Many of us struggle with building a steady stream of MQLs, and some of us hit a plateau with customer growth and revenue.
The possible reasons I see here are a lack of cohesive marketing strategies, ineffective lead nurturing processes, or an inability to effectively reach and engage the right audience.
That’s where building a robust demand-generation engine can help.
It can help you optimize targeting, create powerful content strategies, and establish a systematic lead-nurturing workflow.
In this guide, we will share everything you need to know about building a comprehensive demand-generation engine.
First, let’s understand demand generation and how it’s interrelated with lead generation and demand capturing.
Let’s get started.
Relationship between Demand Generation, Demand Capturing, and Lead Generation
Demand Generation is an umbrella term that encompasses both demand capturing and lead generation. It involves creating and capturing demand, and subsequently, generating leads that align with that demand.
Simply put, it’s a holistic approach to driving interest, capturing it, and transitioning it into actionable outcomes, whether in the form of leads or sales.
Here’s a quick summary table outlining their relationship:.
What Is a Demand-Generation Engine?
A demand-generation engine signifies a strategic approach to captivate, engage, and convert prospects into leads and eventually into paying customers. It involves leveraging a combination of marketing strategies with tools and tactics that can help create demand for SaaS products or services.
Typically, the demand-generation engine encompasses a range of activities, including -
- Demand Capture - Display ads, social media posts, etc.
- Lead Generation - Email campaigns, lead forms, etc.
- Demand Generation - Blog posts, targeted ads, etc.
The main goal of the demand-gen engine is to streamline, measure, and automate the entire flow. It enables you to monitor performance leaks and gain a comprehensive real-time view of the flow from capturing visibility to converting leads.
The outcome? Improved SaaS business revenue and long-term growth.
Key Components of a Demand-Generation Engine
Now that you have understood demand generation, let’s comprehend the key components required for a robust demand-generation engine.
1. Demand Capture
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Defining the characteristics and attributes of ideal customers can help with precise targeting that aligns with marketing efforts.
- Audience Segmentation: Segmenting the audience based on behavior, demographics, and preferences is crucial to building marketing strategies that bring the best outcomes.
2. Demand Generation
- Content Strategy and Channels: Creating valuable, high-quality content across various buyer stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) and channels, such as social media, paid ads, and more, can help engage and streamline the buyer’s journey.
Personalize content to each stage. For instance, provide educational blog posts for awareness, webinars for consideration, and customer success stories for decision-making.
3. Lead Generation
- Lead Generation and Nurturing: Leveraging tactics like publishing gated content, including forms, and adding compelling CTAs can capture and encourage leads to take desirable actions. Ensure the content is personalized. This can help nurture the leads, guiding them through the sales funnel.
- Right Metrics: Leveraging data-driven marketing insights to measure the right campaign performance metrics can help track ROI and optimize strategies for the best outcomes.
7 Steps to Creating a Demand-Gen Engine
Here are the key steps you can follow to create a demand-generation engine.
#1: Set Goals and KPIs
Define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals that align with your broad business objectives. For instance, the goal could be to increase inbound leads by 20% within the next three months.
Next, choose the right KPIs that can help track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
For instance, the KPIs for the given example could be -
- Lead Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads progressing through the sales funnel, eventually converting into paying customers.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): It quantifies the number of leads more likely to become customers based on their interactions with marketing campaigns.
- Conversion Rate by Channel: It identifies the marketing channels (such as social media, email campaigns, or content marketing) that generate the most qualified leads and conversions.
Leveraging historical marketing data and trends can help set realistic targets that are easy to track.
#2: Build Your MQL to Close Reporting
Understanding the conversion rates for every buyer stage is crucial to optimizing marketing and sales strategies.
So, ask yourself -
- How many prospects transition from being a captured or engaged lead to becoming an MQL?
Example: If 500 engaged leads convert to MQLs out of 1000 engaged leads, the conversion rate is 50%.
- What percentage of the marketing leads progress to being accepted by sales?
Example: If 300 of 500 MQLs are accepted by sales, the rate is 60%.
- What percentage of the accepted leads advance to becoming sales-qualified?
Example: If 150 out of 300 accepted leads become SQLs, the rate is 50%.
- How many sales-qualified leads eventually convert to closed-won deals?
Example: If 75 of 150 SQLs convert to closed-won deals, the rate is 50%.
Understanding these conversion rates can help determine the acceptable cost per lead.
Associating the rates with the cost of acquiring leads at each stage can help measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities and optimize spending accordingly. It allows a precise understanding of the ROI for different marketing initiatives.
#3: Perform Full Funnel Analysis
Next, analyze the entire customer journey, from initial touchpoints to conversion.
This can include website visits and product qualification triggers if they take specific actions or interact with sales or support.
Track the different stages to understand your acceptable cost per lead. Leverage advanced analytics tools to understand marketing efforts driving leads and conversions.
#4: Conduct a Thorough Channel Analysis
Evaluate the performance of different marketing channels in acquiring and nurturing leads.
For instance -
- Assess content marketing performance by tracking the download rate of gated whitepapers or blog post signup conversions.
- Track click-through and conversion rates of ad landing pages to gauge paid ads performance.
- Analyze engagement metrics such as shares, comments, and the conversion rate of social media-generated leads to evaluate social media effectiveness.
- Evaluate SEO success by measuring the organic traffic growth rate and the number of high-quality leads from organic searches.
- Track open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and more to determine the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
#5: Identify Opportunities to Scale
Identify marketing channels and strategies that have the potential to acquire high-quality leads.
Here’s how you can do it -
Say your existing content marketing strategy, wherein you produce targeted blog posts, case studies, and webinars, generates 60% more MQLs compared to other content formats.
So, scale content creation efforts by 40% to build more targeted blog posts, webinars, and case studies.
Increase the frequency of publishing on platforms that attract high MQLs. For instance, if LinkedIn and Facebook drive 70% of MQLs, allocate 50% more resources to these platforms for content publishing.
For example, allocate resources for video content on platforms like YouTube or TikTok if they exhibit a potential 30% increase in MQLs. Additionally, explore guest posting on relevant industry platforms, aiming for a 20% increase in leads.
Moreover, arrange frequent webinars and produce in-depth case studies addressing the audience’s pain points and interests.
These practices can enhance content-driven lead generation.
Deploying predictive analytics tools can streamline your hassles and help identify the right channels and content format.
#6: Figure Out Gaps in Content
Assess the content available at various stages of the buyer’s journey. This can help you create relevant and targeted content to help potential customers at distinct stages. This personalized approach can enhance engagement, nurture leads, and generate demand.
Here are steps to figure out and address content gaps effectively -
- Assess your existing content assets across various channels, including website, social media, blog, etc.
- Map out your existing content against the buyer’s journey stages (awareness, consideration, decision). Identify whether your content addresses the target audience’s pain points and preferences at different stages.
- Leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush to identify relevant topics and keywords for the SaaS industry. This can help create valuable content that can help generate awareness among the target audience.
- Analyze your competitors’ content to identify topics that you can work on. Look for content gaps where your content can offer a unique perspective or bring additional value.
- Gather insights from the sales teams through surveys, feedback forms, and more to gauge common queries and concerns of the audience that you can cover through content.
- Find out if your content lacks formats like videos, infographics, podcasts, etc. The gap might not be in the topic but in how you present or distribute it.
- Develop a content calendar to ensure the publishing of the right content at assigned dates. This practice maintains a consistent flow of content across channels, thus helping in generating demand.
#7: Track Demand-Gen KPIs
Consistently monitor the right KPIs to measure the effectiveness of demand-generation efforts. Adjust your marketing strategies based on the insights.
Here are some crucial demand-gen KPIs to track.
- Visitor-to-Lead Conversion: This metric tracks the percentage of website visitors that convert into leads by downloading content, signing up, or providing contact information.
- Lead-to-Customer Conversion: This measures the percentage of leads that eventually become paying customers via nurturing and sales processes.
- Marketing Spend vs. Leads Generated: This evaluates the cost incurred for each generated lead across various marketing channels or campaigns.
- Channel-Specific CPL: This breaks down CPL by channels (e.g., social media, PPC, content marketing) to identify cost-effective initiatives.
- Lifetime Value (LTV) vs. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric compares the long-term value of customers to the cost of acquiring them.
- Marketing Sourced Net-New Revenue: This metric measures revenue directly attributed to marketing efforts for acquiring new customers.
- Lead Scoring: This depicts the scoring system that evaluates lead quality based on demographics, behavior, and engagement level.
- Time on Site/Page: This metric gauges content relevance and interest by analyzing visitor’s average time on a website or specific pages.
- Page Views: This metric tracks which content pages garner the most attention, reflecting audience preferences.
- Contribution to Total Net New Revenue: This metric evaluates the proportion of net new revenue generated by marketing compared to the overall revenue.
- Qualified Pipeline Generated: This metric measures the total value of leads identified as qualified and has a high likelihood of converting into customers.
- Cost of Sales Qualified Opportunities: This metric measures the cost associated with sales opportunities that marketing has deemed qualified.
- Win Rate: This metric reflects the percentage of opportunities or leads converted into sales.
- Sales Velocity: This measures the speed at which leads move through the sales funnel, from initial contact to closure.
- Marketing Customer Acquisition Cost (Marketing CAC): This metric calculates the cost to acquire a single customer through marketing efforts.
- Marketing CAC Payback Period: This metric reflects the time required to recover the cost incurred to acquire a customer through marketing activities.
- Average Revenue per Account (ARPA): This metric determines the average revenue generated from each customer account.
- Return on Investment (ROI): This measures the profitability of your marketing campaigns.
Key Challenges While Building Demand-Gen Engine
Building the momentum to get the demand-generation engine up and spinning is challenging because:
- It involves multifaceted optimization across various stages, which can be daunting for marketers without clarity on where to focus efforts.
- It’s draining to figure out where to invest marketing resources efficiently without accurate data and insights. This can limit pipeline growth and hinder the capability of a marketer to prove marketing value.
- Lack of timely and actionable insights can impede efforts to identify and rectify performance gaps. This can further make it a hassle to establish and track the right demand-gen KPIs.
- Collaboration and alignment across diverse teams, including marketing, sales, and other stakeholders, is challenging.
What’s the Solution? Implement automation tools with advanced analytics features to analyze and optimize your demand generation efforts.
Leveraging Revlitix to Build a Demand-Generation Engine for Your SaaS
Count on our AI and ML-powered platform - Revlitix.
It can help create a well-structured demand-generation engine to address the above-shared challenges, allowing marketing leaders to streamline their efforts and drive growth.
Here’s how the powerful features of Revlitix can empower you to get started.
- Revlitix Pipelines: Revlitix Pipelines can empower demand generation by providing deep insights, forecasting capabilities, and actionable strategies rooted in historical data.
Its inbuilt funnel calculator capabilities offer goal clarity and bottleneck identification, allowing you to understand the key areas to focus on. It analyzes historical data and provides predictive insights like tailored predictions and actionable forecasting.
Revlitix Pipelines forecasts performance, reducing drop-offs and pinpointing areas needing attention.
What’s more? Its funnel playground capabilities enable strategic resource allocation and scenario analysis for peak funnel performance. Pipeline Patterns reveal buyer insights, identifying successful attributes and prioritizing tailored campaigns.
- Revlitix Alerts: It provides real-time signals on pipeline leaks or inefficiencies, allowing you to make proactive decisions and maximize every marketing dollar’s impact.
Revlitix Alerts offers AI-driven insights and actionable recommendations to identify and resolve process leaks, automating fixes for improved efficiency.
- Revlitix Reports: It offers end-to-end automated and customizable funnel reporting provision. With Revlitix Reports, you can add and break down metrics by channels, product types, categories, or demographics as needed.
There is currently no other platform in the market offering end-to-end funnel reporting, integrating marketing spend, outcomes, and various metrics into a unified, automated, and customizable interface as Revlitix does.
What’s more? It connects MarTech platforms and automates processes like data integration, goal setting, and tracking to offer insights for informed decision-making.
With Revlitix Reports, you can track and analyze demand-gen KPIs, such as visitor-to-lead conversion, lead-to-customer conversion, time on site/page views, and more, on a unified dashboard. This can help eliminate silos and streamline collaboration between the marketing team and other stakeholders.
- Revlitix Playbooks: It provides opportunities to enhance ROI by optimizing tech stack setup, automating monitoring, and offering actionable insights.
Revlitix Playbooks streamline processes, audit channels for improved performance, and facilitate actionable insights to save time and boost efficiency. It leverages predictive analytics to identify channels and strategies with the potential to acquire high-quality leads.
Revlitix can thus strengthen your marketing strategies and help create a successful demand-gen engine.
Get in touch with team Revlitix for a free demo today!
Summing Up
Building a comprehensive demand-generation engine is crucial to scaling your firm’s growth.
It requires laying a solid foundation of targeted strategies across the buyer’s journey and seamless integration of marketing efforts.
Leveraging Revlitix can help you create a demand-gen engine with zero hassles!
It offers an array of AI and ML-powered, data-driven features and insights that can help optimize lead generation and perform cross-channel performance analysis, thus enhancing engagement and streamlining marketing strategies. This can help you enable precise targeting across various marketing channels and make accurate decisions.
So, connect with us today to build a powerful demand-generation engine!
FAQs about Demand Generation Engine in SaaS
1. What is demand generation in B2B?
B2B demand generation depicts the method for building demand for your brand’s products and services. It involves a data-driven marketing strategy that leverages technology and tools to cover every touchpoint on the buyer’s journey – from awareness to customer retention.
2. What is the main difference between demand gen and lead gen?
Demand generation focuses on building awareness and interest in a firm’s products and services. It can help a company penetrate new audiences. On the other hand, lead generation empowers marketers to turn prospects’ attention into hot leads - those who are ready to become customers.
3. How do you generate demand in SaaS?
SaaS demand gen involves strategies that help build trust and educate potential customers about the benefits of the SaaS software. Marketing leaders should create a library of content, such as blog posts, eBooks, and webinars, to reach the right audience.
3. Why is B2B demand generation crucial?
A good B2B demand generation strategy can bring higher-quality leads into the sales funnel. So, rather than wasting effort and time on nurturing leads that may not translate into sales, the sales team can directly leverage leads that are likely to convert into paying customers.
4. What is a demand-generation engine in SaaS?
A demand-generation engine in SaaS is a systematic approach to creating and nurturing customer interest in a SaaS product. It involves strategies and tools to generate awareness, capture leads, and drive conversions.
5. How does a demand-generation engine differ from traditional SaaS marketing?
Unlike traditional marketing, a demand-generation engine focuses on creating a personalized customer journey. It leverages data-driven insights to identify, engage, and convert leads, optimizing the entire sales funnel for SaaS products.
6. How does demand gen work?
Demand generation is a vital marketing strategy emphasizing how a product can meet consumer needs and expectations. It helps marketers create robust marketing strategies to create product awareness and convert them into leads. Leveraging advanced analytics tools like Revlitix can help improve your demand generation efforts.
7. What are the key metrics to measure in demand generation efforts?
Crucial metrics, such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), visitor-to-lead conversion, lead-to-customer conversion, time on site/page views, and more, can help assess the effectiveness of demand generation efforts.
