Demand Generation Tactics: 10 Ways to Create and Capture Demand

It’s a tactic within the larger inbound marketing strategy of making your company visible to decision-makers.

That sounds like a great way to hit your KPIs, right? 

It can also feel kinda complicated — like, what is demand generation specifically?

If you're considering giving demand generation marketing a try or are looking for ways to optimize your current marketing tactics, keep reading. 

I'll share 10 B2B demand generation strategies to create and capture demand—including the ones that helped take Leadfeeder from a three-person team to a fast-growing company with more than 60,000 active users. 

Note: Looking to track your demand generation impact? Leadfeeder tracks what companies visit your site—and what content they view. Try us free for 14 days. 

How we do demand generation at Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder has grown rapidly in recent years, and most of that growth is due to us moving to a demand generation first model, as opposed to waiting around for lead generation to do its thing. 

Don't get me wrong, we still do some lead generation, but we also look for ways to drive demand. 

Our demand generation funnel looks like this: At the top of the funnel, we focus on building awareness with content like our podcast, B2B Rebellion, and sharing sales and marketing strategies on our blog. 

In the demand creation step, we create really in-depth, useful content, such as our detailed guides to ABM, lead gen, and demand generation. This in-depth content showcases our expertise and how our tool improves those strategies. 

In the identifying intent stage, we create content like our profit calculator or other high-intent content like our webinars. When users hit these pages, we know they're close. This is when we move into capturing that demand with free trials and demos. 

Your demand generation funnel won't look exactly like ours but feel free to steal a few of our ideas. 😉 As you design your funnel, pay attention to the difference between demand creation and demand capture.

They sound similar, but they're different. 

Demand creation is the act of generating a need. It's about creating demand for your offering by making people want to purchase what you offer. 

Demand capture is the step in the sales funnel where you capture the contact information of those users who now want your offering. Essentially, you're capitalizing on the demand you created and working to turn those users into customers. 

So, how do you do it? 

Before demand generation campaigns: Understand your ICP, buyers, and their pain points

The tactics I'll share only work if you really know who your buyers are and what they want.  

What problems hold them back? 

What challenges do they wake up in the morning worrying about?  

Before diving into the strategies below, make sure you know who your ICP is and have a deep understanding of their pain points. 

5 demand creation tactics

The first step in the demand generation process is creating the demand. That means generating awareness, engagement, and excitement about your offering. Here are five ways to do that. 

Have some meaningful to say

While this isn’t a specific ‘tactic’ in itself, most demand creation tactics circle around content creation that solves problems. 

To be effective, your content needs an opinion and point of view. To be memorable, you need to have something meaningful to say. 

So work internally to craft a POV and thread this through all of your content. 

For example, at Leadfeeder we work with our sales team when creating sales-related content. We ask what strategies they use, and what works for us and share that expert-level advice with other sales teams. 

Create ungated content that captures organic keywords

Gating content is so 2019. 

While not totally dead, gating tons of content just to generate a high volume of leads is no longer the most effective strategy. Instead, create in-depth, useful ungated content targeting organic keywords. 

We do this at Leadfeeder by targeting terms like "cold email templates." 

Does our tool have anything to do with sending cold emails? 

Not really, but a lot of salespeople use our tool and they care about cold emailing. Creating un-gated downloadable infographics, for example, are usually a hit.

Co-market with companies that have a similar ICP

Rather than doing outreach directly to the overall market, expand your reach by partnering with a company with a similar ICP—but isn't a competitor. 

Our marketing team uses this strategy by pairing with other companies to host informative webinars: 

Other ways to leverage co-marketing include:

• Speaking on a panel.

• Co-hosting a podcast.

• Working together to create an in-depth white paper of research about your industry. 

• Content marketing pieces like a blog post or podcast, even getting a quote from someone at a complimenting company is a great idea.

Create, repurpose, and distribute multimedia content

You spend a lot of time creating content, so make the most of it. 💪

That means creating webinars, podcasts, and video interviews and then reworking that content into other content like blog posts, ebooks, guides, and so forth. 

Remember the goal is to generate demand, so you want to reach as many people as possible. Repurposing and redistributing content helps you do just that. And of course, have specific SEO-optimized content to reach the most people.

Paid social campaigns targeting your ICP

In B2B, LinkedIn is the primary vehicle for paid social media campaigns.

To generate demand, consider creating LinkedIn ads targeting a very specific segment of your ICP. You can use this to distribute both gated and ungated content.

The main thing is getting the right message in front of your ICP. Then, use Leadfeeder's acquisition filters to see metrics like how much traffic those campaigns drive to your website.

5 demand capture tactics

You've created demand. Awesome.  

Now what? 

Now it's time to capture those leads so you can turn that demand into sales. Here's how to kill the demand gen strategy game. 

Paid search campaigns to capture high-intent keywords

In the demand creation stage, we talked about targeting organic search terms with ungated content. Now it's time to turn it up a notch by creating paid search campaigns for high-intent keywords to jump in front of your target audience. 

High-intent key terms will vary by company, of course, but the ones we target include: 

• Leadfeeder vs (our competitors) 

• IP enrichment 

• Lead generation tools 

These terms indicate people know what they need and are ready to convert—people who are further along in the buyer’s journey. By focusing on high-intent terms, we aren't wasting ad spend on generic terms that are highly competitive and unlikely to convert. 

We’re all about high conversion rates over here, you feel?

A strong presence on review sites

A strong presence on review sites is another way to target high-intent users and secure new customers. 

For example, if a user is looking for Leafeeder on Capterra, there's a good chance they already know what we offer and are in the consideration stage of the sales cycle. 

By ensuring your website, features, pricing, and screenshots or videos are accurate, you know high-intent users are making their decisions based on accurate information. It also gives you the opportunity to influence high-intent users, interrupting their customer journey. 

Most review sites (including Capterra) allow you to update company information and respond to reviews. Definitely add this piece of the puzzle to your demand generation program, the ROI will surprise you if you dedicate marketing efforts to the cause!

Identify companies visiting ungated content and sync to sales teams

The main goal of gating a piece of content is to make it a lead magnet; to collect qualified leads (you hope). But, it's not always the most effective digital marketing strategy. 

For starters, not everyone will fill out your form—so how do you capture that demand if they’re bouncing from your landing page? 

Luckily, there are ways around the form dilemma for B2B marketers.

By tracking IP addresses, Leadfeeder identifies which companies visit your website, and what pages they view, and determines if they fit your ideal customer persona through filters like lead scoring. Plus, we integrate with several free tools and CRMs, so we can send those captured contacts right over to sales. 

No more gating content just to gather email addresses—and all that sweet data gets sent over to sales in almost real-time thanks to our marketing automation skills. 

Personalize your website for your ICP

Not all site traffic is a potential customer. By personalizing your site for your ICP, you can ensure the demand you generated gets another little push to convert.

What if you could change the content on your website based on who visited? Maybe mention the name of the company they work for or show case studies from clients in similar industries. 

Used in this manner, personalization can push your ICP to convert rather than just poke around your website—account-based marketing at its finest.

 Leadfeeder's IP data enrichment data can help you better understand what companies visit your site and what matters most to them. Our data can help create personalized marketing campaigns and adjust your website to fit your ICP and buyer personas. 

For example, Titta Nummi, Head of Brand and Customer Marketing at DNA said: “During the first month of using Leadfeeder IP data, we have been able to target personalized content to seventeen times more site visitors than before. This is a tremendous improvement when compared with our previous results, and we anticipate that we will continue to achieve strong growth in the future.”

Retarget at the account level using IP data

Here's another use for IP data from Leadfeeder. 

Rather than just guessing who is visiting your website and what they want, using IP data allows you to retarget companies across the web. 

You've generated demand and they know who you are—now leverage information about their company to retarget them through LinkedIn, Google Ads, and other retargeting platforms. 

Ready to launch your demand generation strategy? 

Successful demand generation creates more opportunities by building authority and brand awareness. Marketers do this through high-value content and then capturing that demand through retargeting ads, website identification tools like Leadfeeder, and creating a more personalized experience at each touchpoint in the marketing funnel and sales process.

While lead generation tactics aim to turn a current audience into customers, demand generation creates demand where none currently exists—which makes it a powerful tool for B2B business. 

Looking to improve your demand gen process? Capture more demand with Leadfeeder, a website tracking tool that identifies anonymous website traffic and provides IP enrichment.