What is Demand Generation in marketing & How is it Different from Lead Generation?

What is demand generation?

First, let’s define demand generation. This is the process that revolves around creating brand awareness and demand for your company’s products or services. It helps expand your audience, drive traffic, and generates buzz. You may think, based on this definition, that demand generation is only focused on generating value. However, demand generation is actually shorthand for the data-driven strategies used for the purpose of generating interest and awareness. Demand generating can be compared to throwing bait into the river to attract as many fish as you can towards your boat.

What is lead generation?

On the other hand, lead generation refers to the process of turning prospects or suspects with interest in your services or products into customers. Lead generation is like the product of your demand generation. In other words, demand generation makes sure to grab people’s attention and then lead generation turns them into customers. In that sense, lead generation is like using your best hook to catch high-quality fish like salmon.

Demand generation vs. lead generation: comparison

Demand generation efforts will help you expand your audience. Its aim is to attract new visitors to your website and introduce your solutions to them. Once it attracts new visitors, lead generation takes over and converts them into qualified leads. It’s a very subtle distinction and these strategies are significantly connected.

Demand generation is there to feed into lead generation. Without demand generation, there would be no lead generation. Your first aim is to attract attention to your brand and raise awareness surrounding what your brand is about. Then, you use lead generation to make people stay and become customers.

So, should you separate your demand and lead generation efforts when it comes to your inbound marketing strategies? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. There are distinct differences between their approaches and tactics and that’s why they need to be separated. Here’s how they differ from one another.

Demand generation

There’s a wide range of different types of demand-generation content that your marketing team can implement. However, they all have the same goal and that is to get the right people familiar with your brand. Your target audience includes people whose problems can be solved with your services or products.

Brand awareness

One of the most prominent goals is to attract new visitors by raising awareness about your brand. Only once they are deeper in the funnel, you can move on to your lead-generation tactics.

Creating brand awareness is all about making positive associations with your brand. Once people see your logo they should be able to recognize it. Speaking of logos, they can do so much for your brand awareness. They give the first impression to your new potential customers. For instance, if your brand is all about being eco-friendly and offering sustainable products, that should be clearly visible on your logo. Like-minded people looking to support businesses who cherish the environment will instantly be drawn to your business. Your logo lets them know that you make an active effort to make this world a better place. This is just one of many great ways to introduce your brand to people who are just now getting to know your brand and what it stands for.

Map buyer personas to the customer journey

Brand awareness is, however, just the first step. To boost your conversions, you need to be able to reach the right target audience. In order to do that, you need to create buyer personas that will help you segment different kinds of customers. This also allows you to get a better understanding of their needs and demands.

Once you’re done with that, you need to develop customer journey maps to see how every persona group experiences their buyer journey. Don’t be afraid to be creative and even witty in your approach to customers. Find a relatable, common ground, and a way to communicate with them. Let them know you hear and understand their needs and you can offer them solutions to their problems.

This is just one of the ways you can connect with your audience. It’s important that they know you’re available, communicative, and know how to deliver a great proposition. So, start by building your personas and empathy maps. This will help you better understand your target audience and then you’ll know what kind of approach to take when communicating with them.

Thought leadership

Lastly, thought leadership is one of the great ways to endear prospects to your company. Here’s how this works. Essentially, taking the risk can sometimes be the best thing you can do for your brand. You don’t shy away from showing your polarized and different views on the economy, politics, environment, and so on. Do you know who your audience is? Do you know where they’re active the most? Use that social media platform to connect with your target audience. The right people will find you.

Lead generation campaign

On the other hand, lead generation strategies are more targeted and specific than demand generation strategies. For instance, they can focus on gated content marketing that includes optimizing your landing web pages. However, they can also focus on longer-term lead nurturing tactics like making email drip campaigns.

Gated content

Gated content is the type of content your visitors can download only after they come to your website and provide you with some specific piece of information about themselves. Websites usually use contact information like email addresses. This piece of information is then sent to the sales team and they’re the ones who make a connection.

This type of content is one of the best ways to gather some very important information about online users who visit your website. This information can be their email dress, company name, title, or phone number. People sometimes call this kind of content marketing a ‘lead magnet’.

In exchange for this valuable piece of information, users can then receive access to your website including your video tutorials, webinars, e-books, surveys, studies, and other material.

Social media

Social media has to be one of the biggest driving points for lead generation. Everyone is using at least a few different social media accounts these days. This is the best online space where you can reach your target audience and lead them to your website. That’s why it’s important that you establish your brand’s social media presence. Research your audience. See what platforms they mostly use and learn how to best use these platforms to connect with them.

But remember, social media is mostly there to make the first impression and help you interact with your target audience. The real goal of social media is to lead your audience to your main websites where they can make purchases and get to know your brand even more. While great social media marketing can be an amazing driving point and help you attract new visitors, once they are led to your website, it’s your website’s time to shine. It needs to be in perfect condition if you want these new visitors to stay.

There are a few factors you need to consider when it comes to the appearance and performance of your website. It needs to have easy and practical navigation. The content needs to be optimized and SEO-friendly. You should also consider optimizing your site for mobile phones.

All of these and more are just some of the tasks that are tied by SEO efforts and strategies to create the most appealing and functional website that will expand your customer number. If you don’t really have much experience handling SEO, there are tons of SEO experts in Sydney you can consult for help. Dozens of SEO services in Sydney will provide you with reliable and experienced employees who will help you build a successful SEO strategy and marketing approach for your brand. That way, your website will both be aesthetically pleasing and at the peak of its performance.

Video, webinars, infographics, & other content

Lastly, lead generation is more than just copywriting. You have to think outside of the box. Implementing other forms of content such as audio and visual content, podcasts, webinars, and so on is a great way to provide your customers with diversified content.

Some people simply enjoy visual content more than written content. They can digest it more easily. It’s important that you cater to everyone in your target audience. That way everyone feels welcome and more people are likely to interact with your content.

Conclusion

To sum up, while deeply intertwined, demand and lead generation have different goals. The first one attracts new online visitors and the other one converts them into new customers. It’s important that you consider the above-mentioned differences in their approaches to get the best of both of these practices.