A Channel List Is Not a Strategy
Start with an uncomfortable number. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, in its 95-5 rule research, puts it plainly: 95% of your potential buyers aren't ready to buy today. They will be in the market at some point. Just not this quarter.
Every search campaign, every "request a demo" form and every retargeting ad is aimed at the other 5%. So is everyone else's. That is why cost per lead keeps climbing while pipeline stays flat: the whole category is bidding for the same small slice of buyers who already know they have a problem.
Sources: LinkedIn B2B Institute, “95-5 Rule”. The timings are the ones we publish on our demand generation service page.
Good demand generation strategies start from that split. They decide how much effort goes to the 95% who are not looking, how much to the 5% who are, and what happens to a buyer when they cross from one group to the other. The channels come last.
Creating Demand and Capturing It Are Two Jobs
They are often run by the same team, out of the same budget, and reported as one number. That is the root of most bad decisions in this area, because the two behave nothing alike.
| Creating demand | Capturing demand | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it reaches | Buyers who don’t yet know they have the problem, or don’t think it’s urgent | Buyers already searching, comparing or asking for prices |
| What it does | Teaches the problem and makes you the name attached to it | Converts interest that already exists |
| Typical channels | Point-of-view content, video, executive posts, podcasts, events, paid social to a defined audience | Search, retargeting, review and comparison sites, demo and pricing pages |
| When it pays back | Over quarters, and it compounds | Inside weeks |
| Early sign it’s working | Branded search rises, inbound gets better, sales hears “I’ve been following you” | Cost per opportunity and conversion rate |
| What kills it | Being judged on this month’s leads | Being asked to grow faster than the market’s search volume |
Our own view, and the way we report this work, is that creation and capture are measured separately. Capture converts this month. Creation compounds over quarters. Add them together and you can no longer see which one is working, and the one that looks worse in month one is always creation.
Seven Demand Generation Strategies Worth Running
The first four create demand. The last three make sure it is captured and goes somewhere useful. Most B2B teams already run some of the capture strategies; the gap is nearly always in the first group.
1. Pick One Problem and Have a View on It
Before any channel, decide which problem you want to be known for. Not your product category: the problem your best customers had before they bought. Then take a position on it that a reasonable person could disagree with. “Most finance teams close the month two days later than they need to, and it isn’t the software’s fault” is a view. “We help finance teams work smarter” is not.
A view gives every later piece of content something to say. Without one, you produce material that could have come from any vendor in the space, and buyers treat it that way.
2. Teach the Problem, Not the Product
Out-of-market buyers aren’t looking for you, so a product pitch reaches nobody. What reaches them is useful material about the problem: a breakdown of where the hours go, a benchmark they can hold their own numbers against, a short video explaining a mistake most teams make. The aim is that when the need becomes urgent, they already understand why it matters and whose explanation they trusted.
Keep most of it ungated. A form in front of educational content turns a creation play back into a capture play, and the few people who fill it in are mostly not ready.
3. Put a Named Person in Front of the Market
Buyers follow people more readily than logos. A founder or senior leader who posts regularly, says something specific and answers questions in public does more for creation than most brand campaigns at a fraction of the cost. It also gives sales something to reference on a first call.
This only works if the person actually holds the views. Ghost-written posts with nothing at stake read exactly like what they are.
4. Pay to Reach a Defined Audience, Not to Collect Leads
Paid social is usually bought for lead forms. For creation, buy it for reach and repetition against an audience you have defined: the job titles, company sizes and industries in your ideal customer profile. Run the teaching content from strategy 2 and the person from strategy 3. Judge it on whether the right people saw it more than once, and later on branded search, not on cost per lead.
5. Own the Search for the Problem as Well as the Product
Now the capture side. Most B2B search budgets cover category and competitor terms, which is where everyone else is bidding. Add the phrases people type before they know a category exists: the symptom, the error, the “how do I”. Then watch your branded search. As creation works, more people search your name directly, and that traffic converts better than anything else you buy.
6. Show Up Where Buyers Compare
Buyers who are close to a decision check review sites, comparison articles and pricing pages. If you are absent, or present with three reviews from 2022, the shortlist gets written without you. Retarget people who engaged with the creation content so you stay in front of them while they compare, and make your own pricing and comparison pages answer the question honestly.
7. Route Demand by Fit, and Use the Signals You Already Have
Demand that arrives still needs to go to the right place. In our programmes, demand that fits a target account goes into the account-based programme, and the rest goes to self-serve or nurture. Nothing is thrown at sales indiscriminately, because a sales team flooded with poor-fit leads stops trusting marketing’s leads altogether.
Before you buy intent data to decide who is ready, use your own: site visits to pricing pages, repeat visits from the same company, email engagement, what sales has already heard. First-party signals are under-used at most companies and cost nothing extra. Bought intent data is directional. It tells you where to look, not what will close.
A Worked Quarter
Here is how the strategies above fit together over one quarter. The company is fictional and the figures are illustrative. The sequence is the point.
A software company sells scheduling tools to clinics with 20 to 200 staff. Its search campaigns are profitable but have stopped growing, and cost per lead is up year on year. It has one quarter’s budget to try something different.
| Month | Creation | Capture | What gets reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Picks one problem: no-shows that nobody measures. The founder starts posting twice a week about it. A short benchmark guide goes up, ungated. | Adds search terms for the symptom (“reduce patient no-shows”), not just the category. | Reach and frequency in the defined audience. No pipeline claims. |
| 2 | Paid social runs the guide and two founder videos to clinic managers and owners, for reach rather than form fills. | Retargets anyone who watched the videos or read the guide with a comparison page and a demo offer. | Branded search against the baseline, direct traffic to the guide, first self-reported mentions on the demo form. |
| 3 | Founder runs a short live session on the benchmark, open to anyone. | Fit-scored routing: larger multi-site groups go to a named-account play, single clinics to a self-serve trial. | Opportunities by source, cost per opportunity, sales acceptance rate. Creation and capture reported side by side, never summed. |
Notice what month one reports: nothing about revenue. If the team had promised pipeline in month one, the creation half would have been cut by month two, and the company would be back to bidding against everyone else for the same 5%.
How to Measure Demand Nobody Clicked On
The hardest question in demand generation is how you measure something that never fills in a form. No single number answers it. Together, these describe the trend honestly:
- Branded search volume over time. The cleanest signal that more people know your name.
- Direct traffic to key pages. People typing you in, not clicking an ad.
- Self-reported attribution. A free-text “How did you hear about us?” field on the demo form. Messy, and often the most honest data you have.
- Sales acceptance rate. Of what marketing passes on, how much sales agrees is real.
- Win rate by source. Created demand tends to arrive better informed and closes differently.
- Cost per opportunity, not cost per lead. A cheap lead that never becomes an opportunity was not cheap.
How you report matters as much as what. The rules we hold ourselves to: platform-reported values are labelled as such, the attribution window is stated on every view, early-stage data is flagged as early-stage, and numbers from different ad platforms are never added up and presented as revenue. Each platform counts its own conversions, and a sale touched by three of them gets counted three times.
Four Ways a Good Programme Gets Killed Early
- Judging creation on this month’s leads. Capture can produce inside weeks. Creation compounds over two to four quarters and shows up first as branded search and better inbound, before it shows up as pipeline. Agree the early measures before the first dollar is spent.
- Cutting education first. When a quarter looks soft, the budget that will not convert this month is the obvious target. It is also the only budget building next year’s demand.
- Sending everything to sales. A flood of poor-fit leads teaches sales to ignore marketing. Route by fit, and pass on fewer, better ones.
- Reporting one blended number. If creation and capture share a line on the dashboard, nobody can tell which is working, and the decision defaults to whatever produced leads last week.
