B2B demand generation: create it, don’t just harvest it.
Paid media, content, and executive thought leadership aimed at the accounts you want, so that when they do start looking, they already know who you are.
● Start here
Tell us about the business.
It takes about a minute. It reaches the people who would do the work rather than a sales inbox, and if we are not the right fit for what you need we will say so.
Goes to hello@katama.io. No sequences, no newsletter, no list.
● Demand generation versus lead generation
Demand generation creates awareness and preference in a market before anyone raises a hand.
Lead generation captures and converts the people who already have. Most companies buy the second, wonder why the cost per opportunity keeps rising, and discover the answer is that they never built the first.
The MQL is a bad proxy.
The standard model rewards form fills. So budget flows to whatever produces them, which is usually a gated asset advertised to people who were going to buy anyway, plus a long tail of people who wanted the PDF.
Sales works the list, conversion is poor, and marketing responds by generating more MQLs. The number goes up and the pipeline does not.
The uncomfortable part is that the demand you can capture cheaply is demand that already existed. Once you have harvested it, cost per acquisition rises and keeps rising, because you are competing for the same in-market minority as everyone else.
The way out is to spend against the other 95%, accept that it does not attribute cleanly to a form, and hold the program to pipeline instead.
What we run.
Channel mix depends on where your buyers actually are, which we establish rather than assume. For most B2B companies it is some combination of LinkedIn, paid search on high-intent terms, content that answers real questions, and executives who publish under their own names.
Creative is tested continuously and killed quickly. Attribution is set up before spend starts, not after somebody asks where the pipeline came from.
We do not gate everything. Gating a thing nobody wants produces a list of people who did not want it.
- Channel strategy and budget allocation
- Paid search and paid social
- LinkedIn campaign management
- Content marketing and distribution
- Executive thought leadership programs
- Landing pages and conversion campaigns
- Retargeting and audience building
- Creative production and testing
- Offer and message testing
- Pipeline attribution and reporting
How the work runs.
Find the audience
Where your buyers already are, what they already read, and which of them match the ICP. Built from data, not from a persona document.
Set the measurement
Attribution and tracking go in before spend does. Otherwise the first quarterly review is an argument about numbers rather than about strategy.
Ship and test
Creative, offers and audiences in market weekly. Winners scale, losers die. Opinion does not get a vote.
Compound the authority
The content and the executive presence keep working after the spend stops, which is the part that changes your cost per opportunity over time.
What we report.
MQLs are available on request and are not the headline. The headline is what reached pipeline, and how much it cost to get there.
Pipeline created
New opportunity dollars with a campaign attached, reported monthly against target.
Cost per opportunity
Not cost per lead. The distinction is the entire argument for running demand generation this way.
Influenced revenue
Closed won where a campaign touched the account, which is most of it and is why last-click reporting misleads.
Who this suits.
- You are competing in a category buyers already understand
- You can fund at least two quarters before judging it
- Executives are willing to publish under their own names
- You accept pipeline as the metric instead of MQLs
- You need a form fill number to report upward
- The budget only exists for one quarter
- Nobody will appear on camera or under a byline
- Your category has no awareness problem, only a capacity problem
Fair questions.
How much budget does this need to work?
Enough that the test cycle is meaningful. Below roughly five thousand a month in media, tests take so long to reach significance that you are guessing, and you would get more from outbound. We will say so rather than take the retainer.
Do you gate content?
Selectively. Gate something a buyer genuinely wants and cannot get elsewhere, and the trade is fair. Gate a blog post as a PDF and you have bought a list of people who wanted the blog post. Most of what we publish is ungated because being read is the point.
How do you attribute this when the buyer never fills in a form?
Partly with tooling, partly by asking. Self-reported attribution on the one form that does exist, matched against campaign exposure, gets closer to the truth than any last-click model. We report both and are explicit about which is which.
Can we start with just LinkedIn?
Often the right answer, yes. One channel run properly beats four run thinly, and LinkedIn is usually where a B2B audience is addressable. We would rather prove it on one channel and expand than spread a small budget across all of them.