand generation is key to the overall increase in revenue and the success of a company. As Joe Manna, Marketing Manager @ Alyce, explains:

“The company’s success defines our demand team’s success. We stay grounded in closed-won revenue, account growth, and account retention. While these are lagging indicators of success, we continue to invest our energy into top-of-funnel programs that keep the business thriving.” 

Create a demand generation process that works

Measuring the success of a demand generation process isn’t only about the increase in the number of sales, it’s about your whole brand awareness and thought leadership. As well as understanding better your service, your business, and your customers–whether active or potential. 

Include these six core elements to make effective demand generation strategies. Ones that will help your business grow and become the go-to option for your target audience–not only in terms of the solution to their problem, but also in terms of education. 

Most importantly, achieving a successful demand generation is a long-run project–that needs to be guided by the right process. As Leszek Dudkiewicz, Head of Marketing @ Passport Photo Online, advises, “the most important thing to keep in mind is that it takes time and effort to generate results.” 

That’s why starting with the right demand generation process is crucial to getting the success your company deserves. 

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Demand Generation Process FAQ

Just like a pilot won’t take off without a checklist, a marketer won’t take off without a demand generation plan. Although, in both cases, they know the basics of what they need to do in order to reach the sky, without planning they won’t have a smooth take-off—or last long in flight!

Metaphors out of the way, demand generation is a key aspect of today’s marketing efforts, especially with SaaS products. As its name indicates, it’s about generating demand–which means, attracting the high-quality leads of your target audience to the top of your sales funnel.

Demand generation vs lead generation: what’s the difference?

Lead generation–which is often used interchangeably with demand gen–is different from demand generation.

Demand gen is about turning strangers into high-quality leads.

How to create a demand gen plan for SaaS

Getting the plan right will be your north star in your demand gen strategies. It’s what will guide each of your decisions in your demand gen campaigns. However, you’ll need to be aware of the goals you’re looking to hit with your marketing efforts if you want the plan to work towards them.

Since demand generation is the first step of turning completely unaware people into possible leads, and hopefully customers, you’ll need to know the sales journey you want them to have, and you’ll need to understand who your ideal target audience is. 

You’ll also need to know your company values and how you want your brand to be perceived, this will drastically affect the demand campaigns you choose to run. 

Let’s dive into the eight steps you need to make a winning demand generation plan that will generate a pull from the market that you’ve never felt before.

Step 1- Market Research, Competitor Research & Understanding Buyer Personas

The first thing you need for a demand generation plan to be successful is to understand your customers and your competition, to do this you need to do three things:

Market Research

With market research, you’ll get knee-deep into customer behavior and economic trends to understand who is going to be buying your service. Remember, for B2B SaaS companies it’s said that only 5% of your potential customers are already in the market, according to Will Whitham, senior copywriter and content lead for The CMO Alliance.

It’s important that your sales and marketing teams answer the following questions using methods like surveys, focus groups, personal interviews, and observations:

• Demand: Is there already a desire for your service?
• Market size: How many people are interested in your service?
• Economic stats: What is the budget and employment rate of your potential customers?
• Location: Where are your customers and where can they find you?
• Market saturation: How many similar options–competitors–are out there?
• Pricing: What’s the price point of your competitors?

Tania Miranda, Head of SEO at Recruitee, says there are also some more valuable questions that your own sales team can help you answer:

• What are some frequently asked questions about your product/our pricing/etc.?
• What words are prospects using to describe your product?
• Who are the influencers in organizations who play a part in the decision-making process?
• What are your prospects’ top three biggest hesitations/objections to starting using or switching to your product?
• What are some common goals that your customers are trying to solve?
• What are the top support questions you get?

These answers will give you great insight into who is out there that could benefit from your product. 

However, remember that not all possible customers are aware of their pain points–that’s where demand generation becomes key—in educating and empowering the customer so they not only know their problems but that they see you as a possible solution–or even better, the best solution for them.

Competitor Research

Understanding who your indirect and direct competitors are is key when planning your demand generation strategies. This way you can see how the competition is attracting potential customers, which strategies seem to be working, and which do not.

Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will help you strengthen your strengths and reduce your weaknesses. Additionally, understanding your competition is a great way for offering a unique solution to your customers, you’ll find better product messaging language, identify some SEO bets, and can fine-tune your USPs. 

How can you draw people into your sales funnel, and not the competition’s?

Building Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are research-based profiles that depict the people in your target audience. It’s like market research but getting very specific–up close and personal. It highlights how your ideal customers behave, what challenges they face, and how they make decisions.

For B2B SaaS companies it’s commonplace to have a multitude of buyer personas. Why? Because when subscribing to a B2B SaaS service the approval of many heads is often needed, and each of these heads will potentially have a different buyer persona. After all, the decision-making process they go through will be entirely different, despite them all acquiring the same end product or service for the same business.

Top Tip: Here’s a handy guide on how to create user personas.

Step 2- Introspection: consider your SaaS product

Understanding your product or service inside and out is key for your demand generation plan.

We don’t mean you need to know how to use it or superficially what it does, no. You’ll need to know what jobs-to-be-done your product is solving. After all, a product does not get purchased for what it does but for the pain points it’s solving–understanding this down to the nitty gritty will help you know how to attract the right potential customer.

Another thing you’ll need to know is your brand positioning. Are you seen as a thought leader in your industry? Do people come to you to better understand the pain points and challenges of their niche? Are you seen as a brand that can provide solutions beyond your product?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you’ll need to start making some changes. For demand generation, your brand is half the equation. If your ICP doesn’t trust your brand, or they aren’t even aware of it, it will be hard for them to inch closer to your sales funnel.

Step 3- Map the customer journey

Source

Once you have all of this research, you’ll be able to start mapping your customer journey and the pain points along the way.

A customer journey map is a diagram–or collection of diagrams–in which you’ll show the whole experience a customer has with your brand. It shows their journey from the first time hearing about your service up to the point they make a purchase, and start their onboarding flow.

Top Tip: Beyond onboarding, you’re looking at your customer’s lifecycle, or user journey.

The customer journey map is of great value for your entire product marketing strategy because it’ll let you know–and see–the goals, and challenges that your ICP has, as well as understanding the channels that they use to try and resolve them.

Step 4- Consider different demand generation tactics and what content is best for your goals

Since your demand gen plan is the broader overview—the one that guides your every move—you’ll need to have specific tactics and methods that are actionable, these are your demand generation tactics and best practices.

To give you an idea of what they are and how they work here are some go-to tactics that people in the industry use:

• A/B testing: is a really important step in the process. It helps determine which copy for your marketing channels and use cases is best for your business.
• Content: Content is the backbone of demand generation. It’s important to try to cover everything your audience needs to know about a certain topic, everything from your line of work–this usually means producing large amounts of content, but doesn’t have to be. What’s important is that the content is fresh and relevant to your audience and that it covers everything they need to know.
• Social media: Social media marketing is a great way to increase brand awareness and build a community.
• Email marketing: Email is still one of the most efficient ways to reach your audience–for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
• Landing pages: Landing pages are great for lead generation–as they are the first thing your new user will see about you and can convert fast if you follow the landing page best practices.
• Customer service: Customer service is a great way to build a relationship with your customers.

Although these are all key tactics to consider, there are also some others that do wonders for any B2B SaaS business. As Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO at Mavens & Moguls, explains: 

“Content marketing and thought leadership are great ways to build your brand, increase your visibility more broadly, raise your profile and attract more clients. Activities like hosting podcasts/webinars, writing articles, and building your following on social media all contribute to increasing your awareness with potential customers and building your credibility with a larger community.”

However, there is one tactic to rule them all: SEO, (search engine optimization.) After all, as Paige Arnof-Fenn points out:

“You do not exist today if you cannot be found online. Being invisible online is a terrible strategy so make sure your site is keyword-rich, mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and produces meaningful content.”

If you’re looking for a team of SEO experts ready to help make your brand rank online, check out our team at Skale.

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Step 5- Consider how to build brand awareness

You can only generate demand for something that people can see, that’s why building brand awareness is step 0 for any demand gen plan. Additionally, building brand awareness is key since 59% of customers prefer to buy from brands they already know about.

Will Whitham, senior copywriter and content lead for The CMO Alliance, and host of CMO Convo and CMO Diaries podcasts, says:

“It’s important to make sure you’re balancing your demand gen with brand building strategies. After all, in the B2B world, only 5% of your potential customers are currently in-market. Building a strong, recognizable brand will allow you to make the awareness stage of your demand gen funnel much more efficient, and reduce indecision when the rest of your potential customers move in-market.”

There are many ways to build brand awareness but here are some places to get you started:

• Give your brand personality: if a customer can identify with your brand personality, they’re more likely to buy from it
• Influencer marketing: “41% of customers discover new products through influencers weekly, and 24% do so daily! This presents brands with plenty of opportunities to reach new customers via influencer campaigns,” according to Rakuten. 

If you think this doesn’t apply to SaaS companies you’ll be happy to know that even businesses as big as Canva has used–tremendously successful–influencer marketing in their brand awareness strategy.

• Content marketing: is one of the best ways to increase your brand awareness. Produce quality content that offers value. In fact, “88% of marketers have successfully reached their goals of creating brand awareness and building credibility and trust through content marketing.”
  Another tip comes from Christiaan Huynen, founder and CEO at DesignBro, Christian says: “Content that gives free value to your audience by solving a problem they have, or does not yet know that they have, is always a great model to emulate.”
• Offline campaigns: Although plenty of things for SaaS companies move in the online world, don’t forget about offline campaigns. You could offer free trials for those you encounter at networking events or live workshops, for example.
• LinkedIn: social media it’s super important, but when it comes to SaaS B2B businesses, LinkedIn is way better than Instagram or other top social media accounts. According to LinkedIn, there are over 180 million senior-level influencers–that makes up nearly 25% of its total user base. In fact, 59% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn helps them attract new business!

Creating brand awareness in the right channels can help make or break your demand generation strategy. Take a look at this infographic for some more inspo.

Step 6- Consider how to attract high-value leads

Now that you understand who your target audience is, how you want to drive them through your sales funnel, and you’ve made your brand visible, you’ll need to think about attracting high-quality leads.

A high-quality lead is someone you know is likely to become lucrative for your business. Be that in contract length, value, or both—CLTV. 

In this part of your demand generation plan you’ll need to answer the following questions:

1. Who are those individuals that are more likely to become a customer, without needing every tactic in your demand gen playbook?
2. How can you create targeted campaigns that will reach high-value prospective customers?
3. What steps can you take to streamline the demand generation process for valuable prospects?

By answering these questions, together with your customer journey map and demand gen tactics, you’ll be able to create the step-by-step guide for attracting the right customer to your funnel.

Step 7- Create your demand generation strategy

Just like a good pilot that’s done all the hours of flights and classes, you now know everything to put on your checklist to take off on that demand generation strategy and head towards blue-sky-product marketing success.

By now, you already know your product inside and out, you understand your ICP, and you’ve built a visible brand. This gives you everything you need to align your marketing, sales, and content teams to your brand goals.

Not only this, but you have a broad view of demand generation tactics and will be able to come up with a comprehensible plan that engages your customer to your brand and solutions by using the right demand gen tools and channels.

Step 8- Launch your demand generation strategy!

Once the plan and strategy are ready, all you need to do is to launch it. Depending on the tactics you’re using and how well you’ve done your research you can expect to see results in as little as a couple of months–check Maze’s success story that only took 6 months to see a jump of 283% in their signups.

Remember, demand gen is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’ll take some time to see the real impact of your campaign, especially in the B2B SaaS industry. Have patience, but don’t forget to measure how your progress is going by using demand gen metrics to help you keep your efforts on track.

Final thoughts for your demand gen plan

Your new demand generation plan is not set in stone.

With demand generation, and especially everything linked to a B2B SaaS company, things will change fast. One day LinkedIn is the marketplace to be in for B2B sales, the next day it’s been canceled and you’ll need to find a new approach. Keep track of your efforts, market trends, or new ideas in your industry and marketing teams, and adjust it all as you go. 

Your demand generation plan will constantly evolve, not only due to outside consequences but also due to the constant changes inside a company and brand. Maybe goals will change, maybe they’ll pivot into a new way of doing things, or provide new services altogether.

Demand generation is here to stay, or so think 70% of marketers that say their demand gen budgets will increase in the coming years. Get in the game and create a perfect demand generation plan with these eight steps–guaranteed to help you succeed.

Buckle up, put your seat in the upright position, and get ready for take-off!

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Demand generation FAQ

Demand generation today is paramount to getting the leads and customers your business truly deserves.

The channels you use in your strategy can make or break your whole growth plan. Not all B2B products will use the same channels in the same way, nor will they work with all products. 

Choosing the right demand gen channel for your strategy is no easy task–no fret, we’re here to breadcrumb your journey. In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why is demand generation marketing important?
• How to create a winning demand generation strategy?
• The top seven demand generation channels
• Choosing the right demand generation channels for your business

Why is demand generation marketing important?

To properly understand what B2B demand generation is, we need to acknowledge the power that customers have over their own buyer’s journey. It’s the act of pulling customers to you, via a pathway that feels natural and familiar to them. 

Customers can find all the information they need to decide whether or not to make a purchase, even before ever speaking to a sales rep or being bombarded by ads. 

Today, sales teams only have about 5% of the customer’s time on their B2B buying journey. It’s this empowering position that customers have that has changed the way brands advertise and make themselves stand out.

Marketing teams are now being challenged by self-taught customers, and by customers’ higher expectations of products–thanks to the wide variety available–and businesses’ higher-performance needs–thanks to all the metrics available. 

Marketing and sales teams need to work in sync and genuinely understand their customer and market in order to create a successful demand generation strategy.

Demand generation and lead generation marketing are two different strategies. However, people tend to use these terms interchangeably at times–but they are completely different.

What is demand generation marketing?

Demand generation marketing is the process that focuses on meeting possible customers at the very top of the sales funnel. Demand generation campaigns increase brand awareness, educate audiences, and generate trust.

What is lead generation marketing?

Lead generation marketing focuses much more on the bottom of the funnel. Lead generation marketing mainly consists of creating lead magnets–think gated content or freebies that you give in exchange for an email account. This will help you collect a visitor’s contact information–and then you’ll nurture this lead through–you guessed it–lead nurturing.

However, obtaining a bunch of leads will be pointless if you’re not truly working on your demand generation. A faulty demand generation, that sits at the top of the funnel, will bring you low-quality leads and will make your lead nurturing a harder job than it should be. That’s why here at Skale we focus more on demand generation–a strategy that will actually attract the right profiles to your services and the high-quality leads you’ll then be able to turn into customers in a heartbeat.

How to create a winning demand generation strategy?

To develop a successful demand generation strategy, you’ll need your sales and marketing teams to follow these eight demand gen best practices, which are:

• Focusing on organic search
• Becoming an authority brand
• Conversion rate and user experience optimization
• Co-marketing opportunities
• Creating sales funnel-specific content
• Using AI chatbots and marketing automation
• Introducing integrations to your product
• Making the most of free trial users

However, a fundamental part of any demand generation strategy is the channels you’ll use. Below we’ll tell you the best demand gen channels to get the high-quality leads and conversion rates your business deserves.

There are many demand generation channels available, take a look at the example below, but here we’ll tell you about the top seven channels that marketers are using to guarantee results.

Top 7 demand generation channels

First, let’s cover the top seven demand gen channels you need to know to get your business to a new level. After, we’ll show you how you can choose the one that best fits your business and market.

1. Thought leadership & SEO

Thought leadership content is authoritative, positioned at the top of the sales funnel and it’s designed to establish your company as an expert in your industry.

Since demand generation is all about increasing brand awareness and credibility, one of the best ways to do this is by providing thought leadership content.

Paige Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO of Mavens & Moguls, started a global branding and digital marketing firm 20 years ago and she says that one of the best ways to generate demand is through thought leadership:

“This is a great way to build your brand, increase your visibility more broadly, raise your profile and attract more clients. Activities like speaking at a conference, writing articles, and building your following on social media all contribute to increasing your awareness with potential customers and building your credibility with a larger community. Instead of trying to start your own blog or newsletter, try contributing regularly to existing well-trafficked blogs in your industry or newsletters of like-minded organizations reaching the same target audience as you.“

Showing that you’re an expert on the topic and that you really understand your customer’s pain points is the first step for customers to trust you and pay more attention to what you can offer them.

SEO is a key tool to place your content where it deserves to be. By paying attention to the on-page SEO elements such as keywords and content length, and off-page and technical SEO aspects such as internal linking structure, you’ll make sure your expert knowledge is located where your potential customers are looking and clicking.

“SEO is not something that can be gamified anymore and with the influx of AI technology creating content effortlessly, it is more important than ever to develop blog articles for SEO that have perspective and experience that an AI can’t replicate. This is where first-party data and case studies can be really effective as they are unique to your business.”

–Dan Gray, CEO at Vendry

Benefits of thought leadership content marketing and SEO:

• Heavily rewarded by Google’s algorithm
• Higher conversion–47% of C-suite executives claim that thought leadership content had a direct impact on which products and services they chose
• Takes as little as 4-6 months to see results
• It has a potential ROI of up to 748%

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2. Webinars

Webinars are a great way to directly engage with your target audience. They allow you to show your expertise while putting a face behind the logo. 

Webinars are not hour-long sales pitches. A webinar is to showcase your knowledge and interact with potential users.

Choosing the topic for the webinar is super important. One way you can find what your potential customers are interested in is by looking at your other channels. For example, if a post on social media, or on your blog, had really high engagement or even a lot of questions and comments from users, this might be a great indicator that you can build a webinar on the topic.

Another great way to implement webinars for demand generation is by addressing your audiences’ pain points and by explaining how your product or service works to address those same pain points. For example, do a step-by-step webinar where you explain to your ICPs how to solve a specific pain point with your tool. This will not only make them trust you more because you’re being open about your product but will also tip the scale for them to get your product since they already know how to use it. 

If you’re ever unsure about topics, just ask your audience! Use a tool like 123FormBuilder to automate your customer feedback, and build your topics for the webinars.  

Keep in mind the person or people that will present the webinar. You want to choose someone who is approachable, knowledgeable, charismatic, and that represents your brand’s voice.

Benefits of webinars for demand generation:

• Direct engagement with future customers
• Possibility to re-engage with leads in the sales funnel 
• Great way to show the human side/brand voice
• Takes 2-4 months to see results
• It has a potential ROI of 430%

3. Emails

Emails are still great ways to engage with customers. However, it needs to be with people that already know your brand and the content of the emails needs to be genuinely valuable. People love emails–53% of marketers say it’s the most effective channel for demand gen–but they hate spam–keep that in mind.

When creating your email campaigns you’ll need to keep three principles in mind: 

• Frequency
• Segmentation
• CTAs

Frequency: it doesn’t matter how valuable your content is, if you keep bombarding your clients with too many emails they will start seeing them as spam. In the same breath, if you start emailing too sparingly, customers will forget about you and your email marketing will lose its momentum.

Segmentation: helps keep your emails relevant. If you target each email to a specific type of customer, by industry, position, interaction, or any other demographic, it will help you deliver tailored, valuable content.

Implementing clear calls-to-action and next steps in your emails allows your potential customer to get the most out of the email. Make it easy for them to find out more about your brand or your products.

When using emails for demand generation your main focus will be on creating demand for other products that you sell. This means product launch emails or invitations for webinars about other pain problems–and their solutions with your products–that your customers have. 

Additionally, it’s important to seize technology’s full potential for your email campaigns. Janelle Amos, Founder & Demand Gen Consultant at Elevate Growth, likes to focus on trigger-based campaigns. For her, these campaigns are better since they allow the customer to tell you where they are in the journey and you can feed them exactly what they need to keep moving down the funnel. Thankfully, there are plenty of software and tools out there that help you with automating these campaigns and seeing the impact they are having on your potential customers so you can course-correct when needed. 

Top tip: Userlist is an email automation software specially designed for B2B SaaS companies.  

Lastly, Janelle also mentions the importance of following a zero-click style of email in your newsletters. Zero-click is a term used for content that allows the user to stay on the platform instead of clicking a CTA and being redirected to another site. For example, a post on Twitter will give a fact or interesting copy and then have the reader click on the CTA to go on to a blog post, landing page, or another platform. However, when it comes to emails for demand generation, it can be better to provide all the information the user needs right there in the email, this will improve the chances of them actually reading your email and slowly build your thought leadership. 

“I’ve taken a different approach to use newsletters to establish brand credibility and brand trust by creating a hot topic every single week or every single month, or whatever cadence you send your newsletter for, and using that where it has actionable tips, FAQs, Q&As, infographics, and more. However, I like to make it zero-click, where if they did nothing else but read this email they’ll have everything they need. They don’t have to just bypass the promo copy of ‘download this guide’ or ‘click here to go learn more’.”

Janelle Amos

Once you have a potential–or already–customer email address, use it wisely and you can see your ROI and profits increase.  

Benefits of email marketing:

• Great way to stay in the customer’s mind
• You can encourage conversation or word-of-mouth recommendations–after all, referrals by friends are four times more likely to turn into buyers
• Low cost and easy to manage
• It takes 3-6 months to see results
• It has a ROI of 312%

4. Podcasts

Podcasts have become one of the primary ways for people to learn new things. In fact, 74% of podcast users listen to them to learn something new. Podcasts have become a popular way to look for entertainment and knowledge. 

More than half of Americans do chores while listening to podcasts, and users spend an average of 6 hours and 37 minutes listening to podcasts every week.

With all of this engagement and popularity, it’s a big miss to pass on being part of the podcasting ecosystem. In fact, according to a BBC-commissioned report, companies that have podcasts saw an increase in:

• Awareness by 89%
• Brand consideration by 57% 
• Brand favorability by 24%
• Purchase intent by 14% 
• Engagement by 16% 

Podcasting has become even more important for B2B brands in the last few years, so much so that there’s a new term for it: ABP, or account-based podcasting. This means including your podcast in your account-based marketing strategy and actually having it as your main piece of content that will get to that highly-specific audience of potential customers. 

Podcasts are a great way to connect with your audience and improve your brand awareness and loyalty. Whether your product is a travel management tool or you offer content writing services, or any other B2B business, you’ll be wise to start a podcast. 

However, it’s important to point out that podcasts are not easy. On one hand, users can listen to podcasts wherever and whenever which is great because you won’t be competing with other channels that require the user to be fully present and engaged. On the other hand, you’ll be competing against the thousands–if not millions–of other podcasts out there in the selection process.  

How can you make their selection process easier? Well, collaboration is a great way to get new eyes–and ears–to your podcast. Like Riaz Kanani, founder, and CEO at Radiate B2B, said to us: 

“With more marketing activity happening outside your website, collaborations are incredibly important. Building your own audience remains important as it gives you a foundation to build out all your activities from, but waiting for your audience to sign up is often too late–as by that time, your competitors will already have been engaging and influencing them. We collaborate with influencers and thought leaders and co-promote on our LinkedIn Live as well as guest appearances on their podcasts to reach a wider audience. This in turn increases our audience but also allows you to reach a much wider audience than you would otherwise be able to do.”

Benefits of podcasts:

• Build credibility, trust, and connection with listeners
• Possibility to interact with other podcasts or welcome experts: grow your network
• A way to show your human side
• A way to better show your brand voice, values, attitudes
• A way to reach new, relevant audiences: guest hosting 
• It takes 12-18 months to see results
• It has a ROI of 307%

5. LinkedIn Ads

Another great way to improve your demand generation campaigns is to go on social media. However, we don’t mean Instagram or Facebook. No. We mean the social media platform that is all the rage for B2B companies: LinkedIn. 

“LinkedIn has become more than an online resume or Rolodex, it is the foundation for building trusted relationships in the digital economy.”

–Paige Arnof-Fenn

According to LinkedIn, 90% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn Ads and organic traffic to achieve their B2B marketing goals. With more than 130 million users actively using the platform every day–and with a cost per lead 28% cheaper than Google Ads–you know you can’t go wrong with LinkedIn. 

Janelle Amos, says the most important thing to keep in mind for LinkedIn Ads is to make them content and buyer-first:

“The first channel I love for demand generation is having quality LinkedIn ads. For B2B, the potential buyer consumes and engages on LinkedIn, that’s for certain. So I focus on really having that content-first approach and getting those levels of engagement from the audience. By supplying a content-first and a buyer-first mentality on LinkedIn ads you’ll see your DMs and the traffic to the website increase. A real-winning strategy.”

Janelle Amos

Additionally, demand generation experts like to not only use LinkedIn for its ads but to build their expert reputation. Paige Arnof-Fenn says it great: 

“To present yourself as an expert in your industry post interesting and educational content by sharing a great article you’ve read recently or if you truly want to make valuable connections and represent yourself as a talented thought leader in your industry, you should be crafting your own articles on LinkedIn.”

Lastly, here’s how Riaz Kanani uses podcasting and LinkedIn to increase his thought leadership and overall content marketing performance: 

Top tip: Use the Pinpoint Technique to increase your LinkedIn Ads’ ROI. It essentially allows you to use LinkedIn’s massive store of B2B data to send ads to the exact person you want to read, not just a general audience that fits a box. 

Benefits of LinkedIn:

• Great way to reach millions of people
• LinkedIn Ad algorithms help reach your target audience
• Build strong and trusted relationships

6. PPC/SEM

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two of the most-used channels by B2B SaaS companies.

The main advantage they offer is that the results are seen immediately. Additionally, PPC spending is easy to track and gives straight results and ROI. However, because you have to pay for each click on your Google Ads, this means that the customer acquisition cost is typically high.

As Paige Arnof-Fenn shared with us:

“Using organic SEO and PPC together is ideal now as main search engines are constantly changing their algorithms for rankings so stop thinking of SEO and PPC as rival forces. When used together they are complementary services that help boost your marketing strategy and increase brand exposure. 

Building brand awareness and trust in your brand/business begins by getting your business name to appear in prospects’ searches. Seeing your brand name appear twice, both on organic and on paid results creates more brand awareness and intensifies your business’s trustworthiness.  

Research shows that if two brands have the same products, people will be more likely to choose the one they are familiar with. When a brand is shown in organic results alone it only gets 60% of clicks, whereas a brand that appeared in both organic and paid search results, attracts 92% of total clicks. When paid listings are shown beside organic, the click-through rate of paid ads increases. This means that clicks increase for both organic and paid listings when they are both featured and do not detract from each other.”

Additionally, here’s what Luke Genoyer, Head of Business Development at Global Call Forwarding advice when it comes to PPC: 

• Pay attention to your search terms and aggressively add negative keywords that are leading to clicks but are not related to products & services you offer (this is especially important for bootstrapped companies)
• Test your landing pages and improve them
• Be mindful of high-spend campaigns and keywords that aren’t converting
• Combine PPC with Organic Search for the “brand halo” effect and maximum exposure

Benefits of PPC/SEM:

• Immediate results
• Provides great in-depth data
• Easy to track cost and ROI
• It has a ROI of 36%

7. Account-based marketing (ABM)

Demand generation aims to increase awareness and reach in order to increase high-quality leads that will then be turned into customers by the lead gen strategy. Account-based marketing is one of the best ways to ensure demand, leads, and customer acquisition. Why? Because it focuses so much on a specific account and personalizes all marketing efforts to perfectly match the account targeted.

Riaz Kanani shared a lot of his ABM wisdom with us:

“ABM is an excellent strategy that when scaled can become the default way of building pipeline using a demand generation approach. Many start with ABM in its most focused form, however targeting one company at a time or a small cluster of 10-20 can work when you have a lot of insight into each company. For example, upselling to existing customers. But it can be expensive without that knowledge upfront. Instead, it is better to target a larger set of companies with a similar need and then invest in those showing some form of engagement or intent. You can then continue to scale this approach to different sets of companies with different needs, or as companies move further through the pipeline tailor the messaging further to accelerate closing the contract.” 

“Instead, we use account-based advertising to create a group of companies that are directly targetable and this allows you to build significant awareness without a large investment in media spend. This then gets powered by intent data so you are constantly able to drip advertising in front of companies showing an interest in topics you care about. Alongside this, we run LinkedIn Live which both drives thought leadership and positioning within the industry, but also powers social media content, email nurture, and sales messaging.” 

Top tip: Focus on what you already know, this means, talking to sales and finding out who is your ideal customer. Which type of customer do you fit better with? Who are you providing better results to? Once you know that, you’ll know which companies you’ll want to target in your ABMs efforts. 

Sweet Fish’s B2B Growth interview with Greg Batchelor, vice president of growth marketing at Platform.sh, shines a light on one of the most important pieces of advice people can hear when it comes to ABM: to be laser-focused. 

Once you understand who the companies you want to target are you’ll need to be laser-focused on your messaging across all channels to them. You’ll want to really answer any questions they might have and focus on only their pain points. This is what account-based marketing is all about, is about going specific on who you’re targeting. 

Benefits of account-based marketing:

• High risk, high CAC, but high reward, high ROI
• High ROI when done properly
• It takes 4-8 months to see results
• Great insights into target accounts

There are plenty more channels to consider, but these are the main channels that we know will help you generate the demand of your dreams!

Choosing the right demand generation channel for your business

Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing & Outreach Manager at PhotoAid, points out:

“There are a variety of demand generation channels that businesses can use to reach their target audiences. The most effective channels will vary depending on the type of business, product or service being offered, and the target market.“

It’s true that finding the right channel for your specific situation in terms of products, target audience, and industry is no easy task. In fact, Kevin Barry, co-founder at Right Percent, says that the first thing to note when it comes to demand generation is that “finding product-channel fit is hard!“

We’ve been warned of how hard it really is, yet we must still do it and be meticulous when trying to choose the right channel. When it comes to demand generation, it really is the crux of the matter.

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Things to keep in mind when choosing your demand gen channels:

Understand your market and their channels:

The first thing you need to do is deeply understand your market. Use all the data collected, and that you can find from other companies, to really narrow down who your audience is. What do they like, where are they, and what their pain points are?

“When you analyze your market, you determine whether you can go for blogging, direct mailing, social media, PR campaigns, or influencer marketing. You may also create webinars, videos, or podcasts, write e-books, or organize live events. […] Just remember to balance your scale and personalization in the right way.”

– Nina Pączka, Community Manager at Zety.

Source: Provided by Kevin Barry

Think about your long-term goal:

Of course, your aim is to generate demand, however, think about the greater purpose. If you want to increase your sales fast, improve your brand reputation and credibility, or establish a solid community, your go-to channel will change.

Analyze and adjust:

Once your demand generation strategy is up and running, you’ll need to constantly check how it’s going. There are plenty of demand gen metrics available for you to use and analyze, but here are some of the most used:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
• Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Overall Return of Investment (ROI)

Lastly, don’t forget that you aren’t constrained to using only one channel. Metric charts analyzed the B2B market shares by the number of sales channels used and the results are what you would expect: the more channels that were used, the better. 

However, not all companies will have unlimited time and financial resources to use as many channels as they wish, but this is a great reminder to not narrowly focus on only one channel.

Let us know how you get on with these demand gen channels and thanks for reading!

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Demand Gen FAQs

Demand generation gets the customers that your business deserves. It’s an inbound marketing strategy that manages to leverage data to increase awareness, popularity, and interest from the right people for your brand and product. This strategy works at the very top of your sales funnel.

“Demand generation is all about creating awareness of your services or products. The well-designed strategy broadens the interest group, builds engagement, increases traffic, and turns interest into action.”

–Nina Pączka, Community Manager at Zety

What is demand generation?

Demand generation, or demand gen, is a marketing method that leans on inbound marketing in order to generate awareness and pull for brands and their products. It’s an active marketing strategy throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

In today’s day and age, where there are thousands of new companies emerging every day–in 2021 alone, nearly 5.4 million new business applications were filed–it’s mandatory to prove your worth to customers before they consider buying your product.

You need to be on your client’s radar and stand out from the competition. Not an easy task, we know. However, demand generation is the strategy to empower and educate your customers so that they see you as the authority and the logical solution to solving their pain points.

What’s important is to not confuse demand gen with lead generation. Although some people use them interchangeably, they’re definitely not the same thing.

Demand generation campaigns focus on brand awareness and attracting new potential customers–high-quality leads–while lead gen is making them go from browsers into prospective customers, with an end goal of winning paying customers.

Demand generation is at the top of the digital marketing funnel and lead generation is towards the bottom of the funnel.

If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of what makes demand and lead gen different types of fish, here at Skale we have you covered with this Demand Gen vs Lead Gen article. It’ll clear any doubts you might have and make you sound like a full-on expert on the topic.

Benefits of a great demand gen strategy

Generating more demand is any B2B SaaS business dream. In fact, 70% of marketers say their demand gen budgets will increase in the following years–there’s demand for demand gen.

Demand generation is not only a volume game. You’re not aiming to just attract any bee to your honey. Instead, you’re aiming to attract those beautiful and rare queen bees that will then make your business ROI that much sweeter.

When you’re able to attract high-quality leads, those that really match your user personas, you’ll increase your chances of conversion.

Specific outcomes and demand gen campaign results will vary depending on your B2B SaaS company’s goals. However, they all have one thing in common: a great demand generation strategy helps your business grow–guaranteed.

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The three phases of demand generation

We get it, demand generation is the bee’s knees, but how exactly does it work?

B2B SaaS marketing and sales teams that have a successful demand generation plan focus on the following three main phases that make creating demand and nurturing prospects sweet as pie.

Discovery or awareness

Are people aware of your brand? Are you being seen?

Normally, audiences of demand generation strategies are well aware of what their needs are. However, they might not know that you can solve their needs, or that you even exist. In the discoverability phase, also called the awareness phase, you want to simply ignite intrigue in your prospective customers, and get on screens.

As a SaaS company you need to be visible to your users in their search, and let’s be honest, we’re talking Google. Up to June 2021, Google dominated the search engine market with 92.4% of the market share, with 5.6 billion searches per day. To achieve organic search wins during these initial phases, you’ll need these two main tactics: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid search (PPC).

Let your prospective customers know you’re a company that can help with their pain points.

Brand Activation or engagement

These aren’t just fancy marketing buzzwords. They’re the brand experiences that make your brand pop in the customer’s head.

Truth is, your ideal buyer won’t always be ready to make a purchase. However, you still need to continue interacting with them so that eventually they move from potential to actual customers.

In the brand activation or engagement phase you interact even more closely with your users. You let them know exactly how you’ll target each of their pain points, and most importantly, you showcase the benefits of using your product over the competition.

A popular tactic used by the sales team for this phase is email marketing.

Email marketing is seen as the most effective distribution channel for demand gen efforts by 79% of B2B marketers, and it’s seen as one of the top methods to successfully nurture subscribers, audiences, and leads.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Once your demand gen strategies are in motion, you’ll need to collect the necessary data to be able to optimize for conversion.

At the end of the day, the real proof that your demand generation ideas are fruitful is conversion rate. To increase customer conversion rates you’ll need to understand how your website is performing–what’s really working and what might be lacking.

For SaaS businesses, their website is their presentation card, headquarters, and CEO office–it’s where everything happens. If your website is poorly designed, does not communicate your value properly, or confuses the user on how your product works, your demand generation efforts will go down the drain.

These are a few common CRO opps for brands to look out for:

• Pricing UX
• Sign-up forms 
• Email marketing
• CTAs within blogs
• Landing pages
• Live chat software
• Email signup

CRO is a fundamental part needed to actually bring your demand generation and marketing operations to fruition.

These three briefly explained phases are what make generating demand possible.

Three demand generation tactics to try

There are many tactics that will perform better depending on the product or service SaaS companies provide, and the market and industry that your company is in. For some, webinars will be the key thing to do, while others will see more results from infographics or videos in their content marketing efforts.

Source: 2022 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey, DemandGen Report

However, here are three of the most successful demand generation tactics for 2022 that you should be paying attention to:

1. Webinars

Webinars are one of the best ways to engage with potential users. A webinar is not a sales pitch, it’s an educational activity to position yourself as a thought leader and to generate a direct connection with users.

Webinars are great for top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) and they’re also great for middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) campaigns. They were the top choice for the mid-stage buying journey for 48% of B2B marketers.

When combined with your other co-marketing strategies, webinars are the perfect way to reach wider audiences and gather more in-depth insights. Additionally, you can repurpose webinar content so that it can become a promotional product video, social media post, or even an infographic elsewhere. Check out this example below from GoHighLevel.

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2. Virtual events

Thanks to the pandemic, the world realized that life online is possible. According to Forbes, virtual events increased a whopping 1000%–not a number to be ignored. Virtual events are brand awareness galore and can be what puts you in front of your target audience.

In case you’re wondering what the difference between a webinar and a virtual event is, it’s all about the topic. 

For a webinar, you’ll focus 30-90 minutes on one specific topic, almost like a master class. 

Whereas, virtual events feel more like an online conferences. You have different topics and talks for you to pick and choose the ones that you like the most. One great example of a virtual event is the Forbes Under 30 Summit.

3. Videos

Videos are a great way to catch your user’s attention, inviting them to remain longer on your website and truly get them to understand what you offer. In fact, 94% of marketers agree that videos are key to helping users understand their product or service.

“In a mobile-first world, you have less time to grab people’s attention, with attention spans being shorter than ever, videos will be used even more to boost rankings, show-don’t-tell for maximum impact, because rich content drives engagement, traction, and growth. The world is moving to mobile-first or mobile-only, and fewer people accessing the web on big screens so everyone is tailoring their site, message, and content accordingly. More people watch videos than TV now so adding video to your site and using the right keywords for video descriptions and headlines will ensure you do better in searches too.” 

–Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO, Mavens & Moguls

With video, another important thing to keep in mind is to make it accessible to all users. Adding subtitles is now a priority, not only for those with hearing impairments but also for those learning the language, or who have simply left their headphones at home. HappyScribe is a great tool to use for audio transcription and adding subtitles to any video. 

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Finding the right tactic will depend on many factors, so it’s always useful to do some trial and error. However, these three tactics are guaranteed to help you increase demand and lead generation.

8 Actionable demand generation tips & best practices

Now, let’s get down to some actionable demand gen tips and best practices for you to get your SaaS company to new levels of awesomeness.

1. Create user personas

A user persona is a fictional character of what the ideal user is of your product. Through market research, you’ll get to create a user persona that will allow you to understand the motivations, behaviors, frustrations, pain points, and needs of your ideal user.

Once you have developed user personas, you’ll have the perfect starting point to generate a truly successful demand generation campaign.

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2. Analyze potential generation channels

Once you understand your ideal user, you’ll be able to see in which channels your prospective customer is hanging out. Do they prefer social media? Are they looking for high-quality thought leadership via blog content? Or maybe they spend more time with newsletters?

Finding the right channel for your demand gen strategy is a make-or-break deal, so choose wisely.

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3. Consider collaborations

Collaborations are a great way to position your brand. Not only does it help to appear in front of your users in a natural way, but it helps build the authority of your software. It’s not the same as a SaaS company that advertises by itself, as one that runs a collab with Hubspot or Slack, for example.

“With more marketing activity happening outside your website, collaborations are incredibly important. Building your own audience remains important as it gives you a foundation to build out all your activities from, but waiting for your audience to sign up is often too late–as by that time, your competitors will already have been engaging and influencing them. We collaborate with influencers and thought leaders and co-promote on our LinkedIn Live as well as guest appearances on their podcasts to reach a wider audience. This in turn increases our audience but also allows you to reach a much wider audience than you would otherwise be able to do.”

–Riaz Kanani, Founder/CEO, Radiate B2B

4. Find that dream location, location, location

The best way to be discovered and build brand awareness is by being where your users are looking: search engines.

Let’s look at some interesting statistics to prove the importance of SEO:

• Google found that 89% of B2B buyers use search engines during the research process
• Zero Limit Web found that the first five search results get an average of 67.6% of the clicks
• Hubspot found that 61% of B2B marketers say SEO and organic traffic are their top inbound marketing priority

These prove how important SEO is. If you’re not at the top of the search pages, your demand generation will be as useful as a screen door on a submarine–we mean it.

Like Paige Arnof-Fenn shared with us:

“You do not exist today if you cannot be found online. Being invisible online is a terrible strategy so making sure your site is keyword rich/mobile friendly/loads quickly/produces meaningful content is the price of entry/great foundation for effective SEO. Social media and technology are 24/7 so it is easy to get sucked into it but don’t let them drive you crazy, you do not need to be everywhere, it does not matter which platform you choose just pick one or two that are authentic to you.”

Pay attention to your SEO and you’ll be one step closer to demand gen glory.

“SEO is not something that can be gamified anymore and with the influx of AI technology creating content effortlessly, it is more important than ever to develop blog articles for SEO that have perspective and experience that an AI can’t replicate. This is where first-party data and case studies can be really effective as they are unique to your business.”

–Dan Gray, CEO of Vendry 

If you’re looking for SEO experts to help you get on that prime digital real estate, here at Skale we know a thing or two. 

Steal ideas from a real-life SaaS SEO success story

See how Holded scaled their signups by 450% in less than 12 months

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5. Aim for thought leadership

Providing real value to your customers is truly rewarding. That’s why 58% of B2B marketers used content marketing to successfully nurture subscribers, audiences, or leads. The top two methods for content are email, 87%, and educational content, 77%.

By developing educational content you’re building trust and an emotional relationship with the user, which will help them to pick you over the competition. However, focus on the content, and make it approachable, empathic, and as super-charged with value as you can.

Paige Arnof-Fenn shared an important piece of advice for those building their thought leadership:

“Instead of trying to start your own blog or newsletter, try contributing regularly to existing well-trafficked blogs in your industry or newsletters of like-minded organizations reaching the same target audience as you. Make sure you put your URL or contact info on it so they can find you and follow up. When your articles or talks become available online, make sure to send them out via social media to all your friends, followers, and contacts. Start small and build as you go.”

6. Offer free trials

Offering free trials and resources is a fantastic way to build trust and confidence in your product.

Although the top practices to draw conversions later in the funnel are email with 46% and website with 38%, product demos, and free trials secured second place with 40%–it’s not magic, but it gets close.

One important thing to keep in mind with free trials and demos is that you should aim for the easiest, most seamless onboarding experience. You want users to have the best possible experience with your software so that once they are ready they’ll convert to full customers.

7. Use the right tools

Demand generation tools are a convenient way to save time, money, and resources. They help your inbound marketing strategy and support lead gen, and they also help you keep track of your demand gen metrics–we’ll discuss them more, further down.

Additionally, demand gen tools are often the missing piece for sales and marketing teams to work together in perfect unison.

Check these demand generation tools to discover some not-so-well-known tools that can help nail your demand gen game.

8. Check metrics that are worth checking

Demand generation is always changing and adapting to new trends, technologies, and customer pain points, this makes it a requirement to continuously be testing and proofing your demand generation hypothesis.

There are many variables, and each product and company will have a different level of performance. That’s why it’s necessary to have the right demand gen metrics on the side to make sure everything is running smoothly at all times, and you’re aware of areas to improve.

“The ultimate north star metric of Demand Generation is qualified leads. While other leading indicators like website visitors, ad clicks, or impressions are helpful for understanding the performance of certain initiatives, especially early on, the goal of Demand Gen teams should be to find individuals who are qualified and get them primed to chat with a sales team.”

–Dan Gray

Time to optimize your B2B demand generation channel

A good demand generation marketing strategy can truly make or break your B2B SaaS business.

It’s the marketing strategy to get to prospective users that will convert and turn into happy, long-lasting customers.

Use these eight best tips and best practices for demand generation to get you from zero leads to the most jam-packed sales funnel you’ve ever seen.

Scale your demand generation efforts

See how Skale can leverage your SaaS SEO and content marketing

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Demand generation FAQ

A solid demand generation strategy requires solid ideas. Nope, the bolded s in ideas isn’t a typo. Your demand generation strategy can’t be a one-pronged approach. You’ve probably already got a ton of demand generation tactics up your sleeve, loosen that up and let them all out, and let’s share the lot. It’s okay to hit the ground running with every weapon in your toolkit.

You’ll soon figure out which demand gen idea works best, and then you can double-up and knuckle down on those ideas that are bringing home the high-quality leads you’ve been looking for since the get-go.

A successful demand generation plan meets users where they’re at, however, if they’re not always at the same place, then this is a little harder to do. In this article, we’re sharing eleven demand gen ideas designed to meet your users where they’re at, and then meet them at the next place, and the place after that too.

Let’s start winning your sales and marketing teams the footfall they deserve, shining a spotlight on your product or service, and increasing MRR for your SaaS business.

11 Demand Generation ideas to get you from zero to hero

Because we forgot a TL;DR in the intro, here’s a breakdown of the demand generation marketing ideas we’ll cover in this article.

1. SEO & Content Marketing
2. Lead Magnets
3. Chatbots
4. SaaS Influencer Marketing
5. Pre-launch Campaigns
6. IRL meetings
7. Webinars
8. PPC
9. Co-marketing campaigns
10. SaaS comparison websites
11. SaaS Micro-tools

Come to this article with an open mind, and don’t think you only need to select one strategy. If your sales and marketing teams have the capacity to take on at least three of these demand generation strategies, then give them the autonomy to do so. Let’s get that sales funnel filled.

1. Create a funnel with SEO and content marketing

So, welcome to the Skale funnel. At Skale, we apply our own services to the agency’s growth strategy, essentially treating the business as a customer. We believe it’s a core tactic for any agency’s growth.

An SEO and content marketing strategy need to come hand-in-hand if you’re hoping to rank while still providing quality to leads. Inbound marketing strategies don’t need to be one or the other, you’re still able to deliver on SEO terms and topics, while providing written content that website visitors find useful.

In partnership with some incredibly talented SEO wizards, our marketing efforts are creating quality content that’s ranking for terms the SEO agency needs to be known for.

We’ve ranked, and hopefully—by the time you’re reading this—are still ranking for:

• Demand generation metrics #2 
• SaaS SEO tools #1
• SaaS link building #1

So, as is the case with most listicles these days, we featured our priorities front-of-shop. Welcome to the best-performing demand generation process for Skale—SEO and content marketing.

Oh, and in case you’re thinking of implementing this demand gen strategy for your SaaS and are looking for some help along the way, we’ll leave this here.

Apply to work with Skale today.

Get inspired from real world content success stories

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2. Use lead magnets

Coming in a close second on the list of demand generation campaigns are lead magnets. As far as demand gen strategies go, this one is nothing new—an oldie but a goldie. Lead magnets can be anything from E-books to brochures, and this largely depends on your niche.

Let’s look at some examples.

For B2C products or services, brochures tend to be a better lead magnet. A few years back, Ray Slatter Berry, was the Head of Creative Strategy for European Bartender School. Their ICP was very different to the audiences they write for today.

However, back then they created the best lead magnet the company ever had, which they’re still using today.

Brochures are the most tangible experience your ICPs can have and one that can turn them into leads. They’re not something to be reckoned with.

Example number two is Ebooks! Yep, people still read them. If marketing and sales teams are peppering them into their own strategies and customer flows, you’ll give them an even better chance at demand gen success—rather than just waiting for them to be found via Google.

A brand that comes to mind for this particular demand generation strategy is Codility. The technical recruitment SaaS platform provides a ton of free great content in their marketing strategy. However, their gated content—with an email and a few details—is where they’re winning high-quality leads.

Plus, when a user “downloads” an ebook from Codility, they enter a short email flow where Codility sends them tips, tricks, and more content tailored to the initial download.

3. Chatbots

Chatbots over modals, chatbots over modals. Say it with us. Let’s say it louder for the people at the back. 

Today, chatbots are an absolute must for your demand generation strategy. They save your sales team precious time, allow marketing automation, and are able to address (and track) customer pain points as and when they occur.

They’re also a lot less invasive than modals, and encourage a self-serve product culture that your customer success teams will be thankful for further down the line.

So, for demand generation and lead generation consider a chatbot to help bring in qualified leads. We could probably write an entire article on chatbots, however, a few quick-fire best practices are:

• Lead scoring: to give your leads’ weight and know when to transfer them to your sales team
• User-triggered: to give your chatbots relevancy to users’ on-page actions
• Keep them chatty: there’s nothing wrong with a bit of personality in a bot: R2D2 got quite the name for itself
• Map your lead generation content: have your chatbot share relevant content to potential leads depending on their needs—keeping users on site.

An example of a great chatbot, you ask? Jump over to Whisbi and play around with their ‘bot’—this is a chatbot marketing dream, a demand generation machine, literally.

4. SaaS influencer marketing

We may be a little biased on this demand gen idea, but we could harp on about influencers to fill your sales pipeline every day of the week.

Granted, SaaS influencers are a little harder to find. Sure they’re not as common as your foodies, or clothes haul OOTDs, however, they are out there and they are rife—even if they’re unintentionally influencing, and they can provide you with quality leads.

Let’s start with what we’re all thinking: LinkedIn—and get this social giant out the way. Of course, LinkedIn’s usually first on the list for social media demand generation efforts. 94% of B2B marketers go to LinkedIn over other social channels, and 90% of social traffic for B2B blogs comes from the platform—so it’s worth posting on there regularly. 

A few of our fan favorites on LinkedIn are:

• Rodolphe Dutel, Founder at Remotive
• Anna Franziska Hunger, Talent & People Operations Partner
• Rabin (拉宾) Nuchtabek, Growth Expert
• Anemari Fiser, Product Director
• Colin James Belyea, Growth & Performance Marketing Consultant
• Jake Stainer, Co-Founder @ Skale

It’s also good to think outside of the box as far as possible. Our users are humans too, and it’s all too easy to think that your brand should only be on LinkedIn as that’s a professional platform. However, when was the last time you really scrolled on LinkedIn? Let’s say for over ten minutes?

You need to be looking at meeting users where they are, in their ‘human hours.’ When they’re zombied after a hard day in the virtual office, and are mindlessly scrolling on the sofa back home. TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Quora! There are tons of fantastic social media platforms out there for your next demand generation campaign.

Need more? Sure, here’s a list of SaaS influencers for your demand gen campaign:

• Twitter: Kaleigh Moore. Freelance writer + content marketer for retail tech and related SaaS companies
• Instagram: Ray Slater Berry. I post a ton of content to support small business owners and freelancers
• Twitter: Codi. Social media marketing strategist
• Twitter: Udit Goenka. Building @pitchgroundhq – A $20m Bootstrapped Startup • Angel Investor
• Instagram: Taylor Loren. Growing marketing careers with Instagram

Extra reading: The top demand generation metrics to track in 2024. 

5. Pre-launch a SaaS product

One of the best demand generation strategies we’ve seen in action is to pre-launch your SaaS product to prospective customers. Now, of all demand generation ideas, this one is perhaps one of the trickiest to do, or at least the most specific to implement. Why? You need an audience, which is tough if you don’t have a product, or aren’t on the influencer’s list above.

Kick-start this demand generation marketing tactic and get your product on Kickstarter or ProductHunt to get some hype going for your product and start building that all-important mailing list.

This mailing list consists of your innovators and early adopters from your product adoption curve. They have the potential to be your most loyal customers, your product builders, and your biggest brand ambassadors. Find your people, build their trust, and then VIP-style launch your product to them first.

Guy Nachum did exactly this with Layla Electric, a SaaS platform that enables property managers to reduce operational costs and increase the sustainability level of their assets.

“Our first clients were family and friends, we didn’t publish anywhere—it was all word-of-mouth. Because we were part of an acceleration program, they arranged different calls with stakeholders from different companies, which helped us build out our pre-launch mailing list. They were all very nice and wanted to be part of BETA testing—it was very interesting to them and Layla appealed to their pain points.”

As Guy launched a B2B product in BETA, he didn’t need many clients to generate traction as businesses buy so many units. 

“We’re not working in an environment where we need multiple leads and emails, we need just 100 great clients to hit our ARR goals.” 

This type of pre-launch helps growth in more ways than one, Guy told us more. 

“It’s always surprising because you can be very fixed on an idea of what the market wants, but you get feedback on what they actually think is important, and the features that are of most value to them—and how much they want to pay for those features. If the market won’t pay for something then the feature is just not worth investing time and money on. 

Another thing we’re learning from our pre-launch is sometimes you think the product needs to go in one direction, and your first customers present an entirely new route. They open pathways you thought were not even relevant.”

6. Meet up in person with potential leads

We’d like to think that the pandemic’s behind us by now *anxiously touches wood* . In-person events and meetings are cropping up to take over the new normal. There’s a huge amount of screen fatigue today. We’re tired of tinny voices, shaky screen shares, and having to over-animate our reaction when we’re on mute.

Of all our demand gen strategies, in-person meets give you the biggest potential to lean back into relationship-based sales. Remember the running theme of this article? Meet your customers where they’re at. Figure out upcoming events they’ll be attending and make sure you’re on the guest or speaker list.

If they’re not into events but are a potentially huge lead then make the effort to visit them in person. Show them there’s more to you than an email address and a 5-year-old profile picture. It’s time to take your demand generation marketing strategy offline again, and combat digital tactics with real-world relationships.

Extra reading: The secret demand generation tools experts don’t want you to know about

7. Host webinars

Don’t come for us because we just told you to combat screen fatigue. We also have to stay on the topic of meeting your target audience wherever they may be. The truth is, they may not want to meet offline—and that’s okay, we’ll have you ready for that too!

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Look to host or co-host webinars that add real value to your ICPs. These webinars need to focus on addressing pain points and jobs-to-be-done while having your product as the underdog—not the champion. Webinars are not product demos.

Webinars are not product demos.

Although webinars do fulfill a few demand generation aims, like building email lists as well as product and brand awareness and demand, they don’t need to be your “traditional” webinars. Social media lives are a great way to catch your leads outside of the office, with Twitter Spaces being the most exciting demand generation channel, for us, right now.

If you’re building a demand generation program and want to give your brand as much potential as possible to reach qualified leads then webinars need to be on your hit list.

8. Run PPC campaigns

Pay per click advertising is always up for debate. Should you run a demand generation campaign so heavily reliant on ad spend? 

First up, it depends on your resources. Can you afford it? Do you have the talent available to create ads and a full-funnel ad campaign that will help not only drive demand for your business but result in actual wins?

If you do, is this what will work with your demographic? The truth is, you won’t know unless you try. But, to give yourself enough data to try, you need to be prepared to spend a little. There’s definitely a downward trend, 40% of companies say their PPC budget is not what it used to be. 

One thing your PPC can really help with for an overall successful demand generation strategy is insights. PPC campaigns can massively help you streamline your SEO bets; from low-hanging fruit keywords to content topics. Learn from what your PPC strategy brings up and use it elsewhere in your B2B demand generation strategies.

9. Partner with other companies for a co-marketing campaign

Another oldie but goldie, co-marketing has been a go-to tactic for generating demand for a long time, and it’s showing no sign of slowing down. If anything, it’s evolving to find unique ways that brands and business leaders can partner together to provide quality experiences to target audiences.

Make the most of the community your marketing co-partner has already built and enrich your own with the unique perspective the partner can bring to any experience.

You’re probably leaning towards a co-marketing webinar as your first thought. However, demand generation best practices warrant co-marketing as a mutual exchange of exposure and marketing team lift. Perhaps this is an in-app product shout-out, a blog or backlink exchange, a newsletter feature, or something more in-depth.

Figure out a solution that works best for both and exchange marketing campaigns instead of cash for your demand gen efforts.

10. Get listed on Capterra, G2, or similar

This is a really easy win, and a free tool for SaaS product marketing teams to capitalize on. Websites like G2 or Capterra are your ICPs playground, no matter your niche. Make sure your product is listed on these places and start putting effort into building an all-star reputation there.

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In doing so, it will not only give a healthy 3rd-party perspective for future customers scoping you out, but you’ll also be featured alongside your competitors in comparison pages that these websites host. This is great if you’re a relatively new SaaS as you’ll get a slice of the prime real-estate pie alongside those competitors that your target audience has their eyes on.

Lastly, these pages are high-intent browsers. They’re visited by those looking to make a purchase, so if you’re not featuring at this stage in their buying decision then you’re seriously missing out.

11. Create SaaS micro-tools

Well hello there, little buzzword. You’ve probably seen or heard of something micro in the last couple of years. Whether that’s micro-influencers, micro-communities, or tactics. We’re in love with all things micro except when it comes to our phones and food.

And, we’re showing no sign of slowing that trend down. Micro-tools are the next in-demand topic to hit the market and they are hot as potatoes. Micro-tools are essentially a (free) tool that gives users a unique insight into what it’s like within your paid product.

If you’ve got the resources to create a micro-tool then it’s well worth the effort to reach your potential customers. A few of our favorite free SaaS micro tools on the market at the moment are:

• TravelPerk’s VAT refund calculator
• Totheweb’s metadata checker
• SEON’s Intelligence tool
• Hubspot’s website grader

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That’s your lot of demand generation ideas!

We’re done! If you made it this far in the article, we salute you. If you skimmed this far in the article, then we thank you all the same. Hopefully, you’re considering at least one of these demand gen ideas by this point!

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Demand Generation Ideas: FAQ

There’s no silver bullet technique for B2B demand generation. But, at the same time, we’re not out here hunting werewolves, we’re generating demand. And we’re going to show you how.

In this article, we’ve collected eight demand generation best practices from the experts, so SaaS marketers like you can establish a starting point for DG, or build a comprehensive demand generation campaign that will drive real, tangible results. 

Before you get started with your demand gen efforts, we’re going to help you identify some key parameters of your demand gen strategy in this guide.

Where to begin with demand generation

Start with a clear outline of your objectives and a budget for your demand gen efforts. Look at the resources you already have and analyze their current performance, while benchmarking some greater success metrics. Identify resources that have brought in your highest-paying accounts. 

Next, focus on 20% of the resources that bring 80% of the results rather than spreading your budget thin on low-impact resources. As our very own Italo Vale points out: “Don’t get distracted by shiny objects, hyper-focus and resilience is the winning formula!”

Once you’ve identified your focus, you’re ready to start strategizing. Remember, your strategy is just one step in the right direction, towards generating demand. DG is an ongoing, ever-changing process, and you’ll need to identify some recurring best practices that work well. (Spoiler alert: we’re about to reveal them!) 

Looking at metrics like ROI and conversion rates is a great starting point for measuring your DG and identifying those best practices with quantitative data sets. This data, alongside what we’re about to share, will help you to continue fine-tuning your strategy. 

Let’s get started.

8 Demand Generation Best Practices for SaaS Companies

The eight demand gen best practices we’re about to cover are: 

1. Focusing on organic search
2. Becoming an authority brand
3. Conversion rate and user experience optimization
4. Co-marketing opportunities
5. Creating sales funnel-specific content
6. Using AI chatbots and marketing automation
7. Introducing integrations to your product
8. Making the most of free trial users

1. Organic Search

43% of marketers say organic search brings a major share of website traffic, and that’s why organic search tops this list of demand generation ideas. 

Luke Genoyer, Head of Business Development at Global Call Forwarding, says one of the most important elements to achieve organic traffic is by providing great quality content and coupling it with great SEO practices:

“You want to create extremely relevant and engaging content for your core audiences, using SEO and “jobs-to-be-done” as a framework.

• Website content should follow SEO best practices, but you don’t want to write content solely for search engines. Your website content should rank in search engines, but you want to demonstrate authority and prove that your product is a good solution and that your brand has expertise once prospects land on your website.
• Identify keywords ranking 4-10, using Google Search Console, then optimize those pages, add new sections & missing elements, etc.
• Video SEO has been an emerging trend, as Google started featuring videos on many search engine results pages.
• New blogs and web pages should be mirrored by a YouTube video for double amplification. Videos should be embedded into the blog posts.
• You also need to be mindful of video ranking factors (video title & angle, video hook/getting to your point in the opening minutes, video thumbnail, and YouTube meta description.)
• Content localization is key for international businesses to rank organically in search engines. Don’t use machine translation.”

In the long run, organic search provides a relatively low-cost playing field where SaaS marketers have the opportunity to generate ample demand. The ROI on organic search, if done right, can be lightyears beyond paid alternatives like search engine CPC marketing. 

The key to capitalizing on the potential of organic search is an impactful SaaS SEO strategy. The ultimate goal of an SEO strategy is to rank in SERPs for a specific target keyword, phrase, or topic. 

Keywords bring users with relevant search intent to your website, grow awareness of your product, and generate more demand and leads over time. That’s why keyword research should be at the heart of your SEO strategy. 

However, it’s not only about adding the right keywords to your blogs, as Dan Gray, CEO of Vendry, shared with us:

“SEO is not something that can be gamified anymore, and with the influx of AI technology creating content effortlessly, it is more important than ever to develop blog articles for SEO that have perspective and experience that an AI can’t replicate. This is where first-party data and case studies can be really effective as they are unique to your business.”

Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO at Mavens & Moguls, says that without the basics of SEO:

“you do not exist today if you cannot be found online. Being invisible online is a terrible strategy, so make sure your site is keyword rich, mobile friendly, loads quickly, and produces meaningful content is the price of entry for effective SEO.”

Remember, Google’s algorithm is ever-evolving. As a SaaS marketer, you’ll likely have a lot on your plate: consider outsourcing your SEO to an experienced content marketing consultant or SaaS SEO agency—Psst. We know a thing or two about it! 

2. Become an authority figure

Cultivating trust is at the top of the list for SaaS brands. Increasing brand authority and becoming a trusted voice in your area will boost your SEO efforts and attract more leads. 

Like Paige Arnof-Fenn says,

“to generate demand, Content Marketing and Thought Leadership are great ways to build your brand, increase your visibility more broadly, raise your profile and attract more clients. Activities like speaking at a conference, writing articles, and building your following on social media all contribute to increasing your awareness with potential customers and building your credibility with a larger community.” 

One helpful tip Paige gives to those starting out is that “instead of trying to start your own blog or newsletter, try contributing regularly to existing well-trafficked blogs in your industry or newsletters of like-minded organizations reaching the same target audience as you.”

This is particularly important if you’re exploring a new market niche or introducing an innovative solution to an age-old problem. In this case, you’ll need to educate potential customers about how your brand mission is helpful and why they need your product for their pain points. The most effective way to do this is by creating educational and thought leadership content to post online. 

Creating this type of content comes with a mix of great SEO resources, expert writers, and unique insights that only your business is in a position to share. 

As you become more of an authority brand, you should start to see a greater pull from target customers for your content, as your product and brand become a seemingly obvious solution to user pain points. It should make your sales efforts, well, less of an effort. 

A few of our favorite tools to help you with this mission are: 

• ZipMessage: for quality content development for personalized or gated videos 
• Canva: a great resource if you’re lacking design experience in-house. The tool helps publish real-time data or publish data before anyone else by creating on-brand infographics in a few clicks. 
• Your own solution: free resources created by experts always go down well.

SEMrush and Ahrefs are also great tools to help you fine-tune your content. Both have an education center with tons of valuable insights which include articles, tutorials, and video resources. 

Plus, they’re a great example of becoming an authority figure within their niche. Over the years, both brands have managed to connect with their users by providing them with free, valuable resources.

Looking for more demand generation tools? Check out our article on the 9 secret tools you need to try -> here.

3. Conversion rate and user experience optimization

Make your value proposition clear as quickly and concisely as possible for website visitors. Your website is a potential new user’s first handshake with your brand. Managing user experience through Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is key to capitalizing on users that are already interested in your solution. In fact, effective CRO can increase conversions by up to 300%.

CRO walks the prospect through your website in a contextually relevant manner. As a SaaS marketer, you’ll also want to stay on top of marketing metrics along the way. Identify where there’s room for improvement and continue to optimize call-to-actions, website design flow, and content to convert those visitors into leads. 

Even after a lead has converted, delivering a continued engaging user experience is a key challenge for SaaS brands. From providing a great onboarding experience to acting on customer feedback, your user experience will become the essence of your brand. It will not only help you generate new leads but also sustain the demand for your software solution in the long run.

A few tools to help you identify a website or app optimization opportunities are:

• Chameleon—takes care of all of your online business needs from design to marketing 
• Hotjar—a product experience insights tool to help you better understand your customers and their needs 
• Typeform—a web-based platform that helps you share information in easy and original ways  
• Fullstory—a digital intelligence tool used to optimize the client experience
• Google Analytics— a platform that collects data from your website and apps to give valuable business insights
• Crazy Egg—an online tool that monitors different pages of your websites and provides detailed reports on visitor activity

Luke Genoyer, says that for his CRO and user experience optimization he likes to use Microsoft Clarity or another heat map and session recording software to identify website bugs:

“For example, we used CrazyEgg for about a year (MS Clarity was recently released and is free, so we use that now). CrazyEgg helped us identify a major user experience issue in our website checkout.

You should also use heat maps to identify dropoff points in your content and sections that people skip over. Use these insights to rearrange your content and put the most engaging parts first.”

4. Collaborate to gain greater exposure to your target audience

Despite SEO being such a stellar demand generation best practice, it can take a while to see results. Meanwhile, leveraging current networks where you can reach your target audience can be a more instantaneous demand gen goldmine. 

You can do this through collaborating with like-minded SaaS brands on social platforms, blog posts, forums, podcasts, local meets, or PR opportunities. These also often come with the extra benefit of providing good SEO value, with increased backlinks, for example. Links from high-authority sites can particularly boost your position in the SERPs, steadily increasing your website’s authority. 

Riaz Kanani , Founder, and CEO of Radiate B2B, told us why he thinks collaborations are key in the B2B space: 

“With more marketing activity happening outside your website, collaborations are incredibly important. Building your own audience remains important as it gives you a foundation to build out all your activities from, but waiting for your audience to sign up is often too late – as by that time, your competitors will already have been engaging and influencing them. We collaborate with influencers and thought leaders and co-promote on our LinkedIn Live as well as guest appearances on their podcasts to reach a wider audience. This in turn increases our audience but also allows you to reach a much wider audience than you would otherwise be able to do.”

It’s important to find original and unique ways to collaborate with brands that have a similar ICP as yours. Present your collaboration in a way that feels natural and provides real value. Here you’re positioning your brand as a thought leader, and championing—not pushing—your product. 

5. Create content for specific sales funnel stages

Demand generation campaigns are largely a team sport where the sales and marketing teams coordinate to find the sweet spot between the quality and quantity of leads. As a marketer, creating tailored content is your way of connecting your leads and the sales team. 

After all, demand generation should help your sales team, like Dan Grey says:

“Demand generation is the discipline of converting those in your target market to qualified leads through awareness and activation, to bring them into your business ecosystem. While the sales team is responsible for ultimately converting them into a customer, without demand generation, there is no one to actively sell through at the top of your business funnel.”

Your potential customers are looking to gain a deeper insight into your software and services across all stages of the funnel. This is your opportunity to rake in the demand that’s coming to you and capitalize on specific areas of interest. Create content for all stages of the funnel to get the right message through to your target audience at the stage they need it most. 

“From building the right targeted messaging (make sure you use the same language/lingo as your users) and incentive for your prospects to engage in a conversation, to providing an unbeatable user experience which at least matches your “marketing” claim,”

–Manuel Jaffrin, GetApp Co-founder.

Luke Genoyer says collaborating with your sales team is key “to create the assets they need to sell more effectively.” For example:

• “A main brochure is a must, along with specific “service-related” and “features” brochures
• Case studies that show how you’re helping customers in target industries
• Video testimonials, if you can, from your “buyer personas”

At the top of the funnel, offer your prospects infographics, a short product video, or a blog post to communicate the benefits that your software and services offer to them.  The goal is to solve a problem a user has, which involves showing this user that such a solution exists. 

As Andy Davis, Director of Demand Generation at Attest, points out:

“If you are running awareness and consideration campaigns in top-of-funnel channels and demo requests are increasing, you are successfully creating more demand in the market.”

For prospects in the middle of the funnel, create case studies and white papers to give them an insight into how your solution aces all the competing solutions they will find in the market.

Bottom-of-the-funnel prospects already find your solution to be a good fit. For them, create content that compares your software with the competitor’s, offer them a demo, and share testimonials from current customers.

Laser-focused content targeted to each stage of the funnel can make its delivery so much more effective. It generates demand for your product at all stages of the funnel by giving the potential customer precisely what they need.

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6. Consider AI chatbots and marketing automation

AI chatbots and marketing automation enable zero-error process delegation. A SaaS marketing team can harness granular data about a prospective customer’s on-site activity and leverage this data for customizing marketing emails and remarketing ad messaging. 

Automation can also keep track of revenues, send event-triggered marketing emails or promotional updates to customers, and broadcast activity-triggered notifications to apps. 

Luke Genoyer says that although they don’t use chatbots, they have numerous automations that help them “set up for abandoned carts, new customers, and free trial onboarding/activation. Additionally, we use automation for onboarding and sales follow-up to speed up “time-to-value”.”

Consider leveraging the power of an AI chatbot. A chatbot embodies a brand while ‘chatting’ with a prospect because it represents the brand to your customer, and can help improve your brand image. They can help reduce support tickets, build brand relationships, and act as an internal wiki for getting your content in front of its destined user. 

Chatbots provide real-time assistance throughout the day and offer prospects a no-nonsense way to communicate. 90% of customers say that an immediate response is very important to them when they have a question. Using chatbots is an effective way to deliver real-time support and put a smile on your prospect’s face.

7. Introduce integrations to your product

Fortunately, SaaS businesses generally have a unique opportunity where a brand can create integrations (or add-ons) to the brand’s main product. Most SaaS companies typically have additional products that go alongside the main product, so integration shouldn’t be that big a challenge anyway.

As a starting point, reach out to your customers for feedback on improvements they’d like to see in your product. Ask users what their current tech stack looks like, and what they’d like your product to be able to ‘speak’ to.

If your brand offers a single, standalone product, ask if other brands want to integrate their products with yours, provided there’s a good fit, of course. Once you’ve got these integrations in place, capitalize on their release with co-marketing campaigns. 

8. Don’t abandon free trial users

Many SaaS products are available as a free trial. Once the free trial ends, customers may decide against buying the product. This could be for multiple reasons: failed onboarding, not reaching an Aha! moment, no longer needing the product, the cost outweighing the benefits. The list is long and beating customer churn as a SaaS business is tough. 

If you see this happening, don’t abandon users just yet. Use lead nurturing strategies. Craft a personalized message telling them how your product may be helpful to them in a different way, use any data you have from their use of your product and translate that data into USPs. 

As Ian Marck, Head of Growth Marketing at EasyMovie, says:

Monitor and improvise your demand generation strategy

For SaaS companies leads often come from diverse sources, and each of these sources converts at a different pace. This effectively renders industry benchmarks as potentially misleading, because not two customer journeys will be the same, even with similar products.

A better way to monitor and measure success is to compare it with the company’s own demand generation metrics over time. Make sure you’re allocating resources to the most productive leads by tracking channels and sources of traffic individually.

Janelle Amos, Founder & Demand Gen Consultant at Elevate Growth says that she actually reverse engineer all of her demand gen plans:

“So I start with the KPIs and the stages that matter to us and really look at what’s stuck. What needs a little bit of nudging, is where the really big opportunity is and nobody has ever touched or thought about or done anything here. And then I reverse engineer what’s needed based on that.”

Success takes time, so don’t rush. Things may look slow at first, but over time, incremental improvements can contribute significantly to your revenue growth. 

Benefits of demand generation for SaaS companies

All SaaS companies implement some demand generation marketing tactics, consciously or not. However, some do it more efficiently and effectively than others. All SaaS brands should realize how important demand generation is for business, so here are a few important benefits: 

1. Increases brand awareness 

SaaS companies aim to build awareness about their software and services through demand generation. Increased brand awareness helps SaaS companies attract more potential customers.

Increased awareness about your company’s software means your target audience may already be familiar with your product, which puts them in a better position to decide if your product is a good fit for them.

2. Attract more qualified leads

Demand generation marketing aims to attract high-quality leads that have a higher conversion probability when connected to your sales team. The greater the number of qualified leads you generate, the higher the chances of closing more deals and generating more revenue.

3. Revenue growth

The business’s top line, the record of a company’s revenue, is where all efforts ultimately show up. Demand generation’s impact though is more direct. It focuses on bringing in prospective customers for sales teams to convert into actual customers, which will ultimately boost your revenue. 

It’s not only the top line that benefits from demand generation. A less direct benefit of demand generation shows up on your financials as reduced customer acquisition costs over time. SaaS companies save resources when they spend less time explaining their solution and convincing prospects that their solution is better than that of competitors.

Unless you’re starting with a clean slate, you may already have a few demand gen tools and best practices in your overall strategy. If you’re tracking your demand generation metrics, and a few of them aren’t looking impressive, come back to these demand generation best practices to optimize your ROI.

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Demand Gen FAQs

Demand generation refers to the process of creating awareness, generating interest, and driving demand for a product or service. As such, demand generation campaigns are something every SaaS product marketing team is familiar with. There comes a moment when your ongoing demand gen strategy is not quite cutting it and your product and brand need that extra boost.

In this article, we’ll talk you through how to build a stellar demand gen campaign that champions your product, and brand mission and rapidly builds the reach of your brand.

A demand gen campaign is a specified period of time when you combine marketing methods to generate demand for your business and product. Demand generation strategies usually come with a campaign or two that businesses use as their trump card when they need it most. There are various demand generation tactics that teams can use to create a demand generation campaign and overall strategy that really works. Here are a few demand generation tactics to consider:

• Webinars
• Virtual events
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Podcasts

What’s the difference between a Demand Generation Campaign vs. a Demand Generation Strategy?

The two complement each other but are not the same. Demand generation campaigns focus on sprint marketing over a typically rather short time span. They push for demand and look at short-term goals. A demand generation strategy will involve campaigns and looks at the long-term goals for the demand generation process.

Set goals for your demand generation campaign in the planning process

Before you start building your demand generation campaign, there are a few things you should consider.

Align on your goals: A successful demand generation strategy will come with goals. What KPIs and micro-goals do you need to set for the campaign to ensure you’re on track to meet those larger demand generation goals?

Utilize your human resources: If you have access to your sales and marketing teams, use them! Quiz the people with their ears to the ground and ask them what they think your campaign should focus on in order to generate greater demand. Use this qualitative feedback alongside quantitative, on-site data you have.

Think about the campaign’s next steps: A successful demand generation campaign is forward-thinking:

• What do you want those that experience your campaign to do next?
• Is your goal for it to evolve into lead generation?
• Is it to build positive brand awareness?

When you think about the entire customer lifecycle and where this campaign is coming in that lifecycle, you’ll be able to create relevant content for each stage of the funnel.

Find a campaign management tool: There are some fantastic demand generation tools out there that will help ensure your demand generation efforts are that much smoother. 

However, you’ll need to onboard these tools before you start generating demand. They need a certain amount of data input to prove successful. For maximum impact, there’s a high chance you’ll need them running before you release anything.

How do I create a winning demand gen campaign?

Here we are, a winning demand generation plan in the works. Successful demand generation campaigns aren’t made overnight. However, they are made in eight steps.  So let’s get climbing.

1. Lay the groundwork

To kick things off on the right foot for your demand generation efforts, you need to put in the groundwork and your research. This means:

• identifying your ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
• fleshing out customer personas
• understanding painpoints,
• defining customer language
• understanding buying behaviors
• mapping current solutions

Luke Genoyer, Head of Business Development at Global Call Forwarding, shared with us how he starts his demand generation campaign and overall strategy:

“Good demand generation really starts with understanding your target market and the problems your business is helping to solve. Marketers can do this in the following ways:

• Customer and audience research
• Talking to customers (the most important)
• If you can’t talk to customers, listen to recordings from sales and support calls
• Customer surveys
• Reading industry forums
• Talking to internal teams

Once you have a good understanding of your business, your audience, and your value proposition, you can execute demand generation campaigns that demonstrate how your company helps ideal customers solve their problems (“jobs-to-be-done”).”

Once you’ve done this, you should have a clearer idea of how you can approach potential customers with demand generation tactics that speak to them and where they’re at.

Additionally, as Luke said, it’s important to “not forget about churned customers and nurturing customers from the past who left on good terms. Many of these people can and will sign up again if you stay on their radar.”

2. Outline your solution

Strategies based on the best demand generation practices come from a well-rounded understanding of your solution. This is not your product. When we say solution here, we mean how your product addresses the problem that your customers have. When you refer to your product as a solution, you bring a more customer-centric approach to your efforts.

Now, based on what you’ve learned in the groundwork step you can outline a solution that truly talks to your target audience. It’s a good idea to talk to your sales team here to understand better how they’re already presenting your product to qualified leads.

3. Align on the specifics

Next up, align on the specifics of your demand generation marketing campaign. What does this include? Pleased you asked:

• Publishing channels: inbound marketing
• Campaign length: weeks, months, or years
• Content types: infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos, and other types of content
• Budget: here’s how you can set up your marketing budget
• Goals & KPIs: brand awareness, lead generation, sales team, sales funnel, qualified leads
• Other key demand generation metrics

Now you’ve planned as thoroughly as possible. It’s time to move on to the creative part of your campaign.

4. Create content

When it comes to demand or lead generation, teams often tend to jump straight into content and then wonder why their campaigns failed. “That video was killer; it just never took off.” Why? Because they hadn’t done three steps of research first.

Yes, your content is King. However, if it’s not informed, then it will undoubtedly fall flat. Only now is truly the moment to put your marketing efforts into content creation. Do this wisely. The best demand generation strategies invest in quality content and you should be doing the same for your campaign. This is where the largest part of your budget should go. No matter how much money you put into distribution and reaching potential leads, there’s no point if you’re not giving them an experience that resonates. 

Dan Gray, CEO of Vendry, shared with us how he sees the role of content in B2B demand generation campaigns: 

“Content marketing is incredibly important as most B2B purchases take a lot of consideration and time and content play an extremely large role in building trust over time. By developing content that engages the user and educates them about your service, you are increasing the likelihood that when they are ready to make a decision about who to give their business to, you are at the top of the list.

Additionally, depending on the objective of the content efforts, various types should be considered. If the goal is to grow SEO, blog content tends to be the most effective. Alternatively, if you are trying to get leads from LinkedIn for instance, things like whitepapers or industry reports tend to be more effective in generating attention.”

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5. Launch internally

Demand generation leads to lead generation. It will massively aid your inbound marketing strategies and your sales team should start to see their sales funnel flooded with qualified leads. So, let’s prepare them for it.

 Launch your DG campaign internally so your sales process and the sales cycle are prepared as can be for the influx.

This means you’ll need to inform your teams of the type of lead magnets you’re putting out there, the pain points you’re addressing, and where you’re reaching these prospective customers. 

Ensure there’s no repeat content in your sales cycle and that any team that comes into contact with incoming leads knows exactly what they should know about your product, the content they’ve seen, and any direct mail they have received.

6. Launch to potential users  

Once you’re operationally ready to handle the lead influx, it’s time to launch your demand gen campaign and start to generate leads for your business. A lot of brands tend to do this—thinking they get one shot at launching a campaign. 

Firstly, this is a myth. If you don’t get it right the first time around, that’s okay.

Secondly, if you’re unsure if everything is running smoothly, either run internal tests with a few select members of staff or release them to a smaller group of people with targeted ads. 

This method will enable you to check everything’s going to plan before you release your campaign to the masses.

7. Boost, test, and tweak

The best demand gen strategies and their campaigns keep you on your toes. If you want to increase your conversion rates and stand the best chance of reaching high-quality leads, you’ll need to remain proactive, not reactive, throughout your campaign.

How? Boost that content that’s doing well. Test new variants of content you’re unsure about, and tweak campaign copy, visuals, and more until you get optimal results: Boost, Test, Tweak. 

In doing so, you give your campaign the best opportunity to create demand without having to release an entirely new campaign.

8. Review and repeat

As you’d do with any content marketing strategy regularly, once your campaign draws to a close, it’s time to review, rinse and repeat—if it worked! Did you hit the initial goals you’d set? If you didn’t, then why didn’t you?

Gather feedback from your campaign’s qualitative results and quantitative feedback from your sales and marketing team if they came into contact with leads resulting from the campaign.

Once you’ve understood the campaign’s success and failures, it’s time to optimize for round two, three, four…

Effective examples of demand generation campaigns

HubSpot’s inbound marketing campaign: providing resources and value to their users

HubSpot’s inbound campaigns are the rockstar of demand generation in the B2B SaaS world. They didn’t just dip their toes in; they’ve dived headfirst into the sea of success.

Armed with valuable content, mind-blowing educational resources, and free tools, HubSpot has grabbed potential customers by the collar, hooking them with its expertise in inbound marketing. They became the trailblazers, the ones others looked up to. And it’s been a proven success: their demand skyrocketed! Their marketing automation software? It’s flying off the shelves like hotcakes (metaphorically, of course.) HubSpot knows how to make some serious inbound noise.

Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference: because in-person and live events are great demand gen campaigns

Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference is a prime example of a demand generation campaign. It’s like the Super Bowl of tech events, where industry legends, brainiacs, and Salesforce superheroes unite.

They aren’t just showcasing products, they’re crafting an experience that leaves jaws on the floor. With inspiring panel sessions, electrifying networking opportunities, and immersive encounters, they don’t just generate demand—they create a thunderstorm of conversions.

Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM platform acts as a powerful magnet, attracting numerous satisfied customers. Dreamforce is the renowned event where Salesforce showcases its magic and captivates the world’s attention. The widespread enthusiasm for Salesforce and its offerings continues to grow, as customers eagerly embrace the platform.

HelpScout: guest blogging as a way to the demand gen mountaintop

Fun fact: a significant 53% of marketing professionals strongly advocate for guest blogging as an effective strategy for link building, brand awareness, and demand generation. In this case, HelpScout seems to have tapped into something truly impactful thanks to guest posting.

HelpScout has successfully utilized the power of content marketing, particularly through their guest posting campaign. Half of their revenue is derived from advertising. How did they achieve this? Their ability to generate substantial traffic is unparalleled. People are drawn to them like bees to honey, and it’s truly impressive. HelpScout has certainly made a name for itself in the marketing industry. It’s a true testament to their success and what guest blogging can do for your demand generation and overall bottom line.

8 KPIs of a demand generation campaign

Here are our eight tell-tale KPIs for a successful campaign:

1. CPA: Cost per acquisition = how much does each lead acquisition cost you (on average).
2. Increase in free trials = By what percent have your free trial sign-ups increased because of your campaign.
3. CLTV: Customer lifetime value = What is the lifetime value of a customer that’s come through your campaign.
4. Contribution to net revenue = How much % of your campaign efforts contribute to the overall company profit.
5. Funnel conversion rate = What percentage of leads acquired through your campaign are converting throughout your sales funnel? Is it more than average or less?
6. Sales velocity = What is the increase in sales your business is making because of your campaign?
7. Channel close rate = What is the close rate of each channel the campaign is on? Are there certain channels that are performing exceptionally well? What are the best demand gen channels?
8. Increase in signups = Is your campaign leading to an increase in product or newsletter sign-ups? Can you directly attribute those sign-ups to your efforts?

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How to measure the success of your demand generation campaign

A demand generation is successful if it’s hitting your previously accounted for goals. It means that success looks different for every SaaS running a campaign.

Katheriin Liibert, Head of Marketing at Outfunnel, explains what success looked like for Outfunnel’s demand generation campaigns. 

“Our demand generation campaigns have mostly been inbound. But, a little less than a year ago, we ran our first cold email outreach campaign.

The goal was to find HubSpot partner agencies that would be affiliates of Outfunnel. We put in the hours to make sure every step of the campaign prep was down to a T, and we attribute the success to making sure the target lists were well-targeted and cleaned.

The results? Email engagement levels are comparable to warm lists and a decent number of demos booked. We documented and shared the playbook publicly on our blog as well.”

Demand Generation Campaign FAQs

You won’t find Mailchimp, or Hubspot on this list—uh, uh—here we’re sharing those lesser-known tools. Perhaps they’re new on the market, perhaps people just don’t want to share, or perhaps you’ve never considered them for your demand gen efforts before?

No matter what, we’ve got your back and we’re breaking the tools down into four areas:

• Lead nurturing demand generation tools
• Demand generation strategizing tools
• Demand gen team operational tools
• Reporting demand gen tools

You should walk away from this article with an arsenal of powerful tools to consider to help lift your demand generation strategy to new heights.

What demand generation tools can do for you?

In short, demand generation tools can save you time, money, and resources. Demand gen tools can aid your inbound marketing strategy, support lead generation, help you keep track of important demand generation metrics, and can be a vital resource for marketing and sales teams looking to work more agile.

Done well, demand generation process can help fill a pipeline with qualified leads, and ultimately increase business revenue. 

Demand generation marketing can be something that, done manually, is exhausting. However, implementing the right tools in the right places can help streamline your processes, minimize human error incurred risk, and rapidly optimize your marketing efforts.

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9 Secret Demand Generation Tools The Experts Use (& You Should Too)

In order to create this list, we hustled our way into the heads of demand generation experts currently creating demand for some of the fastest-growing SaaS brands around. 

We also spoke to our own team of Skalers, who together have decades of experience working in SaaS, SEO, and demand generation plan.

Ready?

Let’s start this list off with a lead nurturing favorite. When lead nurturing is done right you make the work of your sales team that much easier. 

In a perfect world, the sales team may not need to do anything at all! So, what tools are the experts using that can help get your business moving leads through your sales funnel as smoothly as possible?

Lead nurturing demand generation tools

1. LeadFeeder

First on our list is a recommendation from the Head of Marketing at Outfunnel, Katheriin Liibert. Katheriin said:

“There are many different web tracking tools available (at very different price points) that help you collect data about prospects, so choose yours based on your specific business case (and budget).

I think for B2B demand generation, something like Leadfeeder is the bomb. It shows you first-party information from prospective customers, but also firmographics about your anonymous site visitors.”

Leadfeeder is a visitor identification software that can help you make the most out of your website traffic. It has a 4.3-star review on G2 and comes with two pricing plans. The ‘Lite‘ plan is free and showcases the last seven days’ worth of leads. The premium plan starts with a free trial and has a €139 price tag with unlimited data retention and leads. 

Demand generation strategizing tools 

2. Answer the Public

Next up on our demand gen list is a strategizing tool. If you’re ever at a loss for how to structure an article, or how to deliver nurture content that potential customers are actually looking for, then this SaaS SEO tool is for you.

Here at Skale, the team uses it regularly within their tool stack to help with the research stage of SEO for clients. Martin, our Growth Strategy Team Lead said:

“It’s helpful to save time when doing keyword research, understanding user intent, and finding interesting opportunities around topics we could create content for (landing pages, blog posts, etc). Plus, by using Answer the Public we have more certainty that there’s demand.

It’s especially useful when you can’t find enough search volume data on Ahrefs, so I use it as a compliment to that.”

This is a great tool to help inspire your demand generation strategy. Generating demand with SEO has many moving parts. 

However, we highly recommend that this be one of them. Answer the Public has a 4.6-star rating on G2, and is available for free for a limited amount of searches. After that, AtP comes in monthly, annual, or expert plans, starting from $99 to $199 per month. 

These more advanced plans grant you unlimited search data, unlimited users, educational packages, and up to 20 search listening alerts.

3. Reddit

Now, we know what you’re thinking, Reddit is no secret… And, you know what? You’re right. However, in the context of demand generation and SaaS SEO, it’s one of the biggest secrets (not) out there. 

Until now. Reddit, the social news aggregation platform, is a fantastic tool for understanding customer voice, SEO topics, and gauging interest in keywords, phrases, or queries.

It’s another favorite of Martin’s for strategizing DG efforts; he said:

“I use Reddit with the same purpose I use Answer the Public. I use it to search what users say around a topic or a product and see if there’s enough demand. It also helps me to find ideas on how I can capture demand for a particular topic.”

Sign-up and the use of Reddit is totally free, and it has a solid 4.2-star rating on G2. However, the catch, or at least the noticeable downfall, is the UX. You need to be a Reddit fan to be a Reddit user, and introducing it to your demand generation team structure may not go down as smoothly as your hope.

Secondly, take everything you’re reading with a pinch of salt. You’re reading peoples’ opinions, and believe us, people have them on Reddit! Most people aren’t speaking as a brand they’re speaking as themselves or an alias. 

So, although it can be a useful demand generation tool to inspire your content, there are other sources out there that are probably more reliable for you. Like your sales team, current customers, and marketing teams.

4. Ahrefs

As an SEO agency, we shouldn’t really be promoting the automation of SEO. However, as a SaaS SEO agency, we understand and appreciate the value of great strategy tools. The right amount of automation, paired with the right talent (and following the best demand gen practices), can go a long way when it comes to your demand generation strategy and inbound marketing efforts.

Ahrefs is a fantastic tool to support any SEO-related demand generation campaigns and can help you craft content to generate leads.

Ivana Drakulevska, a search engine optimization specialist at Sales.rocks, talks us through how Ahrefs is a key player in helping the business build a successful demand generation strategy.

“We build meaningful backlinks to our articles from authoritative websites in the same niche. These backlinks must be placed among relevant content and on specific anchors. For this, we use Ahrefs and expert knowledge and experience in link building.”

Source

Ahrefs has got a dazzling 4.6-star average review on G2. Their price plans vary massively, the Lite plan starts at a modest $99 per month, and it can go all the way up to $999 per month if you’re an SEO agency using the platform.

5. Facebook’s Ad Library

Facebook is well known, will give you that. It’s also common knowledge that most brands out there have or still do run social media marketing ads on the platform. It’s a great place to reach your target audience and is generally the foundation of any social media strategy.

However, Facebook’s Ads library is where you can really excel with your strategy and operations, as Colin James Belyea, a Growth & Performance Marketing Consultant & Head of Growth @outsiteco, tells us more.

“I use Facebook’sAds Library a lot to help streamline my audits and client work. I use it to audit a client’s competition, to learn about their funnel, and take inspiration for future ad creative. It’s a fantastic free resource that I don’t think people are using enough.”

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Demand generation operational tools

6. ZipMessage

A successful demand generation program and team require great communication. Which, in today’s remote world, can be tricky. We’re working across states, countries, and time zones. This tool is more of an operational tool to help you connect with your colleagues or your customers.

Rather than going back and forth over lengthy email chains, trying to find a time in everyone’s calendar for a Zoom call, or flooding each other with Slack threads and emojis, ZipMessage is a healthy and personal alternative for communication.

Brian Casel, the Founder of ZipMessage, shares a little more with us:

“I’ve been using ZipMessage to conduct asynchronous video interviews, which can be shared publicly and turned into podcast content. It’s a great way to promote interactive content like public “AMAs” (ask me anything) with influencers in the space, that’s highly shareable as well.

Here’s a batch of those async interviews I’ve been publishing using ZipMessage.”

ZipMessage is so secret it’s not even on G2, yet. However, it’s being utilized by the likes of Liquid Web, NutureKit.co, and some up-and-coming CRM platforms too.  The basic plan starts at $19 per month, and the premium plan goes up to $39 per month.

Reporting demand generation tools

Last on our hitlist for demand generation tools you need to add to your tech stack is reporting tools. For as great as your demand generation marketing efforts are, if you’re not reporting and optimizing them, you don’t stand a chance of doing better next time.

7. SEO Testing

SEO testing is a tool we use in-house here at Skale. Ben, Head of Tech & Content SEO, explains that with SEO testing you’re able to run top-level SEO split tests to validate experiments such as title tweaks, internal link changes, architecture modifications, and much more.

There are a ton of features to this platform, all of which are useful for testing, and reporting on your demand generation SEO efforts. SEO Testing is a bit of a hidden gem as far as marketing automation and SEO demand gen efforts go, so we can’t share a G2 review with you—you’ll just have to take Ben’s word for it.

As far as pricing goes, there’s a free trial for each of their plans, which look a little like this:

• $40/per month: one website
• $100/per month: five websites
• $300/per month: 20 websites

8. Panguin

Panguin is another one of Ben’s favorites. This free tool will overlay your Google Analytics data to help you identify if traffic drop-offs on your website are a cause of Google algorithm updates. It helps your business to report on the perhaps not so positive side of SEO, but one necessary nonetheless. It will build a proactive attitude toward SEO as you’ll be able to act that much quicker as soon as you see something out of place.

Source

Again, because Panguin is small (but mighty) tool, we can’t share a G2 score with you. What we can do, however, is let you know it’s totally free. It’s actually operating as a fantastic demand and lead generation magnet for the digital marketing agency, Barracuda. Forget the free calculators, here’s a tool that you’ll actually use!

9. Google tools

Yes, yes, Google is no secret, we know, we know. However, it is an absolute must for demand gen reporting. So, what should your weapons of choice be from Google’s tech stack? Ivana, from Sales.rocks has got you covered:

“We write articles filled with transparency and valuable information. We share knowledge from our personal experience and that of the other industry experts. And most importantly – we don’t follow the crowd but we exercise critical thinking. 

We use Google Trends, Google Analytics, Google search itself to figure out the search intent of our ideal customers and write content that ranks.”

Anything Google-related doesn’t need much more of a write-up than this, it’s just something for you to consider!  

Setting up the perfect demand generation system

Whether you’re focusing on demand or lead generation, you’ll need these tools to work harmoniously to see success. 

Zapier is a fantastic resource for you to tie everything together. However, setting up your demand generation strategies doesn’t stop there. Onboarding is so crucial if you want your team to understand, use, and make the most of some of these (quite hefty) price tags that come with the tools.

Consider a knowledge base or group onboarding sessions, so your entire team fully understands the demand and lead generation tools in your tech stack and everyone can go from strength to strength in using them. 

Tools to drive demand generation FAQs