The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

The SaaS Demand Generation Campaign Blueprint (And Mistakes)

by 

Alan Silvestri

Last updated: December 30th, 2024

We audit dozens of B2B SaaS marketing programs each year, and here are the three most common telltale signs that the demand gen strategy is ineffective:

• Low conversion rates: You have plenty of leads at the top of the funnel, but an underwhelming percentage of leads make it to the end of the buying cycle and convert into closed deals.
• High marketing costs: Customer acquisition costs are high across most of your marketing channels (PPC, LinkedIn, Meta, etc.).
• Poor lead quality: The prospects attending demos don’t fit your ideal customer profile. Or, right fit prospects may be booking demos before they’re ready to convert, requiring the sales team to nurture them excessively and lengthening the buying journey. 

Once you recognize that your demand gen strategy is ineffective, the real challenges are:

1. Identifying where inefficiencies occur in your funnel.
2. Fixing those inefficiencies.  

Identifying and fixing inefficiencies is particularly challenging if you’re already following best practices, as the issue may not be obvious.

Additionally, stakeholders are often misaligned on the definition of demand generation.

We’ve helped dozens of SaaS marketing teams improve demand gen performance, so we’ll share how we define demand generation, the most common reasons demand gen programs fail, and most importantly, how to diagnose and fix inefficiencies hurting demand gen performance. 

What is Demand Generation?

Each marketer we talk to has a slightly different definition of demand gen, so here’s how we define it:

Demand generation is a strategy to improve marketing performance by analyzing the buyer’s journey across all of your marketing campaigns (from when they become a lead to when they become a closed deal) and then identifying and solving bottlenecks where prospects leave your funnel.  

You can think of demand generation as the roadmap that ties all of your marketing efforts (PPC, SEO, content marketing, etc.) together to efficiently move prospects from new leads to closed customers. 

From a tactical standpoint, a demand generation program involves: 

• Attracting right-fit prospects: Aligning messaging with the right ICP and their pain points.
• Connecting marketing campaigns: Creating email nurture sequences and relevant CTAs at the end of each campaign to efficiently move prospects to the next step of the buyer journey.   
• Optimizing individual campaign performance within the context of the buyer journey: Aligning messaging across each marketing campaign to deliver a seamless experience and address relevant pain points to the right stakeholders at the right time depending on their stage of the buyer journey.

Why Demand Gen Campaigns Fail 

Identifying why your demand gen strategy isn’t working is the first step to fixing it, but this can be challenging if you’re already following all of the best practices.

Additionally, throwing more budget at the problem might increase the number of closed deals, but it won’t actually improve the ROI of your marketing efforts.

So if you’re already doing all of the best practices and still aren’t seeing great results, here are a few reasons why your demand gen campaign may be underperforming.

Buying Committee Ambiguity (and Each Member’s Specific Pain Points)

Most SaaS marketers have a customer avatar and know more or less the size and industries of the companies they’re targeting, as well as the title of the decision maker who signs on the deal and that person’s general pain point. 

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Most enterprise B2B SaaS sales require a committee of buyers, and each member of the buying committee has a unique pain point and enters the buyer journey at a different time. 

For example, let’s say you sell enterprise cybersecurity software. 

The check signer might be the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or Chief Security Officer (CSO), but the person researching different cybersecurity companies to bring to the VP’s attention might be the Information Security Analyst. Therefore, you need top of funnel content targeting that director’s pain points to ensure your brand’s name reaches the VP’s attention.  

Additionally, most marketers know their prospects’ general pain points, but it’s important to understand their specific pain points and when they experience them in the buyer journey.

For example, if the Information Security Analyst researching cybersecurity companies recently experienced a data breach, the obvious pain point is that they want to prevent future data breaches. 

However, as they go further down the buyer journey, their pain point may shift from “I need to secure against future data breaches” to “okay, all of these cybersecurity products offer protection against data breaches, but I need something that is compliant with regulations in my country and industry (e.g., healthcare).”

If your marketing messaging doesn’t address that pain point as that question in the moment it arises in your prospect’s mind, that Information Security Analyst likely won’t continue researching your company, meaning your brand will never reach the CISO/CSO desk.

Therefore, any ambiguity in who the stakeholders involved in the buyer journey are, when they enter the journey, and the specific pain points they experience at every stage of the journey can negatively impact the ROI of your demand generation efforts. 

We’ll discuss how we solve this problem with our framework for creating SaaS buyer personas.

Disjointed Marketing Campaigns

Marketers conceptually understand that each marketing campaign should seamlessly lead the prospects from one step of the buyer journey to the next. 

Yet many of the under performing marketing funnels we audit have mixed messaging at some point within the buyer journey.

This is sometimes due to legacy issues where teams have older ads and creatives running as these ads have valuable historical data (which Google uses to predict ad performance). Yet that ad messaging doesn’t always align with new landing page’s messaging. As a result, these ads aren’t always very effective at driving conversions.

Another common issue is if the messaging was updated on some campaigns, but not across the entire marketing funnel. For example, you may have updated the ads and key landing pages, but not important blog posts that prospects often visit during the journey. 

We find it’s rare that an organization will update and refresh all of its communications seamlessly, leading to disjointed messaging across marketing channels.

As a result, there’s often a drop in conversions at some point within the funnel.

Overlooking Churned Customers and Dead Leads 

Customers who churned and leads that never closed due to poor timing are excellent opportunities to retarget as they have already expressed interest in your company and its solution.

Therefore, converting these customers is often easier than converting cold leads. Retargeting is also often much more cost effective as you can use email nurture sequences, like our dead lead reviver sequence, to execute the retargeting campaign. 

Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Goals are often arbitrary numbers based on broad or visionary goals expressed by senior executives.

However, there’s a certain amount of time and resources required to achieve any goal. Without adequate time and resources, no amount of sheer effort or talent will allow you to meet your goals.

Instead of setting arbitrary goals based on your executive’s desires, start by looking at your historical performance and calculate the time and resources required to hit those numbers. 

You can of course improve your marketing strategy to outperform historical data, but to accurately calculate how much you can improve inefficiencies, you first need to identify them and then calculate the impact that solving them could have on future performance. 

While it may be uncomfortable, it’s important to present historical data to stakeholders and set expectations for what is and is not possible rather than setting unrealistic goals and setting the team up for failure. 

This is a key reason why we always begin client relationships with a marketing funnel forecast that lays out good, better and best scenarios based on historical performance data and optimization opportunities identified in the audit. 

Our Demand Gen Process

This is the step by step demand generation blueprint that helps SaaS companies attract and convert prospects more efficiently. 

Step 1: Auditing Current Processes and Data Accuracy 

The process of improving the efficiency of your demand generation strategy is removing friction throughout the buyer journey. Therefore, the first step to understanding the buyer journey and improving it is identifying how leads enter your CRM. 

Specifically, we identify each digital touchpoint where a lead can enter the CRM (e.g., lead magnets, downloadable resources, etc).

Without this information, you won’t be able to track how they navigate the buyer journey and you also won’t be able to track the efficacy of your demand generation strategy. 

Next, we want to understand how you’re categorizing each lead.

For example, if someone subscribes to your email list, label them a subscriber. If someone books a demo, label them as an MQL. 

After identifying the touchpoints where a prospect enters the CRM and how they’re labeled throughout the buyer journey, the next step is ensuring your CRM data is clean and accurate. 

Otherwise, your CRM data may not align with real revenue numbers, making it very difficult to optimize your demand generation strategy. 

We have a more detailed resource discussing how to audit and clean CRM data, though here are a few of the most common mistakes we encounter that cause data inaccuracies:

• No tracking setup: Some prospects simply don’t have any tracking set up in their CRM, in which case we start by looking at specific points where visitors become leads.
• Incorrect tracking: Sometimes the UTMs are not set up correctly and a prospect who already exists in your CRM is counted as a new lead. This is a common problem if you have many leads but few conversions.
• Tracking existing customers: Most marketers know that they shouldn’t be tracking existing customers, but it’s not uncommon that some aren’t filtered correctly. As a result, you might be counting existing customers as leads.

Step 2: Assess Current Marketing Performance

Once you have accurate data and you’re tracking each step of the buyer journey, the next step is to identify the breakdown where you’re losing leads and gather more information on the types of leads you’re attracting. 

Here are a few specific questions we ask:

• Who are the leads we’re attracting through each campaign? (company, position, etc.)
• What percentage of top of funnel leads are making it all the way through to the bottom of the funnel?
• Where do most leads disengage from the funnel?
• What are the closed-lost reasons for these deals?

Step 3: Identify Opportunities

Most marketers approach improving demand gen efficiency by identifying underperforming marketing campaigns and then optimize them, often by tweaking the creative or messaging. 

However, if you aren’t attracting the right prospects, or the resource you’re offering is irrelevant to that prospect at their current step in the buyer journey, no amount of campaign level optimization will improve your conversion rate. 

Instead, zoom out and look at the entire buyer journey and how each step flows from one to the next. 

Are prospects receiving the information they need at the right time?

From a tactical perspective, we look at the buyer journey and ask questions like:

• Do we have the right messaging that truly addresses customer pain points?
• Do we have CTAs that lead prospects to a relevant resource that will answer their next questions?
• Do we have everything optimized for lead capture and nurture across all our digital touchpoints?

Of course, we also assess individual campaign performance and ask questions like:

• Are basic best practices in order? 
• Are we targeting the right ICP and the right specific stakeholders with the right messaging?

Another often overlooked opportunity is reducing churn. While this might not seem like a marketing opportunity, reducing churn can improve LTV, which therefore increases the ROI per closed deal. As a result, you can invest more in acquiring leads. 

Therefore, we also set up email campaigns to ensure a seamless onboarding process and help customers use the product correctly to receive value from it. Upselling is another opportunity to increase LTV, so we often send email campaigns that promote additional upgrades that might be relevant to users.   

Step 4: Setting Realistic Goals and a Roadmap

Before setting a goal, use historical performance data to calculate whether or not it’s feasible based on the effort and resources required to achieve it.

Then, use that number as a baseline to calculate realistic outcomes for future performance. 

Use insights from step three, where you identified quick win opportunities to improve performance. By identifying specific opportunities, you have a better idea of approximately how much you can realistically boost performance rather than randomly guessing. Another opportunity to improve performance is identifying what isn’t working and cutting those campaigns.  

It’s also important to consider the current market climate and other external factors that can impact performance. 

Using this data, you can use our marketing funnel forecast template to create a good, better, and best scenario based on available resources.  

This allows you to arrive at a reasonable goal based on available resources, which helps marketing align with stakeholders.

Once the budget is set, create a tactical roadmap. To do this, identify the ICP (ideal customer profile) and fill out a buyer persona checklist to understand who you’re targeting and each stakeholder’s specific pain points. Then, look at historical data to understand which channels have brought the best customers. 

A common mistake is targeting channels that have generated a lot of leads. Yet not all leads convert. Similarly, not all closed deals are equally valuable. For example, an enterprise client is likely worth ten times more than a small startup.

This is why the fundamental building block of our roadmap creation process is understanding which channels bring the highest value customers.  

We also look at the messaging, ad creative, and offers that resonated with the best customers. 

Step 5: Execution and Optimization

A common mistake many marketers make is rolling out a new marketing strategy all at once. 

This is particularly common in marketing teams that feel pressure from stakeholders to dramatically improve performance and are therefore anxious to take action. 

However, every audience is slightly different and it takes time (and testing) to identify the most effective messaging and marketing channels. Therefore, rolling out an entirely new marketing strategy would set your team back to ground zero and is often more costly than helpful. 

Instead, prioritize quick win opportunities – tasks that require minimal time and effort to execute but have the potential to deliver substantial results.

It’s also important to cut the lowest performing campaigns across your existing marketing strategy.

Only after tackling this low hanging fruit do we begin a full roadmap roll out. To ensure each change we make is efficient, we use a hypothesis log to track all previous tests we’ve run.

Specifically, we look at messaging, channels, and audience segments we’ve tested and then use that data to create more effective A/B tests. This ensures we’re never making the same mistake twice and each test is more effective. 

While the quick wins will give you an initial boost, our full roadmap roll out often takes months and we’re constantly improving campaigns as we learn more about each client and their audience.

Therefore, most of our clients see an initial increase in growth at the beginning of the engagement as we tackle quick win opportunities, but the most meaningful ROI often comes six, twelve, or eighteen months into the engagement.

Even if you plan to execute a demand generation program in-house, it’s crucial to communicate this to your stakeholders and ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Get More Help Executing Your Demand Generation Program 

This is the step by step process we use to execute demand generation programs for clients, though there are plenty of nuances at each step of the process, from identifying quick wins opportunities to ensuring your CRM data is set up correctly. 

If you want an experienced team to review your current demand generation program, reach out to our team today. Our team of SaaS experts can help you identify opportunities and work with you to build a more effective demand generation program.