It’s time to go beyond traditional marketing.
What’s that, then, you may wonder?
The answer is SaaS demand generation—an exciting approach that doesn’t rely on gathering contact information but instead shares information to make prospective buyers want to know more and invest in your product or service.
Are you keen to learn how to implement an effective demand generation strategy for SaaS?
Then read on👇. You’re about to learn insights from DG’s best: Alice de Courcy!
SaaS demand generation is a multi-channel, data-driven marketing strategy designed to educate potential buyers, build trust, and drive high-intent leads. Unlike traditional lead generation, which focuses on capturing emails and pushing sales, demand generation nurtures curiosity and establishes your brand as an industry leader before the sale even happens.
The process involves a combination of strategies to attract and engage potential customers throughout their buying journey, including content marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media engagement, and more.
Unlike traditional marketing approaches prioritising immediate sales, demand generation focuses on building long-term relationships by providing value-driven content and experiences.
This methodology attracts high-quality leads and nurtures them, ensuring they are well-informed and primed for conversion when they reach the decision-making stage.
If you’re marketing B2B SaaS, you know the competition is fierce, and innovation is everything. Demand generation ensures your solution won’t ever go unnoticed while retaining loyal customers.
Here’s how B2B SaaS demand generation solves the most common B2B marketing challenges:
The more value and content you provide, the more prospects trust your expertise and opinions. By consistently delivering valuable content and engaging experiences, you position your brand as a thought leader, increasing market visibility and recognition.
Demand generation showcases the value of your product. When you share insightful resources, you empower potential customers to understand your SaaS solutions’ unique benefits and practical uses, making it easier for them to embrace and adopt your offerings.
Demand generation nurtures prospects through targeted content and personalised interactions, guiding them through the sales funnel and increasing the chances of conversion. Engaged and well-educated customers are more likely to remain, resulting in higher retention rates.
Instead of cold leads requiring weeks of persuasion, warmed-up prospects are eager to buy—which, in turn, makes sales happy!
Moreover, a cohesive demand generation strategy fosters collaboration between marketing and sales teams, ensuring a seamless customer journey from awareness to purchase.
Demand generation for SaaS follows a carefully structured funnel. Each stage guides prospects from casual interest to a firm decision.
Here, the goal is to attract a broad audience and make them aware of your brand and solutions. Strategies include:
Alice emphasises the importance of ungated, on demand content in this stage. This allows prospects to access valuable resources without barriers, thereby building trust and credibility.
She says:
Our guide on how to ungate your content explains more about how Alice implemented this idea into the marketing team at Cognism.
By this stage of your demand generation funnel, your audience knows about your SaaS solution but is weighing their options. It’s time to deepen engagement and provide value beyond simple brand awareness. You accomplish this by:
This is the moment of truth—when a potential customer decides whether to move forward with your solution. To ensure they say “yes,” your SaaS demand gen efforts should include:
While not traditionally included in the B2B marketing funnel, promotion is vital in amplifying your SaaS demand generation efforts across all stages. Tactics include:
Transitioning from lead generation to demand generation isn’t an overnight shift. Instead, it should be tackled in manageable stages. Here’s how to make the switch without disrupting your current marketing strategy:
You don’t have to abandon your existing MQL model right away. Instead, start by integrating demand gen tactics.
Here’s an excerpt from Diary of a First-Time CMO, which outlines some of the things Alice says you can do straight away:
Rather than taking a radical leap, test demand generation by allocating a separate budget.
A small experimental fund (e.g., $5K per month) can be used to run ungated campaigns that focus on content consumption rather than conversions.
Monitor high-intent inbound demo requests to validate the effectiveness of your demand gen efforts.
Start tracking separate conversion rates for direct demo requests versus traditional MQLs.
If your data reveals that high-intent demo requests convert more efficiently than gated content leads, present these insights to stakeholders.
Show how reallocating the budget to demand gen improves pipeline velocity and deal size.
Once you’ve gathered enough data, analyse underperforming MQL campaigns.
If certain lead-gen efforts yield a high cost per lead (CPL) with low returns, cut them.
Reallocate that budget to demand gen initiatives while keeping only the highest-performing MQL campaigns.
Over time, transition your budget and activities toward a demand-generation-heavy model.
Aim for a 90% demand gen and 10% MQL split, but move at a pace that aligns with your internal buy-in and success metrics. Sales leaders will appreciate the increase in high-intent leads that convert faster and with fewer objections.
By methodically shifting from lead to demand gen, you build a marketing engine that creates sustainable, high-quality pipeline growth without reliance on outdated, low-intent tactics.
Content marketing is the foundation of any SaaS demand generation strategy, but it needs to be good. It has to serve a purpose and be valuable to your audience.
Alice says:
To establish your brand as an authority and educate potential customers, you’ll need to focus on a range of content. All ungated, of course 👇.
At Cognism, our content focus has shifted to “big rocks,” like our annual cold calling report, the SDR Zone, our demand gen course and, of course, “Diary of a First-Time CMO.”
Creating content now involves phased builds towards these big rocks, allowing our team to produce smaller, related content while contributing to larger projects.
The content team uses a colour-coded planning system in Asana to map out and track deadlines, ensuring flexibility and alignment with the core themes of what the business wants to be known for.
Learn more about our updated DG content strategy.
Search engine optimisation ensures that your SaaS demand gen content reaches the right audience at the right time. A strong SEO strategy includes the following:
Alice says:
What did this mean for SEO at Cognism?
We focused on quality content enhanced by internal subject matter experts. This ensures we always create content with authority and substance around subjects that are poignant to our core ICP.
This and our money keywords strategy saw us taking the place of HubSpot’s biggest organic competitor at the time:
Read this CMO diary chapter on creating content to outperform your competitors for more insight from Alice!
While organic content builds a long-term audience, PPC campaigns can accelerate SaaS demand generation by placing your brand in front of targeted audiences. Key tactics include:
The key lesson Alice has learnt from Cognism's Paid journey is:
Sometimes the biggest impacts are in the basics!
How so?
Here are two chapters from Alice’s CMO diary to help you with your own B2B SaaS demand generation strategies for Paid:
Social media plays a crucial role in SaaS demand generation by fostering engagement and brand awareness, and LinkedIn is the most important social platform for this purpose.
Alice’s demand generation strategy for B2B SaaS was to turn herself into a subject matter expert for Cognism's marketing audience.
Her top advice for using this tactic:
Don’t be afraid to use content more than once.
Best practices include:
A well-executed SaaS demand generation strategy is only as good as the data behind it.
You need to track and analyse performance across multiple touchpoints to ensure your efforts drive tangible business impact.
For Alice, this meant tying the team’s demand generation activities directly to revenue.
She said:
When I took the leap and started setting goals and KPIs against revenue, everything else became a lot easier. Weirdly, the fear of missing target reduced."
For early stage SaaS demand generation, this will mean getting approval from your CEO and setting aside an experimental budget.
To effectively measure demand generation success, monitor:
Organisation and centralisation is everything. This means ensuring your B2B marketing team formalise OKRs, align on progress reporting and tighten up Asana usage.
Alice says:
Here’s how she fixed this challenge:
Learn more about Alice’s approach to reporting and OKR tracking centralisation.
Lastly, the tools you use for SaaS demand generation are everything. You can see a full list of the B2B marketing tech stack we use at Cognism.
Or read this chapter for a summary of the team’s favourite tools.
If you’re serious about mastering SaaS demand generation, Alice de Courcy’s Diary of a First-Time CMO is invaluable.
It provides real-world insights, case studies, and actionable strategies to help SaaS companies transform their outdated lead-gen tactics into sustainable demand-gen engines.
Give it a read, ungated 😉, by clicking the banner below 👇