If you’re like many SaaS marketers, you’ve likely rolled into the new year to ramp up your demand generation efforts. Why? Growing your customer base is essential for long-term success, especially when many software companies face stagnant sales and growth. Demand generation can help your business attract, engage, and convert the right customers so you can achieve scalable growth, even in a challenging economy. As a SaaS business, you’ll need to create a demand generation strategy tailored to your unique needs, which takes time, patience, and a lot of testing. In this article, we’ll look at SaaS demand generation and how you can build a high-performing engine that fuels your growth well into 2025 and beyond.

One way to kickstart your SaaS demand generation efforts is with Trailblazer Marketing’s Validate program, which helps businesses rank number 1 on Google and AI searches. Using our proven framework, you can build a high-performing SaaS demand generation engine that consistently attracts, engages, and converts the right customers—driving scalable, predictable revenue growth in 2025 and beyond. 

Table of Contents

• What Is SaaS Demand Generation and Why Is It Important?

• A Foolproof SaaS Demand Generation Strategy for 2025

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What Is SaaS Demand Generation and Why Is It Important?

SaaS demand generation is a multi-channel, data-driven marketing strategy that: 

• Educates potential buyers

• Builds trust

• Drives high-intent leads

Unlike traditional lead generation, which emphasizes capturing emails and pushing sales, demand generation nurtures curiosity and positions your brand as an industry leader before a sale occurs.

Key Components of SaaS Demand Generation:

• Content Marketing: Delivers valuable, informative content to attract and engage potential customers.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizes content for visibility, ensuring your brand reaches the right audience.

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Drives targeted traffic through strategic ad placements.

• Social Media Engagement: Builds relationships and fosters brand awareness across key platforms.

Rather than prioritizing immediate sales, demand generation focuses on long-term relationship building by offering value-driven content and experiences. This approach attracts high-quality leads and nurtures them through the buying journey, ensuring they are well-informed and ready to convert when purchasing.

Why Is Demand Generation Important for SaaS?

If you’re marketing B2B SaaS, you know fierce competition and innovation are essential. Demand generation ensures your solution won’t go unnoticed while retaining loyal customers. 

Here’s how B2B SaaS demand generation solves the most common B2B marketing challenges: 

1. It Builds Brand Awareness

The more value and content you provide, the more prospects trust your expertise and opinions. By consistently delivering valuable content and engaging experiences, you position your brand as a thought leader, increasing market visibility and recognition. 

2. It Educates the Market

Demand generation showcases the value of your product. When you share insightful resources, you empower potential customers to understand your SaaS solutions’ unique benefits and practical uses, making it easier for them to embrace and adopt your offerings. 

3. It Helps Nurture Leads

Demand generation nurtures prospects through targeted content and personalized interactions, guiding them through the sales funnel and increasing the chances of conversion. Engaged and well-educated customers are more likely to remain, resulting in higher retention rates.

4. It Aligns Marketing and Sales 

Instead of cold leads requiring weeks of persuasion, warmed-up prospects are eager to buy—which, in turn, makes sales happy! A cohesive demand-generation strategy fosters collaboration between marketing and sales teams, ensuring a seamless customer journey from awareness to purchase. 

How Does the SaaS Demand Generation Funnel Work?

Demand generation for SaaS follows a carefully structured funnel. Each stage guides prospects from casual interest to a firm decision. 

Awareness 

Here, the goal is to attract a broad audience and make them aware of your brand and solutions. Strategies include: 

• Content marketing: Publish blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks that address industry pain points and showcase your expertise. Focus on creating educational blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, reports, and guides that answer key questions and solve problems for your audience. 

• SEO: Optimise content for search engines to increase organic visibility. High-intent search terms related to your industry are key here. 

• Social media: Use platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok to share valuable content and interact with your audience. 

• Webinars and podcasts: Establish authority by sharing your insights through engaging discussions with industry experts. 

• Video content: Create short-form and long-form video explanations, case studies, and behind-the-scenes content for YouTube that attract attention and build trust. 

Alice emphasizes the importance of ungated, on-demand content in this stage. This allows prospects to access valuable resources without barriers, building trust and credibility. She says, “We don’t want to put content out there unless you feel someone can learn something new. It should give them a competitive advantage; that’s the guardrail for quality.” 

Consideration 

By this stage of your demand generation funnel, your audience knows about your SaaS solution but is weighing their options. It’s time to deepen engagement and provide value beyond simple brand awareness. 

You accomplish this by: 

• Case studies: Real-world success stories highlighting how your SaaS solution has helped similar businesses solve their problems. 

• Whitepapers and eBooks: In-depth research and strategic insights demonstrating your expertise. 

• Retargeting ads: Stay in front of your audience with ads that reinforce your value proposition and keep your brand top-of-mind. 

• Comparison guides: Help prospects understand how your solution compares to competitors, making their decision-making more manageable. 

• Customer testimonials and social proof: Showcasing feedback from satisfied users to build credibility and trust. 

Decision 

This is the moment of truth, when a potential customer decides whether to move forward with your solution. 

To ensure they say “yes,” your SaaS demand gen efforts should include: 

• Product demos and free trials: Offer prospects hands-on experience with your software so they can see the value firsthand. 

• Sales enablement content: Provides ROI calculators, feature comparisons, and cost breakdowns to justify investment. 

• Personalized outreach: Your sales team should follow up with high-intent leads, offering tailored solutions to address specific needs. 

• Customer success stories and use cases: Reinforce the impact of your product through tangible results. 

• Live Q&A sessions: Address any lingering questions in real-time to eliminate doubts and hesitations.

Promotion 

While not traditionally included in the B2B marketing funnel, promotion is vital in amplifying your SaaS demand generation efforts across all stages. 

Tactics include: 

• PPC advertising: Running targeted ads on platforms like Google Ads and social media to reach a wider audience. 

• Retargeting campaigns: Engaging visitors who have previously interacted with your brand but haven’t converted. 

• Influencer partnerships: Collaborating with industry influencers to expand your reach and credibility. 

• Loyalty programs and referral incentives: Encouraging existing customers to spread the word and refer new prospects. 

• Upselling and expansion campaigns: Introducing additional features or products to increase customer lifetime value. 

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Our scientific approach has delivered exceptional SEO growth, including:

• B2C SaaS: 3,518% increase in non-branded traffic within 21 days, generating 2.1M organic clicks and $700,000 in first-year revenue—exceeding their $300,000 ARR goal.

• B2B SaaS: 9,644% traffic growth in just 10 months.

• Mobile App: 65%+ increase in downloads within 50 days.

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• Long-Term Planning: Sustainable SEO strategies for lasting impact.

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Related Reading

• Enterprise SEO SaaS

• Content Strategy for SaaS

A Foolproof SaaS Demand Generation Strategy for 2025

Create Customer Profiles to Boost Demand Generation

Creating profiles, or personas, of your existing customers is the first—and one of the most important—steps in your demand generation program. These profiles help identify potential customers: 

• Needs

• Pain points

• Long-term objectives

Critically for demand generation, they also help elucidate how to reach these potential leads before they even know your software.

To create these profiles, approach existing customers and ask them specific, open-ended questions like these: 

• How did you find out about our software?

• Why did you choose our software over our competitors?

• What pain points does our software solve for you?

• What kind of content speaks to your needs when you read a blog or website?

• Are you comfortable with changing directions?

The more thought-out and specific the inquiry, the better you’ll be able to tailor your marketing strategy to actual prospects, especially regarding the core of a demand generation campaign: content.

Build a Solid Content Strategy for Demand Generation

The next element of your demand generation program is your content strategy. No matter what channels you choose to invest in—more on that later—you’ll need pages for your potential customers to land on. Demand generation content has two phases: 

• Keyword research and 

• Thought leadership content

Start With Keyword Research 

Unless you choose to forgo keyword-based channels such as SEO, PPC entirely, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn Organic, keywords serve as the link between visitors and your website. That’s because before your customers know to search for your name or the name of your software, they’ll use Google (or LinkedIn) to research their options. 

In other words, keywords are one of the foundational elements of demand generation, and developing the right keyword strategy often dictates the success of the entire campaign. 

Hub & Spoke SEO: How to Build a Scalable Keyword Strategy for Long-Term Growth

Crafting your keyword strategy typically begins with a hub-and-spoke approach. This involves identifying and choosing a small set of broad keyword categories (also known as “containers”) that your potential customers might include in their search. These are your hubs and are short phrases like “team collaboration software” or “staffing platform.” 

Mapping Thought Leadership Content: Turning Spoke Keywords into High-Impact Assets

Next, you’ll create your spokes, or in other words, the longtail transactional keywords that best indicate a searcher would be interested in your software. These are the bulk of the keywords that your website’s landing pages, blogs, and other thought leadership content will target. For example, a CRM platform might use the hub “CRM software,” and choose spokes such as:

• CRM software vendors

• CRM software for real estate

• CRM software buying considerations

Once you’ve chosen which keywords to target for your demand generation strategy, the next step is to map out your thought leadership content.

Develop Thought Leadership Content 

Thought leadership content has two purposes in demand generation: it is a platform for pages that target keywords and educational pieces that establish your expertise by teaching website visitors about your products and services.

The key to doing both is crafting each piece of content to the precise search intent indicated by the keyword it targets. By preemptively answering your visitors’ questions, you can establish trust and ensure they remember your brand and software, even if they aren’t ready to convert. 

We discuss how to write thought leadership content in depth here: the three key elements are: 

• Take care of the reader

• Stimulate their minds

• Conclude with practical next steps

Select High-ROI Channels to Jumpstart Demand Generation 

Once you’ve built your content strategy, the next step is to choose the appropriate demand-generation channels to use. The simplest method is to double down on the currently most successful channels, but your existing demand generation campaigns will inherently skew your existing customer data. For example, if you’ve never chosen to run a LinkedIn campaign, that channel won’t produce results.

Instead, you should use a mix of information gathered from your customer personas on how my current customers find new software for their business and industry data about the most successful demand generation channels. To help you do so, we’ve provided our own B2B SaaS data below on the 7 most popular demand generation channels and their cost, difficulty, speed, and ROI:

Each marketing channel has distinct trade-offs. Lower-cost channels often take longer to yield results or may underperform. At the same time, those delivering immediate impact typically require a higher investment. Channels with the highest ROI demand strategic planning and a more extended ramp-up period before generating returns. 

Successful SaaS businesses leverage a diversified approach, integrating multiple channels to maximize effectiveness and guide leads through different conversion funnel stages. For example, SEO requires excellent content on the pain points your audience experiences that can be solved through software. That content can be repurposed for LinkedIn, email marketing, and webinars. Utilizing a component of one demand gen campaign for others offers economies of scale. 

Measure Results and Iterate for Successful Demand Generation 

You're not quite finished even with your strategy in place and your channels chosen. You’ll need to measure the results of your marketing efforts and track conversion across channels. 

Here are the top KPIs our clients tend to measure: 

• Campaign ROI. ROI is a high-level view that is practical as a KPI because it provides a view of your net profit against your marketing campaign costs. Your ROi demonstrates whether the demand generation campaign creates value for your business. 

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Your CAC equals the total cost of marketing divided by the number of new customers acquired. This ratio helps you identify the most cost-effective marketing channels and warrant more of your marketing budget. The lower the ratio, the more efficiently you leverage your marketing funds in each channel. 

• LTV-to-CAC Ratio. The LTV (lifetime value of a customer) equals a customer’s lifetime revenue minus that customer’s lifetime costs. Therefore, the LTV-to-CAC ratio equals the gross profit from a single customer divided by the marketing dollars spent to acquire that customer. An LTV-to-CAC of 4:1 or better is a healthy ratio for SaaS companies to target. 

• Annual Churn. While often considered a customer retention metric, churn demonstrates whether your campaigns reach the correct audience and offer the right value proposition. 

• Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate. Once visitors are on your website, observing how well they travel through the conversion funnel is critical. Leads that convert at a higher rate (~39% for B2B SaaS) are a sign that you’ve invested well in a demand-gen channel.

You can use these metrics with your website’s visitor tracking systems to identify shortcomings and revise your strategy when needed. For example, if conversion rates are low, you should examine my conversion funnel to determine which pages are causing visitors to click off. Regularly updating your strategy ensures that your efforts lead to real-world results.

Related Reading

• SaaS Content Audit

Validate SEO for $300 - 3 Spots Available per Month | Reserve Your Spot Today

Trailblazer Marketing is your dedicated SEO team, specializing in strategic content that ranks prominently across Google, Bing, and AI-driven search platforms like: 

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Perplexity

Our scientific approach has delivered exceptional SEO growth, including:

• B2C SaaS: 3,518% increase in non-branded traffic within 21 days, generating 2.1M organic clicks and $700,000 in first-year revenue—exceeding their $300,000 ARR goal.

• B2B SaaS: 9,644% traffic growth in just 10 months.

• Mobile App: 65%+ increase in downloads within 50 days.

Measuring Success: Tracking SEO Performance and Key Metrics

• Long-Term Planning: Sustainable SEO strategies for lasting impact.

• Product-Led Keyword Research: Targeting keywords that convert.

• Competitive Analysis: Gaining insights to outperform competitors.

• Strategic Backlink Building: Strengthening domain authority.

• High-Velocity Content Production: Publishing at scale for rapid growth.

Unlike most SEO agencies, which require thousands per month upfront, our $300 Validate Program lets you test our proven process with 10 SEO-optimized articles and see actual results within 30 days before making a more significant investment.

Only 3 spots are available per month! Reserve yours today.

Related Reading

• Best SaaS Blogs

• SaaS SEO Budgets