B2B demand generation is all about reaching the right audience with the right message. In today’s competitive landscape, understanding where your audience is and how to engage them effectively can make all the difference. This article explores strategies for engaging audiences at different stages, from ungated content to personalized incentives, and how to leverage both content marketing and product marketing to drive results.
Udi Ledergor, CMO of Gong, has a compelling analogy for B2B demand generation. He explains that the most efficient strategy is to go where the party is (e.g., LinkedIn) rather than trying to get people to come to your house (e.g., your website) for the party. When you’re at the big party and making new friends, it becomes natural to invite some of those friends over for an after-party at your place.
The main currency on LinkedIn is ungated content. The trick is to provide a lot of value through this content, then around two-thirds of the way down, let your audience know there’s a more in-depth guide available if they’re interested in the details. At this point, you can put a link in the comments to an external page with a simple form (e.g., email only) or encourage the audience to comment with a phrase to receive the asset via direct message. The latter approach is more effort but has a powerful advantage: it boosts LinkedIn’s distribution algorithm, increasing the reach of the post as more people comment.
Creating a LinkedIn post that asks your audience to comment for the full document is like offering a free sample at a market. People get a taste of something valuable (the teaser post), and to enjoy the whole dish (the complete document), they need to take a small action — like engaging in conversation.
If you need to reach a broader audience, LinkedIn’s paid ad formats can help extend your reach. LinkedIn Lead Gen ads, Document ads, or Thought Leader ads are all useful options. Paid ads are particularly valuable if organic reach isn’t sufficient to achieve your goals.
Udi also shares an important insight: 95% of the people marketing is reaching today are not ready to buy your product right now. They might buy it someday — when a multi-year contract ends or during a re-platforming project. This is the “maybe someday” crowd, similar to someone who bought a new car last year; they’re not going to buy another just because you reached out.
The remaining 5% are the “ready now” audience actively in-market for a solution. These two audiences require very different content.
For content marketing, attention spans are short. Ungated content should be bite-sized and engaging. Gated assets can be longer and more detailed. The benefit of collecting emails is clear: email is a channel you control, unlike social media, where the algorithm decides who sees your posts. Monitoring the size and health of your email list is arguably more important than tracking social media followers.
We successfully ran a demand generation campaign at Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud that focused on targeting cybersecurity leads — specifically CISOs and their teams — at mid-market and enterprise companies. The challenge was it was an audience we hadn't specifically targeted with a global integrated campaign before so we didn't have a baseline and needed to build it from the ground up. CIAM buying decisions had largely been more on the CTO side of the house, but in the field and through analysts we were observing more and more CISOs were taking more of an active role as customer identity has implications to overall organization cybersecurity risk.
CISOs are a diverse bunch and very skeptical of sales pitches. There are so many vendors hunting after them I joke many enroll in the "FBI Witness Protection Program" just to get a rest from the salespeople chasing them down. During my primary research getting to know this persona, by talking to CISOs, listening to calls and talking with our AEs that sell into them, I learned two things: CISOs do like to learn from other CISOs and they do like data.
With this insight, I recruited Auth0's own CISO, Jameeka Green Aaron to do a little roadshow with a presentation she's put together. She's such a wonderful speaker. And I booked her and our Product Manager for our Security offerings Ian Hassard onto podcasts like "The CISO Series", sponsored a few episodes. We also ran webinars and magnified their distribution through sponsored digital events to get 10X the security-minded audience we could get with our own database. This was great for awareness, and the webinars drove leads, but we wanted to do more.
For a data-rich asset CISOs and their teams would be eager to download we had our “State of Secure Identity” report, an annual proprietary report based on billions of login transactions flowing through our customers’ authentication systems. It detailed the top attack vectors, broken down by geo, vertical, and trending over time, with insights from our security experts and product managers.
This report was incredibly effective for content marketing aimed at the 95% “maybe someday” audience. It was valuable to cybersecurity leaders no matter what authentication solution they were currently using, as it demonstrated our domain authority and the scale of our customer base. The report also discussed mitigation strategies, including those that leveraged our solutions such as Bot Detection, Credential Guard, and passkeys.
We promoted this report heavily on LinkedIn through both paid and organic posts. We also hosted webinars walking through the report’s results and paired them with sneak peeks of upcoming security-related product launches. This anchor asset was used not only for LinkedIn but also for field events, PR efforts, and podcast appearances featuring our CISO. Pull quotes and statistics like “1 in 4 Account Registrations is Fraudulent” make for engaging, ungated LinkedIn posts that caught the attention of the cybersecurity community.
At Okta, this report is one of a number of annual reports that anchor global integrated campaign. Other examples of Okta’s annual reports include The Secure Sign-in Trends Report, The State of Zero-Trust Security, and Businesses at Work. And some of these are then broken out by vertical, such as “State of Zero Trust Security: Financial Institutions”. In addition, there’s a whole other category of anchor content that is more introductory and serves as primers. Assets like the Customer Identity for Dummies guide and the Identity Security Checklist.
At Okta, we leaned heavily on polished, annual reports and paid promotion, rather than leveraging individual subject matter experts (SMEs) or internal influencers to produce a steady stream of bite-sized how-tos or best practices. This approach was influenced by company culture, brand guidelines, and our organizational structure. In contrast, at Auth0, we hired an industry heavyweight, Vittorio Bertocci, who was trusted by the C-suite and had big outgoing personality, and sometimes strong or controversial views. His polarizing opinions on social media and in talks sparked a lot of audience engagement — likely at a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) compared to Okta’s approach. However, every company is different, and as a marketer, you need to adapt to the environment you’re in.
Ultimately, the goal was to start where the party is — on LinkedIn or in podcasts — and move the conversation to our own channels once we earned their interest and email. We also encouraged Okta employees to repost announcements, putting their own spin on the content. This kind of social amplification worked well because deals driven by CISOs and security concerns were high-value and high close rate, motivating sales executives to help drive awareness.
One critical aspect of measuring success for campaigns like this is understanding the impact on the “maybe someday” audience. For these audiences, we aimed to increase our marketable database, ensuring that the new contacts we brought in aligned with our ideal customer profiles (ICPs). We tracked detailed breakdowns of leads by segment, industry, seniority, function, and geography. Additionally, we focused on the fit score of these leads — whether rules-based or machine learning-based scoring was used — to make sure they were high-quality contacts.
We also monitored whether these new leads re-engaged with us during subsequent nurtures and outreach efforts. Beyond generating new leads, our proprietary reports and other value-add content marketing helped keep us top-of-mind with existing contacts, and metrics like asset downloads and webinar attendance fed into our larger attribution model that ultimately tied back to pipeline generation. For any enterprise deal we closed, there were typically dozens of campaign touches across multiple contacts before the opportunity was created, and even more after it entered the pipeline. Success is rarely about just one touchpoint — it’s about the cumulative effect of our ongoing efforts.
We also experimented with content syndication, a channel that has largely fallen out of favor. It produced high volumes of leads within our ICPs at a very low cost, but these leads didn’t return to our site through non-syndicated channels at the same rate as net new leads from other acquisition sources. Despite the lower yield, the cost per lead was so low that the economics still made sense. Moreover, if the leads came from our target companies with the right seniority and departments, the weak link might have been our follow-up nurtures and engagement strategy, rather than the acquisition channel itself. We also found a good balance of performance and cost by using content syndication to promote webinars, achieving up to 10x the viewership through partnered media.
For the “ready now” audience, some will be “hand-raisers” who willingly fill out a form on your website or engage with a chatbot. You should optimize your site experience to make this as easy as possible to capture these high-value leads.
But what if you want to be more proactive? That’s where outbound and ABM (Account-Based Marketing) come in. This involves reaching out directly to prospects — whether by calling, messaging, or inviting them to a meeting. The aim is to get them out of the shadows and into a conversation.
Different tactics can be used:
Outbound can be warm or cold. Warm outbound is where the contact has already engaged with your company in some way. Cold or warm outbound efforts can be led by BDRs who manage the outreach and qualification, or — depending on the business — by automated marketing programs that drive prospects directly to an AE discovery call, skipping over BDR qualification.
If your ACVs are high enough, incentives can be used to get decision-makers on the phone. For us at Auth0 by Okta, the gift was either a box of themed gadgets or a gift card. Through trial and error, we found success when:
This meeting maker program was run by marketing, but we also provided our BDRs and AEs with a quarterly budget for incentives to get meetings from prospects that didn’t fall under marketing programs. We kept a tracking sheet to measure who received offers, who accepted, and the outcomes — ultimately calculating ROI.
Gifting works. According to data from HockeyStack, a study on 30 B2B SaaS companies from April 2023 to May 2024 showed that outbound emails offering a gift had a 3X higher meeting rate and a 1.84X higher close rate compared to those without a gift.
HockeyStack, through HockeyStack Labs, excels in content marketing for the “maybe someday” audience. Their regular, data-rich analyses are thought-provoking and often counterintuitive, sparking intense LinkedIn debates while underscoring the wealth of customer data they process. This positions them as a thought leader, providing ample social proof. They also use gifting strategically — not just as a meeting maker but as a thank you for mentions on social media or as a surprise when high-value prospects in their ICP change companies. This approach is smart, as new marketing leaders are often keen to prove the value of new initiatives within their first 90 days.
I recently experienced gifting from the buyer side. I was looking for an agency to help my marketing team. I had a shortlist of three vendors, and one had the most recommendations. Coincidentally, I received a LinkedIn message from them offering a gift card for a meeting. Since I already planned to talk to them, I took the offer. I liked what I heard, and it nudged me closer to a decision — even before I completed my due diligence with the other vendors.
It actually wasn’t a coincidence that I received the offer when I did; they used reverse IP technology to identify my visit to their site, enriched my profile, saw I fit their ICP, and sent the meeting offer. It was a perfect example of right person, right offer, right time. Ultimately it helped them get me “off the couch” and titled the table in their favor to ensure they had the first opportunity to sell to me. And it worked.
B2B demand generation requires a strategic blend of content, incentives, and proactive outreach. By understanding the needs of both the “maybe someday” and “ready now” audiences, you can create tailored content and implement effective tactics to engage them. Start by evaluating your current content strategy and identifying opportunities to introduce personalized incentives to boost engagement and conversion.
Consider integrating these tactics into your overall demand generation plan to better connect with your target audience and optimize your marketing efforts. Start small — perhaps with a targeted LinkedIn post or a simple gifting program — and iterate based on the results you see.