Demand Generation

Blog Post

5 Tips For Creating Demand Before Capturing It

5 Tips For Creating Demand Before Capturing It

Building and launching a new product is exciting, especially if your research suggests there aren’t many great alternatives on the market.

But even with the right audience research and product-market fit, creating genuine "I can’t wait to try this thing" interest in your product is a tall order. Particularly for B2B SaaS, wherein your brand and its latest solution need to be compelling enough to a bunch of decision makers.

That’s where demand generation comes in — while lead generation is all about converting an audience that’s already aware of their problem and are actively hunting for solutions, B2B demand generation helps you create a buzz for your brand and its offerings by educating buyers about their challenges and your unique ability to solve them better than anyone else.

While there’s plenty you can do to generate leads for your new product, in this post, let’s look at the top five things you can do to generate demand for your B2B product before capturing it.

#1. Craft Educational Content to Build Brand Awareness and Authority

The first step to generating demand for your product is to create great content meant to introduce and inform people about a problem they’re facing.

Educate your audience in the three key stages of their buyer’s journey:

  • Stage 1. Non-aware. People that don't even realize they have a problem. Make them aware of the problem, its consequences, and available solutions with Top-of-the-Funnel (ToF) content such as:

  • Long-form guides
  • Blog posts
  • Infographics
  • Podcasts
  • Videos

  • Stage 2. Problem-aware. People that know they have a problem but no solution. Guide them through potential options and show them how your solution outperforms the rest with Middle-of-the-Funnel (MoF) content such as:

  • White papers
  • E-books
  • Case studies
  • Webinars

  • Stage 3. Solution aware. People that know the kind of solution needed to solve their problem and wish to finalize a product. Showcase your product in action and prove its benefits with Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BoF) content such as:

  • Case studies
  • Success stories
  • Demos
  • Free trials

Source: Content Marketing Institute. A table showing how effective each marketing channel is for each buyer stage.

#2. Focus On The Pain Point 

To generate demand in a space where your prospects are largely unaware of the snags your product addresses, you must concentrate all your content marketing efforts on leading your audience to the "aha!" moment.

It’s the moment your prospects realize that the problems they’re facing are worth investing good money in solving.

You can make this moment happen by following the PAS model: Illustrate the problem, agitate its pain with real-life examples and data (such as the % loss in productivity or revenue), and showcase your solution as the go-to one. So, put simply, find and understand your audience's biggest pain point and position your product as the solution to that problem.

#3. Promote User-Generated Content (UGC)

There aren’t many better ways to create demand for your new product than letting your initial, satisfied customers do the talking.

While not B2B, one of the best examples of UGC done right is GoPro. The renowned action camera company doesn’t rely on fancy big-budget marketing campaigns, but rather leverages handpicked content created by customers actively using their products. No hard sell.

Source: GoPro on Instagram. A screenshot of a post from GoPro's Instagram.

You can take a leaf out of their book by promoting your product’s good reviews and highlighting your happiest customers with testimonial videos.

All in all, UGC is the most authentic way to prove your solution’s effectiveness without the fluff. 

#4. Leverage Customer Feedback

Continuing along similar lines, modern buyers won’t even think about signing up unless they see positive reviews from happy customers. Word of mouth will always be the best way to create magnetic demand for your product.

The other side of that coin is to capture feedback from your happy customers and act on it.

After launching the pilot version of your SaaS product, quickly switch your focus to gathering honest and detailed feedback from your initial users. Then, add new features, content, pricing points, etc. to enhance your offering based on customer feedback.

By consistently acting on user feedback and showcasing your efforts publicly (on your social channels and via blog updates), you build trust and credibility for your brand and thus drive more demand for your product.

#5. Set Your Brand Apart

As innovative or revolutionary as your new product may be, odds are your prospective buyers still have options to pick from.

When your competition is offering a similar product as yours, your goal is to set yourself apart by pinpointing exactly what you offer that is different.

You can do this by:

  • Identifying your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and relaying it throughout your brand messaging.
  • Keeping an eye on your competitors’ product updates, social media content, and user reviews to identify their customers’ most pressing pain points and address them iteratively in your product.

And although it’s a risky strategy, don't be afraid to be a bit bold or controversial in your content to stand out as a brand. This helps build a community of like-minded customers who’ll champion your product and filter out prospects who don’t share your brand’s outlook.

Content Creation and Demand Generation Walk Hand-in-Hand

Sure, investing in paid media helps drive immediate demand and leads for your new product. But, as cliché as it sounds, content is indeed king when it comes to generating inbound, non-intrusive interest in your B2B SaaS.

If you follow the strategies in this article you can fuel a sustainable (and growing!) demand for your product.

And if you wish to drive hockey-stick growth for your new product, you’re in the right place. Make Matter Made your partner in product-led growth and content-led demand generation to meet your most ambitious MRR targets fast.

Demand Generation

Blog Post

The Power of Full Funnel Marketing on Revenue Growth

“Full funnel marketing” isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a radical approach that can grow your revenue sustainably, keep customers happy, reduce retention, and positively transform your relationship with prospects. 

This article will cover the basics of the full funnel marketing approach, the four demand actions that fuel the funnel, and what investing in full-funnel optimization can do for your business. 

What do we mean by “full funnel”? 

Full funnel means serving the buyer at all lifecycle stages of the funnel — from pre-brand awareness and engagement through to customer retention and growth. In other words, full-funnel means not neglecting one area or another just because:

  • It seems to be fine/working without effort/support
  • It doesn’t seem necessary or needed
  • Your other efforts in the funnel are doing fine without it

While shaped like a funnel, the growth efforts you do — whether in marketing, in sales, in customer success, etc. — act more like a web of influence with full-funnel marketing. 

Here are two examples of full-funnel marketing strategies:

  1. You engage deeper with your customers through advocacy programs and paid media marketing. This involves creating high-quality organic mid-funnel content and referral support.

  1. You gather both quantitative and qualitative data as a prospect converts to a customer. This helps you refine your top-of-funnel ICP understanding and targeting, identify key accounts to either pursue (with new customers) or grow (with existing customers) with high traction, and build more tailored post-purchase onboarding and education programs for greater retention.

The four demand engine actions that fuel the funnel

Demand generation and growth often gets the misconception that it’s just “capturing demand” for a company … aka, lead generation. But there’s a reason intelligent B2B brands evolved from the marketing focus of just “lead generation” to demand generation and overall funnel growth marketing — it’s so much more than just capturing leads.

Demand generation breaks down into four core actions that support revenue growth across the funnel:

  1. Creating demand
  2. Capturing demand
  3. Accelerating demand
  4. Growing demand

Creating demand

Whether your category already exists or you’re building the category, creating awareness of the problem your market has is vital to selling a solution. 

Capturing demand

This is the point at which you’ve garnered enough intrigue from your market for them to engage in a meaningful way to move that interest from “unknown” to “known.” In other words, you’ve captured some data that proves these captured prospects are interested. This could be through website traffic, making contact with a salesperson, or taking an action like joining your email list.

Accelerating demand

This is when you invest in marketing to prospective leads and engaging with them. The aim is to deepen their connection to your brand and its ability to serve their needs and goals, converting a passive soft interest into a higher intent that could lead to a sale.

Growing demand

Marketing isn’t done once you secure a sale! This step involves investing in things like post-purchase nurturing to onboard customers, advocacy programs, and key account identification for growth. 

These stages come together to create this marketing and sales funnel:

A graphic showing a sales funnel with key stages like awareness, consideration, action, adoption, and account growth.

Why are all four stages required for success?

Because brands often neglect demand creation 

Without creating new demand, your audience's existing intent to buy/awareness is finite. You’ll hit the wall trying to capture interest and prospects out of a pool of buyers that is not being expanded on.

The brand that creates demand wins. As your competition in the field grows, if you aren’t driving the in-market knowledge, education, and awareness around your market’s problem/solution, you will become one of many. As one of many, there is no loyalty or connective tissue between your brand and the needs of your buyer. Good luck trying to capture that unloyal buyer base.

But just investing in thought leadership and creating demand isn’t the solution to your funnel and revenue growth alone. More robust demand capture and acceleration programs, in partnership with sales, are the biggest driver toward your new revenue goals. 

The businesses that win with both high potential buyer capture and conversion to customers are the ones that invest in dynamic, personalized, and thoughtful experiences for those prospects across the first 2/3rds of the typical funnel.

This means leveraging insights and data intelligently to make sure each touchpoint/engagement with that person is relevant and adds value to them. This engagement must align with the person’s demographics, primary pain points, and where they see value. 

Because sales and marketing must be aligned

If every lead you get contact info on is shot over the fence to sales without any prioritizations, you’re not putting your customers first and likely losing potential sales because of it.

Intelligently combining nurture programs, leveraging lead scoring mechanisms, and bridging the collaboration gap between marketing and sales initiatives can create a better buyer experience while also providing warmer, more qualified prospects that do go to sales.

Because post-purchase marketing is vital for customer retention 

For the longest time, the marketing funnel ended at conversion. Eventually, more and more people recognized that support for engaging and helping post-purchase adoption of the solution was critical to reducing customer churn.

At Matter Made, we push our clients to think even more. A winning area for B2B business (especially SaaS) is when you push beyond your competitors by:

  1. Having little to no churn rate.
  2. Having a high-growth customer rate.

You can achieve these milestones by investing in key account identification and growth.

But this, too, doesn’t happen in a silo. A full-funnel cohesion of experience, messaging, and customer-centricity in marketing efforts is essential. Marketing with your customer base is one of the most powerful revenue sources — whether that’s in high-quality referrals, key account expansion, advocacy programs, etc. Businesses with strong recurring revenue are those that have figured out how to not just nullify churn rate, but multiply account investment with their solution. 

Note: Check out Matter Made’s case studies to see how Matter Made has maximized full funnel marketing tactics for clients, from helping to create that demand, to account-based marketing.

What investing in full-funnel optimization looks like

To give you an idea of what it might look like if you were weak in just one area of the funnel compared to competitors, here is a year-over-year look at three companies: 

Sample data from three companies showing the results of investing in full-funnel optimization.

In the first month or so, the growth difference doesn’t seem like much. But when you pull out to one or two years, you can see that you and your competitors have a painful gap. In many cases, this gap can’t be overcome once that time has passed, and that’s where you see many B2B SaaS brands fall out of the market.

An infographic showing the results of investing in full-funnel optimization.

Remember: these data points are only giving examples of weaknesses in one area of the funnel. Imagine if you only focused on mid-funnel demand capture and not investing in creation or growth?!

Three steps you can take now that you know the importance of full-funnel optimization

Step 1. Assess if you’re doing all four demand actions

This doesn’t need to be scientific, but step back to review if you’re doing all four actions to serve the full funnel. Grade your efforts using this scale:

  • Little to not at all
  • Somewhat
  • A good amount
  • A lot

Step 2. Prioritize areas of the funnel you need to improve on

From what you may have identified, likely starting with any you marked as “little to not at all” or “somewhat,” order the priorities of the areas you need to focus on as a business.

If you need to do more in multiple areas, you’ll find that you’ll probably prioritize top to bottom on the funnel. For example, if you are not doing much to accelerate or grow demand, you’ll want to prioritize accelerating marketing efforts over growing. 

Step 3. Identify how to fill those demand gaps

Do you have the internal resources to support where you’re underserving? Do you need to outsource?

Work on mapping out what you have in skill or ability, and then where you should outsource. Some skills are super critical to have in-house — for example, your brand/content expert. Some skills can be outsourced with greater success — for example, demand generation programming. 

Master your full-funnel marketing

Investing in optimizing your full-funnel marketing will boost your revenue short-term and long-term. It’s a no-brainer if you’re chasing sustainable growth and customer satisfaction. 

If tackling full funnel optimization for your company immediately leaves you unsure on where to start or overwhelmed by the effort and time/energy/resources required to do it, reach out to us here at Matter Made. We're made up of a team of fire-breathing funnel marketing experts that are deploying game-changing growth tactics on the daily for our clients.

Let us do the same for you. 

Monique Olan, Director of Demand Generation

Ready to drive efficient demand?

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