You need demand generation to get customers aware and interested in your product before bringing them into your sales funnel.
And, of course, you can’t do that without the right tools.
In this article, I’ll show you our favorite tools for managing demand generation strategies here at Linkflow.
What counts as a demand generation tool?
A demand generation tool is any software or platform that helps you create, manage, and track demand generation efforts. These are the top-of-funnel activities that make potential customers aware of your existence and create interest in your product or service.
Depending on your marketing mix, this might include the tools you use for:
- Content marketing
- Social media management
- Email marketing
- PPC advertising
- Landing page creation and optimization
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Marketing automation
It’s important to remember that there is a critical distinction between lead generation and demand generation. Lead generation is about capturing contact information from potential customers, while demand generation focuses on building brand awareness and interest in your products or services.
Demand gen tools vs. SEO tools
While there is some overlap between search engine optimization (SEO) and demand generation, the tools you use to execute a demand generation strategy are not the same.
Yes, top-of-funnel SEO content (think: “how-to” blog posts) helps you generate demand, it’s not the same as using a specific demand generation tool. SEO tools are primarily focused on improving your website’s search engine rankings and driving organic traffic.
Demand generation tools, on the other hand, are more diverse in their functionality and focus on a wider range of functions across marketing and sales teams.
You definitely want to track how much traffic your demand gen content gets from organic search. But SEO is only one channel for that content, and your overall SEO strategy is much broader in scope.
I’ve already published articles on the best ecommerce SEO tools and SaaS SEO tools (which include general tools for any website). I recommend checking those out for a full list of SEO tools.
16 best demand generation tools for driving brand awareness and interest
When you’re building your demand generation process, you’ll want to consider all the different touchpoints and channels you can use to reach your target audience. Influencers, email marketing, social media, video content, and paid traffic (PPC) should all be points of focus.
You also need analytics tools that help you understand where your traffic is coming from and how visitors behave once they land on your website.
Here are our favorite demand generation tools for executing a comprehensive strategy that reaches your target audience:
1. Influencer marketing with Upfluence
Upfluence is the ideal platform for running a full-fledged influencer marketing program. You can use it to:
- Search through 1,000s of vetted creators
- Identify ones that are already engaged with your brand
- Understand their audience demographics and potential reach
- Track results of influencer campaigns
- Build and manage individual creators or an affiliate program
- Facilitate user-generated content creation
Its automated engagement rate calculator, fake followers checker, and AI-powered mailing assistant that helps you communicate with and hire influencers make it stand out from other similar platforms.
And, above all, it offers easy integration with your ecommerce and marketing tools. So you can easily incorporate influencers into your marketing mix without creating data or operational silos.
2. Email address lookups with VoilaNorbert
While marketing teams should not automatically add business addresses they find on the web to their email subscriber list, sales teams can use an email address lookup tool to get in touch with prospective leads.
VoilaNorbert is a low-cost and easy-to-use web-based platform you can use to find any corporate email address and verify it for deliverability.
You can also use it to actually send emails to your prospects.
Best of all, you can use its API to integrate with your CRM and enrich contacts with up-to-date business email addresses and other relevant data.
3. Email marketing and landing pages with Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the best-known platforms in the email marketing space. It offers a user-friendly interface for creating and sending email campaigns.
It also has advanced features like email personalization and automation, making it an essential tool for any demand generation strategy.
Plus, its analytics dashboard lets you track the success of your campaigns based on delivery, opens, engagement (click-throughs), and conversions.
But, perhaps most importantly, Mailchimp also has a landing page builder that you can use to create high-converting landing pages for your email and PPC campaigns.
This means you can use it for your full-funnel marketing strategy — it’s one of the best lead generation tools in the game as well.
Social media publishing with RiteKit
RiteKit is a simple and powerful social media management tool that helps you create, schedule, and analyze your posts across multiple platforms.
Its platform is broken up into four pieces:
- RiteForge for crafting, scheduling, and publishing
- RiteBoost for enhancing content in Buffer, Hootsuite, or anything else
- Rite.ly to add self-branded CTAs on links and track clicks and conversions
- RiteTag for instant hashtag suggestions
It’s not a full-fledged SMM tool like Hootsuite, but it’s a great complement to your SMM stack. It’s packed with useful features like automated GIF creation, plus a Chrome extension for easy workflow integration.
5. Content optimization with Surfer SEO
While this is predominantly an SEO tool, the Surfer SEO Content Editor is one of the best tools for optimizing your demand generation content.
It’s a visual editor that helps you write search-friendly, high-quality, relevant, and engaging content. You just type your keyword into the editor and start writing.
This is one of the most valuable content marketing tools because you’re writing for search engines and people.
It gives you visual feedback on how well your content matches the top-ranking pages. You can see what words you should use more or less, and how your content structure should look.
You’ll also get tips on:
- Title and meta description optimization
- How to make your content more engaging with visuals, image alt attributes, and internal linking
- Making your content more relevant with supporting keywords, questions, and entities to include
- Page loading speed recommendations
- Content length and reading time estimation
6. Video content creation with CapCut
CapCut is a traditional all-in-one video editor and graphic design tool, with all kinds of AI features built on top.
It offers editing and content creation features like visual animations. What sets it apart, though, is its AI video production and editing tools like:
- Video upscaling
- Text-to-speech video generation
- Photo editing tools
- Automatic video generation (e.g., for social media stories)
- One-click long videos to shorts (e.g., for TikTok or Reels)
- Video effects and filters
- Background removal
- Text overlays, emojis, stickers, GIFs, and animated text
It’s a user-friendly tool for creating engaging video content you can scale across your entire demand generation marketing strategy.
7. Visual content creation with Canva
Canva is the best platform for creating 100% original visual content for your demand generation campaigns.
- Social media posts
- Email campaigns
- Print materials like business cards, flyers, and brochures
- Infographics
- Presentations
- You name it.
With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and thousands of templates to choose from, you’ll be able to create professional-looking visuals in no time.
It also offers easy team collaboration and integration with other marketing tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Buffer. So you can easily incorporate your visuals into Canva and launch them across your marketing channels.
Plus, its “Magic Switch” feature enables you to resize your designs for all your different platforms at once, saving you time and effort.
8. PPC audience reach with Dealfront
Dealfront’s Promote module is designed for B2B display ads. While platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads have built-in analytics tools, they’re better for DTC campaigns with easier attribution tracking.
Dealfront is built for the B2B customer journey, where a sale can take months to close and often requires dozens of touchpoints.
With Dealfront, you can:
- Upload your target account list or use Dealfront’s extensive database of over 30 million companies to build your list
- Refine your target list with filtering options based on company size, industry, job titles, and trigger events like revenue increases
- Target specific companies by their IP addresses, bypassing the need for third-party cookies and guaranteeing your ads reach employees of those companies
- Use account-based remarketing to target all key decision-makers within a company’s buying group
- Integrate seamlessly with your CRM to automatically target companies that your sales team is pursuing
Leadfeeder is also now part of the Dealfront ecosystem. You can use the two together to identify anonymous companies visiting your website and automatically input them into your CRM. From there, your sales team can convert them.
9. Data enrichment with Clearbit
Clearbit is a comprehensive data enrichment platform that provides businesses with detailed information about their customers and prospects. Its company and IP intelligence data are best-in-class.
With Clearbit, you can:
- Enrich your existing customer data with additional details such as company size, industry, location, and more
- Find, target, score, and prioritize new prospects by searching for specific criteria such as job title, company size, or technology used
- Identify anonymous website visitors by matching their IP addresses with Clearbit’s extensive database.
- Integrate with various tools and platforms, including Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot, enabling seamless data flow and automation for your sales and marketing teams.
Clearbit’s API allows for custom integrations and the ability to pull enriched data into various applications, enhancing their functionality.
And, since Clearbit enables you to identify key accounts and gather detailed information about them, it supports account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
10. LinkedIn automation with Linked Helper
LinkedIn is one of the best social media channels for demand generation, particularly in the B2B space. In fact, nearly 50% of social traffic to B2B websites comes from LinkedIn.
Adding connections and reaching out to people one by one is time-consuming, though. Using Linked Helper, a smart LinkedIn outreach automation platform, saves hours of time and effort.
First and foremost, you can use it to grow your network. It can automatically invite targeted second- and third-level connections with you based on the criteria you set (e.g., job title).
Its auto-responder enables you to trigger drip campaigns and responses to newly added connections without lifting a finger (with reply detection).
All you have to do is set up a default message.
It works with any LinkedIn subscription — Sales Navigator, Career, Recruiter, or Business. And it comes with a built-in CRM you can use to manage your social media leads (or you can integrate it with your sales CRM).
11. All-in-one inbound sales and marketing with HubSpot
HubSpot is a comprehensive inbound marketing and sales platform that includes features like email marketing, social media management, content creation, and marketing automation.
- HubSpot’s CRM helps you manage customer interactions and track leads throughout the sales pipeline.
- Its marketing automation tools help create and manage campaigns that attract, engage, and delight customers.
- HubSpot CMS allows you to publish top-of-funnel demand generation content that brings potential customers into your sales funnel.
- You can use HubSpot’s data and tools to score and segment leads based on their interactions with your content.
For example, you can set up retargeting ads for visitors who have engaged with your website but have not yet converted. You could use HubSpot’s tracking codes to create retargeting audiences and deliver personalized ads.
You could also offer valuable resources like eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, or a free webinar. HubSpot forms can help you capture lead info on your website in exchange for these resources. You could then nurture those leads with targeted email campaigns.
12. All-in-one social media management with Sprout Social
If social media is a huge part of your demand generation strategy, you need a comprehensive platform like Sprout Social.
It’s one of the best social media tools out there — it integrates all your social media accounts and collateral, provides data and analytics, and offers robust scheduling and automation features.
In your Sprout Social dashboard, you can do everything from analyzing paid campaign ROI to looking at your average audience sentiment.
The platform even has features that allow you to track your competitors’ social media activity, giving you valuable insights into their strategies.
13. Free web analytics with Google Analytics
You should realistically already have a Google Analytics account set up. To use it effectively for demand generation, however, you have to pay close attention to the following demand generation metrics:
- Web traffic amount
- Traffic sources, including organic, referral, social, and email campaigns
- New users
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Pageviews, dwell time, and average session duration
You can also use Google Analytics to track traffic and conversions from specific URLs, allowing you to accurately measure the effectiveness of certain elements of your demand generation campaign.
14. High-converting landing pages with Unbounce
Plenty of demand generation tools (including a few mentioned above) offer their own landing page builders. Unbounce is its own breed. And it’s far more advanced.
It’s a landing page builder that offers a drag-and-drop interface, easy form integration with email marketing tools, and robust A/B testing capabilities.
It’s not just good for creating stunning landing pages; it also enables you to create pop-ups and sticky bars that can help you convert more website visitors into leads.
15. Conversion rate optimization with Hotjar
None of your demand generation marketing strategies are the least bit useful if the site your visitors land on sucks.
Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and feedback tool you can use to understand how people navigate and interact with your website.
Its defining feature is its heatmap technology, which tells you things like where on a given page people click, how far they scroll down the page, and which elements they interact with.
You can also find out how users navigate a page by looking at session recordings. This tells you where people are clicking, where they’re hovering their cursor, whether they’re getting lost, and other UX insights.
You can then use this information to optimize your site’s design and user experience according to where users are dropping off or getting stuck. You can also draw attention to CTAs or important information when you know which areas of the page visitors are most likely to look at.
16. Targeted Email With BookYourData
If your data isn’t accurate you’re wasting money.
BookYourData is designed to help you ensure you’re targeting real prospects, not just bulking up your email list. Start by prospecting with their curated email lists then verify the data is up-to-date using their browser extension.
The tool helps you save the manual labor of checking lead data accuracy at scale so you can focus on closing rather than verifying open doors.
It all comes back to web content…
No matter what your marketing mix looks like, your customers will always turn to your website to get more information and make purchases.
If you don’t have a site that…
- Shows up on search engines for queries they type into Google
- Provides valuable content and resources to potential customers
- Is easy to navigate and use
- Performs well on all devices
- Has clear CTAs and an easy path to conversion
…your demand generation efforts will be in vain.
We can help with that.Book a call with us to align your SEO and content strategy with your demand generation goals.
