11 Demand Generation Strategies That Generate High-Quality Leads

You cannot capture leads for your B2B SaaS product or service without attracting the ideal prospects through the demand you create for what you sell. Your product or service may be disruptive and out-of-the-box, or something that may already exist in your target market—but how will your potential customers know about what you are offering without you telling them in exaggerated detail?

Yes, demand generation is self-promotion in a nutshell. And in today’s competitive tech industry, it is essential that your demand-generation strategy provide your ideal prospects with a comprehensive understanding of how your product or service is the best solution to resolving most (if not all) of their pain points and help make their lives easier in the long run. This is the only way to compel current B2B buyers to invest in your offer and, contribute to revenue generation for your brand.

Another prime concern for 41% of marketers in 2022 is to focus on lead quality over lead quality. The “spray-and-pray” approach is slowly becoming obsolete. Marketers are trying to drive as many leads with high-value propositions as possible to the sales pipeline to nurture and convert into paying customers. And that’s where an effective demand generation strategy, approved by B2B marketing experts, comes into play. In this blog, we will discuss what a demand generation strategy is, how to create one that will help you win, and eleven strategies you can try to successfully generate demand for your B2B product or service.

What is a demand generation strategy? 

Now, you may be faced with two scenarios when you are filling up your sales pipeline. Scenario A, where the prospects are actively looking for the solution you’re offering, having already identified their problems, and scenario B, where you approach your target audience, who may be facing the challenges that your product or service strives to solve. It doesn’t take much to guess that the prospects in scenario A have a better chance of conversion—and the first step to getting there is to hype up your offer as what’s best available in the market. 

To put it simply, a demand generation strategy is a tailor-made campaign plan for your business, conceptualized through data-driven planning and primed for consistent implementation combined with continuous improvements based on what works and what doesn’t. Its primary objective is to create hype around your product or service as much as possible—thereby attracting the right kind of attention, i.e., the eyeballs of your potential customers who have the need for your product or service and are ready to pay the price to access it for their purposes.

Let’s use an example. Suppose you are selling a project management tool. The way to breach the market is by educating your target audience with blog posts, highlighting the benefits of segregating work amongst employees by implementing automated systems, and monitoring and streamlining workflows to run all operations smoothly and on a single platform. 

Next, you can record videos of how your project management tool can help with certain tasks or have someone from your product team answer possible questions about the usability of your product that may arise when your potential customer uses it. You may also promote case studies that cover how your SaaS software has helped existing better manage their employees and projects.

Demand generation practices focus on generating interest in your product or service in exchange for… nothing. Yes, that’s right! You provide actionable information in exchange for earning a potential customer segment’s trust towards your brand—that you can then leverage to gain access to their contact information, i.e., convert them into leads that can add to your sales pipeline and be nurtured into paying customers (that help you make bank!).

Features of an effective demand generation strategy

A successful demand generation strategy has a pre-determined formula for success and needs to possess the following characteristics to turn out effective for your brand. Let’s check out what these features are:

1. Have a concrete idea about your buyer persona:

Without knowing who your product or service should appeal to, how do you expect to generate unmatched hype about it? 

The first step to successful demand generation is thoroughly assessing and developing your buyer personas. The better you understand your ideal audience, the better you can position yourself as the number one solution provider to mitigate their pain points. 

Another aspect you should keep in mind is to figure out which channels your potential customers are using daily, i.e., where they can best see you. This can help you create the kind of content that will best resonate with your target audience and educate them effectively about your brand.

2. Stick with your strategy:

If you are a startup that has just launched its SaaS product, chances are that you are in for the long haul when it comes to measuring the success of your demand generation strategy. When you have few (or no) competitors, comparing your results to industry standards may not be the right way to go. 

Therefore, once you develop your demand generation strategy, the best you can do is stick to it over time and with patience. It is not a matter of a couple of weeks or even months—you need to give it sufficient time to begin generating your leads (especially high-quality ones). 

3. Monitor metrics and optimize based on the results:

While measuring any real success from your demand generation campaign may take time, you can track certain KPIs to find out what is working for your brand and what isn’t. Examining your metrics may lead you to relate them better with whatever tactics you try. 

Some KPIs you can measure in case of demand generation strategies include the number of meetings or opportunities generated, average sales cycle, sales pipeline value, customer acquisition value, cost per lead, customer lifetime value, the average cost per deal, revenue generated against investment, etc.

11 demand generation strategies that generate high-quality leads

Demand generation is synonymous with lead generation, but there are certain subtle differences between the two—and it is essential for marketers to understand them. So what creates demand for your product or service?

To help you find the right answer, I will break down eleven of the most important methods for drumming up demand for your brand. This will subsequently support effective methods for generating leads interested in investing in your product or service.

Let’s get into it!

1. Identify high-quality prospects using intent data

Due to its ability to provide precise insights into your ideal prospects' current digital footprints, intent data is crucial for demand generation. Additionally, intent data provides details on customers' immediate needs, purchase intent in real time, and internet research habits. These insights enable businesses to clearly understand their prospects' problems, motivations, research interests, and other account details.

You can identify prospects actively seeking your products or services or something similar to what you are offering and get in touch with them with relevant offers consistently to alleviate their problems.

Here are a few ways to do that:

• For early-stage buyers, intent data alerts will show an increase around topics and keywords that address the common problems and issues your potential clients face and the 360-degree solutions your goods and services offer, not specific to any product categories.
• For mid-stage buyers, intent data will focus on productor service-specific keywords, since your potential customers will know what their pain points are and consequently, what they want to implement toward solving them.
• For late-stage buyers, the intent signals will indicate keywords that are specific to your organization, specific product or service package names, their features and similar offers from your competitors; these segment of your target audience is ready to make their purchasing decisions, and that can contribute a long way towards qualifying them for sales purposes.

2. Talk to your potential customers (not at them!)

When you research your potential customer base, you will find they are present on specific marketing channels, and that’s where you need to drop the bomb (i.e., offers to pertain to your product or service). 

If you are just starting, you should speak with your target audience personally. Still, suppose you have already got some paying customers. In that case, you should be devoting your time to digging deeper into how your product or service has helped them solve some crucial problem and helped them scale their operations (and, consequently, their revenue).

In the case of your target audience, you should: 

• Inquire about their problems;
• the way they consume content; and, 
• the websites they visit. 

Conversely, for paying customers who have invested in your offer, asking them about their favorite features and usage patterns is a great idea.

Next, you should utilize the data to develop product-focused material that illustrates actual instances of how other companies have used your solution to address their issues. Nothing is better accepted and trusted by prospects than user-generated content!

Speaking with your target market will also aid in your decision-making on the content kinds (such as blog posts, webinars, videos, or podcasts) and marketing channels to employ.

You should however, keep in mind that talking to your potential customers should never turn into bombarding them with information, left and right. That translates into talking at them, and you risk sounding self-obsessed or tone-deaf. Utilize the information you obtain in a correct manner to maximize the results when it comes to generating demand for your product or service.

3. Generate content specific to different marketing and sales funnel stages

Marketers should remember that there need to be different kinds of both informative and interactive content at different stages of the marketing or sales funnels. This means creating a single kind of content in one format (for example, product-led content in a blog post) will not work. What should you be doing then?

Produce a wide range of content in multiple content formats.

Produce material for those who are:

• Problem-aware and seeking out practical, affordable solutions;
• Product-aware individuals who you can inform about the features of your product and its usability; and,
• Product-aware customers who are prepared to buy but still require some persuasion.

Some examples of content you can create include: 

• Educational articles that address the reader’s concerns and establish you as an authority on the subject;
• Product-focused writing that presents your service or product as the answer to your readers' concerns; and,
• Comparison infographics pitting your product against some existing solution in the market to highlight why you are better and convince potential customers who aren't sure yet that your solution can make a bigger impact.

Creating such different kinds of content will help you better satisfy the needs of your ideal prospects at various funnel phases.

4. Focus on strengthening your content marketing initiatives

45% of marketers want to use content marketing to boost brand awareness i.e., generate demand for their product or service, with more than 36% focused on generating leads through such initiatives.

Effective content marketing techniques can provide relevant and beneficial information for your potential customers during each stage of the buyer journey. Using a systematic content marketing approach, you may answer customers' issues, increase purchasing confidence, and establish brand reputation. This will enhance your company's content and establish your brand as a market authority while providing many clients and prospects in the market with a much-needed answer and guide.

Detailed customer research will give you a decent notion of the marketing channels and content formats you should utilize for your content marketing plan. Having evaluated that, you must develop a content strategy that emphasizes:

• overarching content themes you'll write about; 
• how frequently you'll post new material; and, 
• how you'll make your writing stand out from your competitors.

What is left after that is for you to implement your strategy (and stick to it consistently to achieve the results you want!)

5. Repurpose the available content into different formats and distribute it efficiently

There is only so much content to create—which is why the matter at hand needs to be repurposed and distributed in as many ways as possible to maximize your reach and increase your brand awareness. 

Here’s how it can help:

• Repurposing content entails utilizing the material you post in several formats. For instance, you could make a Twitter thread using the insights you provide in a blog post. Make a video from a LinkedIn article in a similar manner, or convert your webinar into a podcast.

• Recycling content enables you to maximize the potential value of your published content. It also guarantees that you are disseminating educational content in various formats to accommodate your audience's varied content consumption tastes.

Now let’s talk about the other part of the game plan i.e. distributing the content you have painstakingly created, on the right marketing channels! No one can know about your brand unless you reach them with all the juicy information. 

Let’s see how you can do that:

• You can share a few insightful passages from the blog post or case study you produced, and include a link to the complete article to sufficiently engage your audience and get more eyeballs on your content. will increase the number of people who see it. How does it help? Readers are usually more susceptible to bite-sized content and this provides a brief overview of the subject matter, further encouraging readers to click through to the full article.
• You may also hare more about the activities your organization is investing in to attract more ideal prospects. 

                        1. If you got an event coming up, promote it consistently on social media and run advertisements—to increase sign-ups

                        2. Launch an ebook you are about to publish on Product Hunt or G2 to increase downloads; and,

                        3. If your product is introducing some updates, email your newsletter subscribers about it!

6. Deploy ABM strategies to warm up specific targets

Account-based marketing is not a fad; if done right, it can help you gain some very profitable business. Being top of mind for specific target accounts involves a lot of effort dedicated to personalization. Therefore, you should look for ways to warm them up to your particular value propositions. The following are some possibilities for warmer entryways into a target prospect who has already interacted with your business or at least has some knowledge about it:

• Reopen closed sales opportunities:

A sales opportunity may not have turned into a customer due to various reasons at the time, but that doesn’t mean they may not very well convert in the future! Your potential customer account may not have had the financial backing to invest in your product or service, or some key decision maker may not have found you credible. 

But circumstances change, so you should keep getting back to these accounts from time to time. A well-synced CRM that tracks the personnel changes and market value of your target account businesses can help you go a long way.

• Keep track of job changes:

Borrowing from the previous pointer, a customer changing jobs is one of the most successful sales trigger events. Imagine your contact was a previous client or a potential client. You can increase your chances of making sales by contacting such individuals who are familiar with and (hopefully) pleased with your product.

• Stay in touch with the advocates and influencers of your product:

Recently, many businesses are ensuring they can secure staff support before purchasing. For influencing purchasing decisions at the organizations of your target accounts, keep track of your champions and influencers within an account (and maintain the directory even as they move to new companies).

7. Utilize freebies to drum up demand

Now you must be thinking, why should someone spend money to buy if I give away freebies similar to my product or service offers? But that’s the point—you utilize freebies to attract potential customers and to further make them realize that even when they are not starting from scratch, it may take them a good amount of time and resources to create something professional that can actually make their lives easier. And instead, they should just outsource such things to an expert and focus on scaling their business with what they know best. 

Freebies can come in the form of templates for your websites, checklists, proposals, contracts, etc., and if you manage to demonstrate why and how you’re adding value to your ideal prospect’s business, chances are they would be more than willing to become full-fledged paying customers. Leastways, they would definitely add to boosting demand for your products or services in your niche market.

One great example of this could be the Divvy’s expense management platform that offers a business unlimited virtual cards for free. Using a personalized credit or debit card as bait, Divvy attracts consumers to take control of their finances using their hassle-free expense management plans. 

Another example could be Profitwell’s free pricing and retention audits that help you scale subscription growth for your digital products. Digital products accessible on a subscription model can help you with some easy passive income, but growing your subscriber database could come with many challenges. Profitwell helps its customers solve this problem with their free audits that decrease churn, provide you with market-level pricing and completely optimize the functionality of your subscription product—and in turn, gets them to invest in their subscription analytics solutions. 

8. Add powerful CTAs to the blog posts

But how can CTAs lead to generating demand? Not directly, I will admit, but powerful CTAs positioned cleverly, can help you catch as many leads as you can from all the ungated content you’re developing and publishing as part of your content marketing and distribution plans. 

Let’s face it, readers this day have a lot of information and, and catching their attention is not an easy feat at all. Since you are investing sizable time and effort into creating in-depth content through blogs and guides already, why not prompt your website visitors and social media handle followers to download those resources with well-placed and powerful CTAs? 

This is a win-win strategy, where you let the clients gain access to all the valuable content you create and, in exchange, get their contact details, which makes them leads that you can nurture through your sales pipeline.

9. Engage one-time website visitors with remarketing campaigns

No first-time visitor to your website or social media channels will readily invest in your product or service. But these people have shown an interest in your offer, so should you let them go? Obviously not! That is why remarketing campaigns exist! Remarketing your campaigns is crucial because it enables your brand to engage more with users who aren't yet ready to enter or even notice the scene.

Paid-per-click campaigns are excellent for driving high-quality traffic to your website, but no matter how effective your campaigns and targets, it won't generate demand right away. That’s where remarketing ad campaigns come in; in reality, they may help you drive ROI greatly.

Social media is one of the most effective tools for implementing remarketing campaigns. You must have heard someone say that they searched for a particular product online. In the next week, they kept seeing ads showcasing similar products from the same company or an industry competitor popping up in their social media newsfeeds. These remarketing campaigns not only act as triggers to influence the purchasing decision but also as reminders for those customers who may have left their desired product in the cart. 

Remarketing campaigns act as a brand awareness-building measure and have the potential to drastically increase your conversion rates.

10. Optimize email marketing strategies

Emails are a great way to drum up demand for your product or service. Still, you must be careful not to sound too sale-sy, and just introduce the slightest amount of curiosity for the potential customer to make them want to know more about your brand.

A/B testing is crucial for email marketing check-ins, and the less promotional you sound, the more attention you will attract as a customer-friendly brand. If you regularly carpet-bomb your email list, you risk losing out on ideal prospects and harming your brand. Despite this, you should constantly check your lists to work smarter rather than harder.

[Creative brief: Create a flowchart highlighting how email marketing should work from start to end for a particular campaign, including all the steps, sequences and follow-ups.

Everything needs to be tried, from the length of the headline and the subject line to the linking strategies and offer placements, for you to make final, well-informed judgments about your email campaigns that are based on actual data rather than assumptions.

When email marketing is the primary goal, you must first keep track of the demand creation plan, which is to "give away as much value as you can." If you consistently flood your database of contacts with low-value offers, you can be certain to drive your subscribers mad. However, if you include your best tools, resources, and offers in your emails, you will quickly attract prospects waiting to learn more about you.

11. Update lookalike audiences on Facebook lead ad campaigns

Facebook is the best place when it comes to lead ad campaigns. With a monthly active user database of 2.91 million (the biggest in the world), Facebook is the third-most visited website in the world.  Let's suppose that you are already running ads on Facebook, in which case you should be using lookalike audiences—which is one of the most effective targeting methods available.

So what are lookalike audiences? These are the bespoke audiences that, based on behavioral or demographic similarities, resemble consumers who have already expressed an interest in your products or services or the content you have been carefully curating to attract your ideal prospects. Facebook allows you to upload custom audiences that you have already created using information from your attributes.

Lookalike audiences have a number of important benefits, one of which is the ability to essentially boost the potential reach of your Facebook advertising campaigns by utilizing the enormous amount of user data Facebook has available. The more custom audiences you upload, the wider you can use lookalikes to cast your net.

BONUS: Keep updating your content!

One of the most important SEO tactics businesses ignore and leave out while doubling down on their demand or lead generation initiatives is upgrading older material.

If you fall short in this area, potential customers will have a hard time connecting with your brand content and will go for another one. A number of issues can arise when outdated content is neglected, including erroneous or irrelevant information, broken links, a decline in ranking, and more.

However, your content material will stop generating demand, let alone leads, which defeats the entire purpose of your initiatives.

Convert high-quality leads into paying customers—with RevenueHero!

The key to generating maximum hype around your product or service is offering free value content (and when I say a lot, I mean truckloads!). Providing your potential customers with a vast knowledge base of information can help them identify problems they have within their business operations, and find solutions without making much of an investment. This will not only establish you as an authority in your niche market but also put your offer top of mind and make your ideal prospects trust you enough, to convert them into buyers and, further, advocate for the quality of your brand.

Once your demand generation campaign is successful in generating high-quality leads for your business—the next step is to nurture those sales leads all the way through your sales pipeline and convert them into paying customers. In doing this, you need all the help you can get—and that is why you should check out how RevenueHero can make a difference!

What does RevenueHero do? It helps you with lead qualification and lead prioritization based on high-value offers while also aiding and in booking quick meetings (for prompt and responsive communication). In a nutshell, you absolutely need this tool to make your brand more customer-friendly and keep track of all the high-quality leads you secure in one place. This SaaS platform also offers an efficient lead scoring system and simple integration with every GTM stack product you might own—all at cost-effective pricing.  

Would you like to explore this further? Check out the platform right here!