The B2B SaaS buying journey is anything but linear.
Multiple stakeholders with varying job titles, responsibilities, needs, and motivations must align to justify an investment that involves spending someone else’s money. Marketers must navigate a complex web of decision-making, making demand attribution a common challenge.
Marketers face the daunting task of engaging with decision-makers across various channels. Each touchpoint serves a purpose in guiding prospects through different stages of the buying process. However, tracking every single touchpoint or attributing a single source to a conversion is nearly impossible. The "dark funnel" — a term used to describe all those unseen, unmeasurable interactions — adds an extra layer of complexity.
In reality, getting a prospect to take action — say, by scheduling a demo — involves multiple steps. Top-of-the-funnel interactions like awareness campaigns, thought leadership content, and social media engagement play a critical role in generating bottom-of-the-funnel actions usually captured through initiatives like paid search ads for high-intent keywords or retargeting campaigns.
It’s a widely known principle in B2B marketing that only 5% of your total addressable market (TAM) is actively searching for a solution at any given time. The other 95%? They’re either unaware of the problem, not ready to solve it, or don’t yet see a need for a solution. Understanding this is key to balancing your demand generation efforts.
Demand capture focuses on the 5% who are in-market, actively seeking a solution. These prospects are ready to click that “schedule a demo” button after seeing your paid search ad or visiting your website’s pricing page. They’ve already moved through much of the buying process.
But what about the 95% who aren’t ready to buy? This is where demand creation comes into play. Demand creation is about meeting prospects where they are in their journey, whether they’re at the very top of the funnel or just becoming aware of a potential pain point. Allocating resources and time to create demand will help you be in the top 3 when those prospects become ready to buy.
Let’s consider an example: a prospect schedules a demo after clicking on a Google Search ad. Your CRM attributes this lead to "Paid Search." On paper, this seems like a win — your paid search strategy is paying off. But that’s only part of the story.
What’s missing is how that prospect became aware of your solution in the first place. Did they first hear about your brand in a LinkedIn post, on a podcast, or through a recommendation from a colleague? Paid search may have captured the demand, but it didn’t create it.
This moment is where last-touch attribution - the source where you are capturing the demand- falls short in painting a full picture. The last-touch attribution model alone is not enough for reporting purposes and for truly understanding the impact of your marketing efforts.
Don't get me wrong, capturing the demand through Paid Search and attributing that conversion to that channel has a lot of value, but Go-to-market strategies for B2B SaaS require a multi-channel approach.
Most attribution models fail to fully account for demand creation efforts. These top-of-funnel activities may not result in an immediate conversion, but they play a crucial role in shaping how and when a prospect becomes ready to engage with your solution. Unfortunately, these early touchpoints are often the hardest to connect with new demand generated.
To build a successful demand generation strategy, you need to align your efforts to create and capture demand—the two work in tandem. While demand capture focuses on short-term wins by converting ready-to-buy prospects, demand creation nurtures those long-term opportunities by educating and building awareness with the 95% of the market that isn’t quite ready to convert.
Investing in demand creation means delivering value upfront without expecting immediate returns. These initiatives ensure that when the time comes for that 95% to enter the buying process, your brand is top-of-mind. This strategy might include:
At the same time, demand capture tactics focus on converting the prospects already primed to make a purchase. Capturing demand efficiently requires strategic placement, targeting, and messaging to maximize the return on your marketing investments. An example of these tactics are:
If you have a Marketing CRM, like HubSpot, all your new leads, MQLs, and opportunities will be correctly attributed to your demand-capture source. This source follows the last-touch attribution model.
To ensure that you and your team have visibility into the impact of your demand creation efforts, add a property asking "Where did you hear about us?" to all your conversion points on your website and landing pages.
Personally, I like to make it an open field, and I create a workflow to map words contained in the answer to a source bucket. Something like this:
The form answers must be monitored to update the workflow if there are terms you missed. But by leaving it as an open field, you let the prospect use their own words, which is something I value. Some marketers like to overwrite the prospect's main source with the "self-attributed" source and use that as the official source to attribute the conversion. However, I recommend keeping both properties separated and creating different reports with both of them to tell a more comprehensive story. It provides me with insights into what impacts their buying journey.
Understanding the difference between demand creation and demand capture is crucial for a comprehensive B2B SaaS marketing strategy. While capturing demand brings immediate results, creating demand ensures future growth by nurturing prospects long before they’re ready to buy. To truly succeed, marketers must balance both approaches — investing in brand awareness and thought leadership while fine-tuning conversion-driven campaigns to turn intent into action.
By doing so, you can create a holistic demand generation system that not only drives conversions today but also builds the foundation for future success.
What is the difference between demand generation and lead generation? They're not the same, even though they're sometimes used interchangeably.
Demand is not ~generated~ any longer. You generate interest by being interesting. Relevance is what will make you stand out.
To hit the ground running as a SaaS VP of Marketing or CMO, these questions will help you build a long term plan and start delivering value right...