Capture your audience’s attention and turn it into action with a winning B2B demand generation strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss what demand gen is all about and ten specific tactics you can use to attract, nurture and convert high-quality leads with great ROI.
What is B2B Demand Generation?
B2B demand generation is a strategy for building awareness of your brand or solution in order to generate leads further down the marketing funnel. Demand gen is all about using your audience’s attention as an opportunity to create a demand for your product and inspiring action that will get your prospects on the path to becoming leads.
B2B Demand Gen vs. Lead Gen
Demand gen is distinct from lead generation, which focuses on existing demand for your product. Demand gen takes place higher in the classic marketing funnel, pulling in an audience before they are actively ready to become leads. The awareness and nurturing that demand gen promotes ultimately drive more people to the lead gen stage, so a solid demand generation plan can help you get the most out of your lead generation strategy.
B2B Demand Gen vs. Brand Awareness
While building awareness is a key part of demand gen, it isn’t the whole picture. Brand awareness, or the level of recognition people have for your company or product, is helpful for your demand gen strategy, but it doesn’t replace them. Demand gen aims to do more than just create awareness; it’s about capturing attention and driving action, building an audience rather than just making your name known. While the audience you capture might not be ready to become leads at this very moment, your goal is to inspire action that will initiate a buyer’s journey.
11 B2B Demand Gen Tactics That Drive Successful Campaigns
Successful demand generation relies on implementing strategies that deliver real results. Here are our ten picks for top B2B demand gen tactics for driving leads.
1. Track Key Metrics to Measure Success
Before you launch a demand gen campaign, decide how you’ll measure success and make sure you’re set up to track and record your key metrics. It’s essential to do this early on so you can determine whether your demand gen efforts are working and ensure you’re getting good ROI.
At CMG, we prioritize the following funnel and awareness metrics to track our demand generation campaigns:
- Visits
- Leads
- MQLs
- Articles placed
- Mentions
- New followers
- Estimated views
Additional metrics that may be helpful for a holistic look at how demand gen efforts are feeding into other strategies include:
- SQLs
- Opportunities
- Closed won
- Closed lost
- Total pickups
2. Leverage Technology for Data-Driven Campaigns
Another good step to take early on in your demand generation campaign is to set up your marketing tech stack — tools like your CRM, automation tools and intent data software. These tools will be invaluable when segmenting your audience, launching nurture campaigns and creating targeted content.
3. Define Your Audience
Know who you’re talking to. Develop buyer personas, define your ideal customer profile (ICP), and set goals and actions based on these. This will help personalize your content and ensure you’re using the right messaging for your targets.
Creating Buyer Personas
Buyer persona data can be pulled from your CRM, conversations with your sales team, and customer surveys and interviews. Third-party research can help fill in the gaps if you don’t have a well-populated CRM yet. Some important details to create your buyer personas include:
- Demographic information
- Job titles
- Pain points
- Goals & challenges
- Buying behaviors
Defining Your ICP
In B2B demand gen, your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the type of company you’re targeting with your solutions. Think about what challenges you can solve, the industries that need your solution most and ideal company structure (size, revenue, growth stage, etc.)
Setting Goals Based on Your Audience
Once you’ve created personas and an ICP, analyze your audience and decide what actions you can take to best target stakeholders. Look at the values your personas care about and the kind of company you’re targeting; use these to determine the type of content that will resonate most with your audience. For example, an audience that is highly technical and particularly values hard data and ROI will require different messaging and content assets than an audience that prefers to consider big-picture goals.
4. Think Beyond Top of Funnel Strategies
We often think of demand generation at the top of the funnel, but your strategy should ideally involve all stages to facilitate the buyer’s journey and make the marketing-to-sales handoff smoother. As you read through the other tactics we recommend, think of where and how they fit into a funnel strategy.
Here is a general outline of when specific tactics tend to work best:
- For early stage demand gen, consider content marketing and brand awareness activities. Think blogs, videos, webinars, social media and paid ads.
- For middle-funnel demand gen, choose activities like email nurturing, account-based marketing and live demos. This is also where you can make use of in-depth thought leadership assets.
- At the bottom of the funnel, support sales enablement efforts by driving prospects to tools like calculators, providing access to demos or consultations and implementing retargeting ads.
5. Use Thought Leadership to Draw an Audience
Thought leadership is one of our core strategies at CMG, and it’s particularly great for B2B demand generation if approached with a demand-first strategy. This means delivering value upfront to gain your audience's trust.
Providing value on social media and in blog articles is a good initial step in this strategy because it allows you to build trust with your audience before asking for something from them. Once that relationship is established, engaged prospects may opt to subscribe to your newsletter, where you can offer exclusive content. A regular reader of your blog, social, and newsletter will be more willing to consider your recommendations for products and services than someone who doesn't know who you are.
Thought leadership hits all the checkpoints for good demand generation if you can include the following elements:
- Content that captures attention and intrigues your audience on a blog or social media
- An invitation to subscribe to your newsletter for exclusive content
- Continued engagement to build trust between your audience and brand
- High-quality content that can’t be AI-generated or easily found elsewhere online
- A strong message that inspires your audience to further action and engagement with your brand
6. Encourage with Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing typically relies on automated email sequences, personalized follow-ups and retargeting ads, and this can be a great way to continue working on an audience you’ve brought into your orbit already. Providing additional assets, offering one-on-one discussions or even just ensuring that you stay top of mind by popping up in a LinkedIn feed can keep your audience engaged and encourage them to consider your offerings more seriously.
7. Prioritize with Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a way to sift through your audience and identify your most promising prospects. A CMS tool like HubSpot is generally the easiest way to do this, though some of our clients have also had success using surveys to determine if their products or services would be a good fit for prospects.
In B2B, lead scoring should take a lead’s individual demographics and behaviors into account as well as company-level attributes. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll need to assess for — the exact factors that matter will vary depending on your industry and the specific solution or service you offer:
- Buyer persona fit
- ICP fit
- Geography
- Behaviors, including website activity and engagement
The lead scoring process can be time intensive, especially if you have a large number of contacts, but prioritizing your most sales-ready leads is essential to a well-informed strategic plan, especially if you’re looking into paid channels like Google Ads or boosted LinkedIn posts. Spend your resources on the prospects that are the best fit for your solution and you’re likely to see much higher ROI.
8. Specify with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
If you have specific target accounts you want to land, or you’ve identified some via lead scoring, account-based marketing (ABM) is a great B2B demand gen tactic because it allows you to personalize your efforts to a very specific audience, driving up ROI.
9. Use Social Media and Influencer Marketing
Both organic and paid social media have a place in the demand gen toolkit, though the specific methods you use can be highly industry-specific. In most B2B situations, LinkedIn will be your go-to platform, but certain businesses may still have luck on Facebook, Instagram or even TikTok, so it can pay to research your audience’s habits thoroughly before making an investment.
Organic posts can generate demand in much the same way as your content strategy, but paid ads open the possibility for retargeting prospects. In certain industries, connecting and collaborating with influencers can also be a successful strategy for attracting attention and earning trust.
It can be difficult to prove ROI when reviewing social as a metric. We recommend using lead indicators or correlation to make educated estimates about results such as:
- Increase in direct traffic
- Increase in brand mentions in keyword monitoring software
- Number of leads captured through paid brand campaigns
10. Optimize Content for High-Intent Keywords
In addition to a thought leadership approach to content strategy, SEO-driven content is still a successful way to draw an audience via organic search. For blog articles and webpages, perform in-depth keyword research to determine the search queries that resonate most with your audience and are most relevant to your offerings.
The best way to make an SEO-optimized content strategy work for demand generation is to check how your content is impacting revenue. Try pulling reports on closed/won deals that originated via organic search. Reviewing the first page viewed in this report will help you determine what pages initially attract customers. This can help you build a better-informed strategy with better odds of drawing in a relevant audience.
11. Event Marketing to Drive Engagement
When done strategically, participating in webinars and industry events can be a worthy B2B demand gen tactic. First, decide if event marketing makes sense for your audience. Are professionals in your target industry eager to join virtual events or travel to in-person conferences? If so, you can start building your strategy. A few tips:
- Find another organization that has a large audience that overlaps with yours, and partner to host a joint event.
- Conduct first-party research to make your webinar unique and attract more attention. You’ll get a larger audience if you can provide information that isn’t readily available elsewhere.
- The end of your event is when your nurturing work begins. Use your webinar or conference as a springboard for relevant blogs and an email nurture campaign.
Net Better Leads with a B2B Demand Generation Agency
Implement successful demand generation tactics with expert support. Our experience in demand and lead generation means we can help you build a strong marketing engine that drives leads down the funnel with less friction.
Want to see what you can expect from a CMG partnership? See how we helped one of our clients leverage demand gen to quadruple traffic and increase customers by 800%: Read the demand gen success story.
