Complete Guide to B2B Demand Generation in 2025
- ROI Leaders: Email marketing (3,600% ROI), content marketing (844% ROI), SEO (702% ROI)
- Cost per Lead: Ranges from $31 (SEO) to $300 (qualified email leads)
- Strategy Mix: Combine 3-5 channels based on your audience, budget, and sales cycle
- Success Metrics: Track MQLs, SQLs, pipeline velocity, and channel-specific ROI
- Future-Proofing: Invest in first-party data, AI automation, and account-based marketing
We started Draft.dev in 2020, and five years later, made the 2025 Inc Regionals list as one of the fastest-growing startups in the Midwest.
How did we do it? With demand generation.
And in this guide, we outline how you can do it, too.
This exhaustive guide explains everything you should know about B2B demand generation, including how to build a funnel, measure your progress, and track results. It also explains the different types of content and channels available so you can mix and match a strategy that works for your needs.
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
- What is B2B Demand Generation?
- How Do I Build a B2B Demand Generation Strategy?
- What Are the Essential B2B Demand Generation Channels?
- Measuring and Optimizing Demand Generation
- Working with B2B Demand Generation Services
- Future Trends in B2B Demand Generation
- The Bottom Line on B2B Demand Generation
What is B2B Demand Generation?
First, some definitions.
Demand generation is the process of driving interest in your product, service, and brand. It’s also what separates successful B2B brands from unsuccessful ones: it creates a pipeline of leads without retaining a dedicated sales department.
The B2B demand generation is also what gets customers into your B2B marketing funnel, as it’s often an introduction to your business as a whole. Remember the six stages:
- Interest
- Consideration
- Intent
- Evaluation
- Purchase
- Ambassadors
B2B demand generation is what initially brings prospects to the ‘interest’ stage.
This guide will explain how to build a B2B generation strategy that is scalable, repeatable, and most importantly, measurable. To do this, we’re building a campaign that you can address with key metrics and KPIs. We’ll address each of these measures in the following subsections.
Sidenote: B2B demand generation is not the same as lead generation, although they’re tied at the hip. Demand generation is simply one aspect of lead generation, but there are other things you can do to get prospects through the door. We’ll cover more of these in-depth at a later point.
💡Related: Breaking Down the Marketing Funnel in B2B
How Do I Build a B2B Demand Generation Strategy?
First things first: building a strategy to get from point A to point B. This requires setting clear timelines, goals, and objectives, as well as allocating resources to properly fund your venture.
Here’s what you should know:
Setting clear objectives
Before breaking ground on a B2B demand generation system, you need to consider what your outcome should be.
Ask yourself: what’s your biggest goal for creating a B2B demand generation strategy? Is it more leads? Higher revenue? More qualified prospects for your sales team?
The outcome you choose should have a massive impact on the structure and design of your demand generation strategy. If you’re struggling to define clear objectives for yourself, one of the following suggestions may help:
| Demand Gen Goal | Recommended Objective | Key Tactics to Prioritize |
| Generate more leads | Maximize visibility and inbound traffic | SEO, content marketing, lead magnets, paid social ads, newsletter CTAs |
| Generate higher quality leads | Attract better-fit prospects through positioning and trust | Thought leadership, high-authority guest posts, clear brand voice, case studies |
| Shorten the sales cycle | Educate and pre-qualify leads before hand-off to sales | Interactive content (quizzes, calculators), comparison guides, retargeting workflows |
| Increase conversion rates | Optimize each touchpoint for action and intent | CRO (conversion rate optimization), lead scoring, intent data, A/B testing |
| Improve lead-to-customer conversion | Nurture leads with relevant, stage-specific content | Email drip sequences, product education, gated demos, webinars |
| Grow pipeline in new verticals | Build awareness and credibility in new markets | ABM (account-based marketing), vertical-specific landing pages, strategic partnerships |
| Reduce reliance on paid channels | Shift to organic and community-driven strategies | SEO, LinkedIn, webinars, customer advocacy, product-led growth |
Don’t worry: we’ll get into the specifics later in the guide.
Identifying target audience and personas
Next, let’s hone your targeting. Who are you looking to reach?
If you don’t know your audience (or who exactly is in your sales funnel), you could be leaving hundreds of potential sales on the table.
One of the easiest ways to identify your audience is to generate personas. These are fictional representations of real-life people who represent your ‘perfect’ client avatar.
There are a few different ways to create a persona based on how far along you are in your business:
- Using real-life customers. If you’re already working with a ‘dream client’ or set of ‘dream clients’ you can turn them into an anonymous persona.
- Use an AI-powered tool. Give a system like ChatGPT information about who you’re looking to serve, then let AI help flesh out the particulars.
- Use a plug-and-play chart. You can use a simple persona chart to create avatars for each product or service (such as your enterprise-level service versus your startup package). Then, you can add demographics and psychographics to better understand their next steps and purchase intents.
You can use the following plug-and-play chart to help kick off the process:
| Field | Description | Example Entry |
| Persona Name | Give your persona a memorable, relevant name | “Operations Olivia” |
| Job Title and Role | Common titles this persona holds | Director of Operations, Ops Manager |
| Industry or Company Type | What industry and company types they typically work in | SaaS, Logistics, Manufacturing |
| Company Size | Typical size of company (employees, revenue, etc.) | 50–200 employees |
| Key Responsibilities | What they’re responsible for in their role | Process optimization, cost savings |
| Top Goals and Success Metrics | What defines success for them? | Reduced churn, increased efficiency |
| Biggest Challenges and Pains | What’s frustrating or holding them back? | Manual systems, data silos, unreliable vendors |
| What They Care About | Core values, priorities, and decision drivers | ROI, vendor reliability, integration ease |
| Buying Triggers | What events or changes make them start looking for a solution? | Company growth, team restructure, budget reset |
| Objections or Concerns | What reasons might they have to say no? | Too expensive, long onboarding, compliance risks |
| Where They Hang Out Online | LinkedIn groups? Newsletters? Podcasts? | LinkedIn, Ops Leaders Slack, “Operations Nation” |
| Preferred Content Format | What type of content do they consume? | Case studies, ROI calculators, how-to videos |
| Role in Buying Process | Are they a decision maker, influencer, or gatekeeper? | Influencer + Approver |
| How I Can Help | What solution or offer will resonate most? | Time-saving automation with proven ROI |
Remember: the more details you add, the easier your personas will be to understand, and the simpler it will be to target your audience and map their purchasing journey.
Which leads to our next point…
Mapping the buyer’s journey
Every B2B buyer who works with your business will interact across different ‘touchpoints.’
For example, you might have an enterprise customer who found your business through a Google search (aka SEO), then read a few case studies before booking a call with your sales team. This entire process took a matter of weeks; far below the B2B standard of 84 days.
On the other hand, maybe you have a startup business owner who religiously reads your weekly newsletter. They eventually read blogs about how you create results for clients like them, and tune into a few webinars to get some free advice. It’s only after 10 months of touchpoints and multiple conversations that they finally decide to become a paying client.
Both of these prospects followed different buyer’s journeys according to their personality, position, and persona type. The good news is, you can customize these journeys to create pre-planned pathways for potential customers to follow.
First, start by identifying the different pathways customers can take. Don’t necessarily judge your process at this point. Instead, act as a passive observer and take notes based on what you find. You can even add surveys to contact forms or sales calls asking prospects where they heard about your brand.
Next, take your persona(s) into account. Where do they spend time? And what pathways make the most sense based on their unique avatar type?
You might want to consider priority pathways based on:
- The lifetime value of the customer. A full-service startup client that grows into an SMB might end up being more valuable than a brand that stays on your free forever plan for example.
- The cost-effectiveness of each channel. For your business, webinars and emails might offer the highest performance at the most effective cost. A good metric here is ‘cost per lead,’ essentially how much it costs to get a lead on each platform. You can compare and contrast to select the best options.
- Your A/B testing. It’s a good idea to test various pathways and see which set of touchpoints offers the best lead volume, quality, flow, and price. We’ll chat more about this later in the guide.
Now that you’ve mapped out existing touchpoints (and identified what your audience members prefer), you can customize a journey path specifically catered to their needs.
For example, at Draft.dev, we lean heavily into written content. We couple this with social media, webinars, and email newsletters, which allows prospects to flow seamlessly from one touchpoint to the next. This eventually leads them further down the B2B funnel and gives our team a chance to learn about their needs.
But this becomes much easier to handle when you understand your budget, as we discuss in the section below.
Resource allocation and budgeting
It takes money to make money, as the saying goes. But as you’re creating your initial demand generation strategy, you need to keep an eye on your bandwidth (aka, how much money you have to spend up-front).
First, identify how much of your revenue you can put toward demand generation. The easiest way to do this is by working backwards from your revenue goals.
Here’s a quick and easy calculation you can use for identifying your demand gen budget:
| Calculations | Sample Data |
| Total target revenue | $1,000,000 |
| Percent of target revenue via demand gen | 80% ($800,000 |
| Average sales price per lead | $30,000 |
| Total leads for target revenue via demand gen | ~27 |
| Close rate | 20% |
| Total opportunities required to reach desired number of target leads | 540 |
| Average cost per opportunity for total demand gen strategy (aka cost per lead) | $250 |
| Total budget required to meet demand gen revenue goal | $135,000 per year |
Keep in mind these numbers are variable and can swing considerably depending on your revenue goals, close rate, and cost per lead.
And remember: some B2B channels cost much more than others. It might make sense to break down your strategy based on content type or channel used.
Pssst: need more tips and tricks to get started with the basics? Check out our guide to B2B Demand Generation Tips and Tactics.
What Are the Essential B2B Demand Generation Channels?
Speaking of the cost for each demand gen channel, let’s take a closer look at your available verticals.
Most B2B businesses (including Draft.dev) mix and match from the following options:
1. Content marketing
- Possible cost per lead: ~$100
- Average ROI: 844% over three years
- Cost to start: Free – $1,000+ per piece
Written content marketing is exactly what it sounds like: creating valuable pieces of content to help buyers make informed decisions.
There are many different content types depending on your audience:
- Thought leadership: Hot takes and opinions about recent happenings, events, or important topics in your industry.
- Technical tutorials: You might write blog posts with technical tutorials, or create video tutorials to educate our audience. Learn more in our guide on how to write a technical tutorial.
- Case studies: A roundup of customer success stories, typically featuring their challenges, solutions, ROI, and success metrics.
- Blog posts: Researched articles, white papers, deep-dives, break downs, and more. You can learn more about B2B copywriting essentials here.
Learn more about B2B Content Types here.
💡Related: Content Marketing Resources.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Possible cost per lead: ~$31 per lead
- Average ROI: ~702% for B2B SaaS brands
- Cost to start: $250 – $1,000+ per month
Search engine optimization is all about adjusting your web presence to rank at the top of engines like Google or Bing. You might use SEO in content writing, optimizing your website, or adjusting your social media presence (possibly all three).
The specifics of B2B SEO are a bit dense for the purposes of this piece, but rest assured you can learn it yourself, delegate it to a team member, or outsource it to an agency.
For example, we at Draft.dev look for keyword opportunities in developer marketing to target keywords with >100 monthly searches and <20 difficulty in Ahrefs. We can use this strategy to create topic clusters for technical content and ultimately rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
See for yourself:
3. Video marketing
- Possible cost per lead: ~$174
- Average ROI: 300% – $500% depending on platform
- Cost to start: $250 – $1,000+ per month
B2B video is a quintessential part of building trust, value, and authority with prospects. You can also implement video for almost anything: product demos, walkthroughs, ads, landing pages, video tutorials, webinar recordings, and more.
You don’t necessarily need a videographer to get started. In fact, many businesses rely on simple screen capture tools like Zoom or Loom. You can also repurpose your content across a variety of use cases, like creating a video podcast, turning into an SEO blog post, advertising it via email marketing, and more.
4. Paid media and advertising
- Possible cost per lead: ~$237 for B2B SaaS
- Average ROI: ~200%
- Cost to start: $1 – $10,000+ per month
Research shows only 5% of your audience is looking for solutions at any given time. The other 95% may not know you exist and don’t know how to solve your problem without education.
Ergo, the need for paid media and advertising.
You should know paid ads can be relatively expensive depending on the niche and topic involved. But they also play well with other demand generation strategies and may take less time to get up and running than other processes (i.e., events and webinars).
You can run paid ads in all sorts of online spaces, from LinkedIn and Facebook to Google, Bing, and ‘private’ websites. You might even consider partnerships with other businesses or vendors, which is commonly referred to as account-based marketing (we’ll cover this later in the guide).
5. Events and webinars
- Possible cost per lead: $75
- Average ROI: 5% to 50% conversion
- Cost to start: Free – $10,000+ per event
There are three different types of events for B2B brands: in-person (like trade shows), virtual (like webinars), and hybrid (like workshops). You can use this strategy to attract leads near the bottom of your funnel and push qualified prospects into becoming qualified leads.
For example, Draft.dev’s webinars invite registrants to learn more about inbound content methods, plus tap into recordings to recall important details after the webinar is over. We also invite participants to register for discovery calls and learn more about how our methods can help their businesses grow.
6. Email marketing
- Possible cost per lead: $250 – $300
- Average ROI: +3,600%
- Cost to start: Free – $100+ per email
As you can see from our roundup of the best developer newsletters, email is one of the best ways to reach highly technical B2B audiences. It’s not necessarily the best for cold outreach campaigns, or particularly effective top of funnel prospects. But it does offer one of the highest ROIs in demand generation, with a whopping $36 for every $1 spent.
You can look at the Draft.dev Newsletter to see an example of this: we send once-monthly emails with resources, tips, and case studies all about reaching developer audiences. This allows a warmer audience to keep in touch with our work and learn more about our services as their business needs evolve.
Measuring and Optimizing Demand Generation
There’s no way to manage what you cannot measure; and that’s particularly true of demand generation. If you can’t see what’s working, you can’t optimize or replicate it. And if you’re not optimizing your strategy, you’re likely leaving money on the table.
Here’s how to keep your demand generation efforts tangible, measurable, and effective:
Attribution Modeling
Attribution is the art and science of figuring out which touchpoints actually influenced a lead. Did someone convert after reading a blog post? Or was it that webinar they attended two weeks earlier?
There are many different attribution models to experiment with, but it may be best to start small with simple ones (think first-touch or last-touch attribution first). Then, you can graduate to more advanced options (think multi-touch or data-driven attribution as your funnel matures).
Analytics Setup and Tracking
Your analytics stack should give you a clear picture of traffic, engagement, and conversions. For example, you might want to keep tabs on:
- MQLs, SQLs, and close rates
- Channel-specific performance
- Content and campaign ROI
- User journeys across touchpoints
You can always use free tools like Google Analytics to get started, but eventually, you might need to upgrade to something like Mixpanel or Tableau to get a bit more granular and customize your setup for a demand gen strategy.
A/B Testing Framework
Now that you have hard numbers in hand, you can look at the systems that are working and identify any hiccups in between. For example, if your display ad conversion rates are low, you might look closer at the ones that did convert highly and play ‘spot the differences.’ Then, you can set up two different ads and prove if your theory was correct (and if it needs to be rolled out across other pieces of content.
You can use this A/B testing framework on everything and anything, from subject lines and CTAs to landing pages and email cadences. Just don’t forget to keep your tests focused. You should try to change just one variable at a time, let it run long enough to gather meaningful data, and avoid making impulsive decisions without carefully considering the long-term effects (i.e., unsubscription rates).
Continuous Improvement
Contrary to popular belief, demand generation isn’t a one-and-done process. It might take months (even years) to build a funnel that truly gets results.
Instead, try to set regular review cycles either monthly or quarterly to look at what’s working and flag what isn’t. You might also want to set times to brainstorm your next experiments and loop in both sales and marketing to get a full-funnel view.
Pssst: want more tips to improve your process faster? Learn more about Maximizing Your Content Marketing ROI.
Working with B2B Demand Generation Services
By now we’ve covered practically everything you should know about creating a performant B2B demand generation strategy. All that’s left is to put it into practice.
But depending on your business, you might need to decide who is in charge of implementation.
You’ve got three options:
In-house
When to choose, how to pick the best one, and how to maintain good relationship
You might want to stick with in-house demand gen if you have:
- Brand-critical channels like social, product marketing, or executive comms that should not or cannot be handled by anyone else
- Long-term projects that are within a specific niche (i.e., it’s going to be difficult to find an industry niche enough to handle it)
- Your audience requires a wealth of internal expertise because you market a complex product
That’s not to say you can’t find a way to outsource your project. Depending on your project, it might make more sense to pick up a…
Freelancer
Freelancers are a great fit when you need flexible support on a specific part of your demand generation strategy, but don’t want the price tag of an agency or the commitment of a full-time hire. They’re especially useful for hands-on work like writing, design, SEO, or paid ad management.
Outsourcing to freelancers makes sense when:
- You already have a strategy but need help executing parts of it
- You’re testing a channel and want to start small
- You have a short-term project with a pretty clear scope
- You’re trying to stay lean and save money wherever possible
- You need niche expertise (e.g. HubSpot setup, B2B landing page design)
Just like with agencies, hiring the wrong freelancer can slow you down. So you should look for people with strong portfolios, relevant B2B experience, and solid communication skills.
Of course, freelancers typically focus on execution rather than strategy, and may need more direction from your internal team. You can always scale up with more freelancers as your needs evolve, or eventually make the switch to an agency if you need a better fit.
Which leads to our final option…
Agency
B2B demand agencies can help you quickly build a strategy without putting pressure on your internal team. They provide more skills and resources than a single freelance strategist, although keep in mind they’re rarely as cheap.
Outsourcing to a B2B demand generation agency makes the most sense when:
- You don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to execute specific tactics (like paid media, SEO, or lifecycle email marketing)
- You’re launching a new campaign or entering a new market
- You need to move fast
- You don’t have the budget or bandwidth to hire a full team
- You want to experiment with new strategies before scaling them internally
Of course, you need to be careful who you choose and how you manage the relationship.
You can learn more about What to Look for in a Startup Marketing Agency here.
Future Trends in B2B Demand Generation
We covered everything you should know about getting started with B2B demand generation today. But what about the future of building a funnel tomorrow?
There are many other demand gen tools on the horizon that may be helpful as your business (and its technology) progresses.
Below are the ones to watch:
AI and Automation
You probably don’t need a reminder of just how powerful AI and automation can be. After all, its present in just about every LinkedIn feed these days.
But for B2B brands, the impact is becoming seismic. It’s also more and more accessible to small and growing brands.
For B2B demand generation, AI is being used to:
- Predict buying behavior and score leads to hone in on the best possible demand channels
- Auto-generate and provide solid recommendations for SEO blog posts, ads, and landing pages
- Feed dynamic content to leads based on intent data and past behavior
We also know that automation is going far beyond ‘set it and forget it.’ Many businesses are experimenting with behavior-triggered journeys, real-time sales alerts, and auto-synced CRM updates that cut manual labor and leave room for more human tasks (like closing deals).
To summarize: if you’re not already exploring AI for demand gen, you might be slowly falling behind.
Privacy Changes
Between Apple’s iOS updates, Google’s ongoing phase-out, and stricter global privacy laws, B2B marketers are needing to rethink how they collect and use data.
The death of third-party cookies isn’t quite here (yet), but it won’t be long until most of the industry needs to pivot. So in the meantime, B2B marketers should be focusing on their first-party data strategies (think newsletters, webinars, gated tools) and contextual targeting instead of behavior-based retargeting.
This is also a wake-up call to get serious about consent-based marketing, like opt-ins for emails and compliant webinar registrations.
TL;DR, clean, ethical funnels will be the ones that last. And if you haven’t already, now is a great time to look for any gaps in your funneling process.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (usually abbreviated to ABM) is the process of marketing 1:1 to high-value accounts. These could be existing clients of your business, or prospects offering a high potential lifetime value. Either way, it’s a more personalized way of building revenue and growth without necessarily spending thousands on cold accounts.
Thanks to smarter targeting tools and richer data sources, ABM in 2025 is more precise, more automated, and more profitable. For example, you can:
- Set up AI-driven firmographic and technographic segmentation
- Create personalized experiences for entire buying committees
- Sync your CRM stages directly with ABM ad platforms
- Build sales and marketing alignment tools for joint pipeline ownership (aka, more than one sales rep)
Short story long: if your business relies on whale accounts, AMB might be a strategy to explore.
The Bottom Line on B2B Demand Generation
Demand generation isn’t necessarily a ‘silver bullet’ for business growth. But it will be a differentiator that puts you well ahead of other competing B2Bs. If you can build, execute, and refine a process that drives awareness and interest to your brand, you’ll be able to scale your messaging (and business) to the next level.
The bad news is, B2B demand generation takes time. You can’t necessarily build a performant system overnight.
The good news is, you don’t have to manage everything on your own. It’s possible to hand-off various pieces of your demand gen strategy so you can focus more heavily on other tasks (such as taking sales calls, managing client fulfillment, or setting visionary goals for your business to reach).
Draft.dev is one of these avenues that can help with delegating written, social, and video content creation for technical audiences. We’ve helped hundreds of companies publish millions of words regarding technical tutorials, guides, ebooks, and beyond.
But frankly, we’ll let our case studies do most of the talking.
Learn more about our process and how to get started with Draft.dev by booking a discovery call.