Series B Funding: What It Is, Metrics & How to Raise

This neglect in tailoring content for specific platforms results in missed opportunities and potential customers swiftly overlooking your brand. Lack of strategic presence on platforms frequented by your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) leads to inadequate platform engagement. While digital channels like social media, email marketing, SEO, and PPC serve as trusty steeds, traditional methods such as billboards, events, and word-of-mouth act as the old-school knights. Businesses adopt a multi-channel approach for their marketing strategies. Relying solely on AI can lead to subpar content strategies, diminishing brand engagement and growth potential.

Stay focused, stay lean, and stick to what’s working. Knowing what to expect can help you stay focused and avoid delays. What matters more than the amount is how fast it’s growing. SmartAsset is an award-winning financial technology company that helps millions of people make smarter decisions about investing, retirement and financial planning.

Keep an eye on the metrics that matter, and don’t be afraid to recalibrate your course. This alignment is strategically placed last as it allows for a comprehensive assessment of which tools and technologies are best suited once the foundational pillars are solidified. It’s akin to expecting someone to go from walking to running without the essential learning phase in between. Series A funding empowers companies to approach their strategies with agility and precision.

Common Pitfalls That Stall Growth

Gartner research shows the average B2B purchase now involves 6 to 10 decision-makers, each with their own information needs and objections. A B2B demand generation strategy is a company-wide system that coordinates marketing, content, and sales activities to create and capture buyer demand at each stage of the funnel. A B2B demand generation strategy is the documented framework a company uses to generate awareness, attract in-market buyers, and build a qualified pipeline before those buyers contact sales. Demand generation creates awareness and intent among buyers who aren’t yet searching for solutions. It includes content marketing, executive visibility, digital PR, and educational assets designed to build trust and authority over time, so that when a buyer is ready to act, your company is already on the shortlist.

Use AI-driven experimentation to test content variants and reallocate budget to top-performing segments. Tofu's AI knowledge graph ingests your brand guidelines, messaging, and account intelligence to generate thousands of personalized assets while maintaining consistent brand voice. It ingests data from your CRM and intent tools, generates personalized content at scale, and orchestrates delivery across channels. Here is how the major categories fit together, what each layer does, and where the tools mentioned in this article sit.

Use your ICP to determine your GTM motion

Stage 1 teams should invest primarily in foundational tools (CRM, marketing automation) and content creation capacity, often $50K to $200K annually. For companies with $10M to $100M in revenue, this typically translates to annual demand gen budgets of $200K to $2M. For paid campaign optimization, Metadata.io automates ad experimentation and budget allocation across LinkedIn and Facebook. Its primary metric is the number of new leads added to the database.

Positron is focused on inference — computing needed to run AI models for real-world applications — rather than training large language models, positioning the company well as demand surges for inference hardware as businesses increasingly shift focus from building large models to deploying them at scale. If you’re reaching director-level prospects or mid-level managers, you may focus on demand generation for series b startups developing an inbound motion, posting content on LinkedIn with invitations to join a webinar or download a buying guide. This data-driven approach allows for more informed decision-making and ensures that ABM resources are focused on the accounts with the highest potential for success. These leads can then be segmented into high-priority accounts for more targeted ABM campaigns, where personalized outreach, account-specific content, and tailored solutions are deployed to nurture these relationships further.

• I've sat in countless rooms with brilliant founders who've built genuinely innovative solutions.
• This approach ensures your efforts are focused on deals with real momentum.
• You can also explore dedicated attribution software tools to automate this process.
• First, we’ll get into the fundamentals, but jump here if you want to learn how to adapt your demand generation efforts for the AI era.

It uses content, thought leadership, and brand presence to build familiarity before buyers are ready. A company that starts SEO at Series A has a significant organic moat by Series B. A company that starts at Series B pays for that delay in both time and budget. Gated content, retargeting ads, and demo request forms are all demand capture tools.

Once you’ve captured a pool of prospects into your ‘marketing universe,’ that is—gotten their email addresses in your CRM, it’s time to think about email communication. For example, your prospects need to better understand their symptoms, why current solutions are insufficient, and how your company is solving their problems in a different way using AI. When working with early stage startups, Allyson usually finds homepage messaging starts off too broad and generic, or technical and feature-focused.

First things first—hone in on your ICP

A webinar, a whitepaper, and a LinkedIn campaign running in separate silos don’t compound. Vague ICP definitions produce vague content that earns vague attention from people who never buy. Content built for “VP of Engineering at a Series B climate tech company evaluating data pipeline tools” does.

It’s a tactical approach centered on identifying prospects who are ready to engage with Sales in the near term. The foundation of successful demand generation programs lies in understanding that modern B2B buyers have fundamentally changed how they research, evaluate and purchase solutions. “Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” said Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic. Global enterprises across industries are deploying Claude in their core operations, and a growing number of people around the world use it for their everyday work. AI is redefining marketing, shifting the focus from transactional interactions to relational experiences between brands and consumers.

It also provides rich behavioral data (open rates, click patterns) that can inform your broader demand generation strategy. PPC campaigns can generate leads quickly and predictably, making them valuable for product launches, promotions, and filling pipeline gaps. It's particularly valuable for capturing high-intent buyers — people already searching for a product like yours — and directing them to targeted landing pages or gated content designed to convert. Brands with robust review profiles on third-party sites also gain passive demand generation as prospects discover them through peer research.