There has been some confusion among digital marketers in recent years regarding the terms demand generation and lead generation. Some have argued that there is no need to distinguish between the two, while others continue to use them interchangeably. Does it matter what we call these targeted marketing strategies?
The text discusses the difference between demand generation and lead generation.
What Is Demand Generation?
The goal of demand generation marketing is to create awareness and demand for your products or services. This involves expanding your audience, generating buzz, and driving traffic to transform interest into action.
Demand generation is about creating interest in your product or service.
It is a set of actions that a company takes to increase consumer demand for its products or services. This can be done through various marketing techniques, such as advertising, promotions, public relations, and pricing strategies.
To use a fishing analogy, demand generation is like trying to attract as many potential customers as possible to your business.
What Is a Lead?
A lead is a potential customer who has shown some level of interest in your product or service. Let’s first define the term “lead” before discussing lead generation vs. lead nurturing. A lead is a potential customer who has shown some level of interest in your product or service.
A lead is a potential customer who:
Has expressed an interest in your products or service.
If someone has given you their contact details, it is likely that they are interested in staying in touch with you.
For example:
A lead is someone who has given you their email address after expressing an interest in your products or services by visiting your website.
What Is Lead Generation?
The lead generation process describes the steps necessary to turn a potential customer who is interested in your product or service into an actual customer.
Lead generation is the process of turning prospects into leads. In other words, you got their attention through marketing efforts, now you’ll get their money through lead generation.
If we continue with the fishing analogy, lead generation is like baiting your hook with the best lure to catch the attention of your target audience.
There are many ways a marketer can convert interested prospects into customers, especially when it comes to B2B lead generation. The type of content that works best depends on the goal of the campaign.
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: Comparison
The main difference between demand generation and lead generation is that demand generation focuses on attracting new visitors to your website, while lead generation focuses on converting your audience into qualified leads.
The demand generation process leads into lead generation. The first step is to create awareness and interest, as not everyone is ready to opt-in or convert right away.
Demand generation (top of the funnel)
- Increases brand awareness
- Educates your target audience
- Builds trust
- Sparks interest
Lead generation (bottom of the funnel)
- Captures audience contact information
- Generates qualified leads and nurtures them
- Demonstrates brand value and differentiation
- Converts high-quality leads to customers
It is essential to distinguish between demand generation and lead generation efforts within an inbound marketing strategy. With different approaches and tactics, separating lead generation and demand generation allows for a more effective marketing methodology.
Demand Generation Examples
There are various types of demand generation content that your marketing team can use. But, they all share the same goal: to make the right people, who have the right problems, familiar with your brand and its solution.
You need to use a specific amount of these methods to make your demand generation work efficiently.
Brand awareness
The main goal during the demand generation process is to make potential customers aware of your product at the top of the funnel. Once they are more interested, you can provide them with lead generation content.
In short, brand awareness is creating positive associations between potential buyers’ experiences and your product or service.
To generate brand awareness for your sunscreen, you want customers to associate the need for sunscreen with your specific brand. You’ll want your brand name to be so well known in the sunscreen market that customers use your brand name to describe the product they’re using, instead of the word “sunscreen.”
Thought leadership
In 2015, he wrote an article for Inc. discussing how he was able to use thought leadership to grow his business. Thought leadership is an effective way to make prospects more receptive to your brand. Few people understand the benefits of thought leadership better than Gravity Payments CEO, Dan Price. In 2015, he wrote an excellent article for Inc. discussing how he was able to use thought leadership to grow his business.
The following is a paraphrase of the text above: Dan Price became popular when he cut his own pay to give every Gravity Payments employee a $70,000 a year base salary. The move generated a lot of discussion and debate in the media, with some people criticizing him and others praising him for making such a sacrifice for his employees.
As Dan became a more active leader on social media, sharing his successes as a CEO with thousands of followers, it had a positive effect on Gravity’s revenue. In 2014, Gravity’s revenue was 150 million dollars and it increased by 15 percent each year after that.
Although it may be risky, Dan does not avoid discussing controversial topics. In fact, most of his followers and potential customers seem to enjoy his direct approach.
This is a simple way to connect with prospective customers on a deeper level by sharing executive thought leadership. It can help to humanize your c-suite and make your brand more relatable.
Lead Generation Campaign Examples
In contrast to demand gen’s extensive approach, lead generation strategies are much more narrow and targeted. They can entail gated content marketing with perfected landing pages for things such as webinars or white papers. Another possibility is longer-term lead nurturing through email drip campaigns.
Gated content
Content that is gated can only be accessed after a prospective customer comes to your website and provides you with specific information about themselves. This information is then passed on to the sales team so they can make a connection.
Gated content is a type of content that requires a person to input their personal information, such as an email address or phone number, to gain access to it. This is a great way for businesses to collect data about their visitors. Lead magnets are another term for this type of content marketing.
The most important thing for you to remember is that your visitors will expect something targeted and worthwhile in exchange for handing over important information about themselves.
Social media
Many B2B marketers tend to overlook social media as part of lead generation, which is a shame because it’s a powerful marketing tool. While social media is often thought of as a tool for B2C marketing, more and more B2B businesses are using platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn to educate their customers about their services and updates.
B2B social media strategy shouldn’t be dull.
If you’re looking to make your brand more attractive to CMOs and other high-level decision-makers, one of the best things you can do is to get more creative with your social media presence. Social media posts provide an opportunity to humanize your business, and your company’s profiles can be a direct point of contact for people who are trying to solve problems or get questions answered.
How Can You Generate More and Better Leads?
When it comes to generating leads, you need to focus on two things:
- Lead quantity.
- Lead quality.
The goal of your lead generation strategy should be to get more and better leads.
But how can you do that?
Figure Out Who Are Your Dream Customers
One of the most common lead generation mistakes that online entrepreneurs make is thinking that the more email addresses they collect, the better.
As we explained on Instagram, the best way to generate leads is to get the contact details of your dream customers, rather than adding random people to your email list.
In order to obtain the contact information for your ideal customers, you must first identify who those customers are.
Fortunately, if you are already making sales, then narrowing down your target audience is pretty straightforward:
- Analyze the sales data.
- Identify the traits that your customers have in common.
- Create a buyer persona based on those shared traits.
The 80/20 rule can be applied to your customer base by identifying the 20% of customers that generate 80% of the revenue.
Focusing on the 20% of customers that are most likely to convert to paying customers will help you attract higher quality leads.
It’s not necessary for the distribution to be exactly 80/20, but it’s important to identify the customers who generate the most revenue.
If you have not generated any sales, you will need to predict who your ideal customers might be, generate a customer profile based on that information, and then change the profile once sales start coming in and you have additional data.
Although you probably have some idea about who your target audience is, you need to focus it more.
Who would you want to serve as customers if you could have any customers that you want?
And here are some additional questions that you might want to ask yourself:
- What does your dream customer want?
- What is your dream customer struggling with?
- How will you serve your dream customer?
- What will you sell your dream customers that they’ll want to purchase?
Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet
If you want to attract your ideal customers, you need to create a lead magnet that is very valuable to them. It should offer a solution to one of the problems they are struggling with.
The goal is to make something so useful that people would be happy to pay for it if you decided to charge for it.
Your lead magnet should address the same problem or a related problem to the one(s) your paid products address.
After someone downloads your lead magnet, you can offer them more value by selling them a paid product.
For example:
Matthew Hussey is a dating coach who helps women achieve the relationships they want.
He gives women templates for nine different text messages to use when texting men.
If a woman downloads this free guide and sees that the texts work, she will be interested in Matthew’s paid product, which features 59 scripts that women can use in different dating situations.
You want a sales funnel that has a logical progression, from downloading the lead magnet to buying the paid product.
Implement Best Landing Page Practices
Your lead magnet landing page is its sales page.
You need to persuade potential customers to download your lead magnet, even though it’s free.
We’re lucky that online marketers have been testing landing pages for the last 20 years, so we know what the best practices are.
Here are the three most important landing page elements that you should pay attention to:
The headline
This lead magnet will improve your potential customer’s life by teaching them how to save money on groceries.
The body copy
Your lead magnet should provide value to the potential customer by solving a problem they have. It should also be something that is easy for them to consume, such as a checklist, guide, or cheat sheet. Additionally, your lead magnet should be something that is valuable to the customer and that they will want to keep coming back to.
The call-to-action
In order to get the customer to take your desired action, you need to make it very clear to them what that is. Having a prominent call-to-action button (or several of them) is a great way to make sure that the customer knows what to do next.
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