Demand generation and lead generation: What’s the difference?
In B2B marketing, you’ll hear these two terms used as if they are one in the same. They aren’t the same but rather, two terms that have to be intertwined in order to have a consistent and effective funnel.
I like to think of it like this: Demand generation creates awareness for your company/product and lead generation takes those that are aware; turns them into a known prospect and eventually a customer.
What’s an example of demand generation?
The key component to almost every demand generation activity is content. Without meaningful content, you’re likely not going to have success. Let’s say you want to run a campaign for a new product that you’re launching. How are you going to let the world know you have this available for them?
Well, to start, you should have a couple of conversations with your counterparts in product marketing. They’ll help you understand the messaging and personas that this new product is made for also known as ICP. If you’re also in charge of creating content, working with your product marketing team will help you understand how to create content around the pain points the product solves for and at the same time, guides the prospects down the funnel from awareness to decision.
When you put your demand generation campaign together, you'll use this new content across social (paid and organic), display, blogs, webinars, ebooks, a one-pager, and podcasts. What you want to do here again, is just to create awareness. A key component here is building your audience targeting. This is where your conversation with product marketing comes into play. You’ll want to really hone in on your audience building in paid social or Google Ads. I’ll create a separate blog post around audience building because there’s so much detail that goes into this step.
Once you have your audience targeting set, you want to make sure that this content that is being promoted is free and not gated. I know this can feel counterintuitive for some marketers but if you want to drive awareness, you’re going to have to give this level of information for free. I like to compare it to dating. What you’re doing here is trying to get a prospect to consider going on a date with your company. When you have a gated form or have a “buy now” CTA, instead of asking them to consider going on a date, you’re already asking them to get married and have kids.
Where does lead generation come into play?
So now that you have your demand generation campaign running and it’s driving awareness to your company and product, you need to have lead generation campaigns going to turn that awareness into known prospects. In this example, you’re driving paid traffic to a blog post or product page on your website. What you’d want to do in this situation is retarget those visitors with something that’ll get them to fill out a form. The usual example is some sort of lead magnet which would be a high-value piece of content; something that is worth them giving you their information. Lead generation covers actions that are mid-to-bottom of your marketing funnel. You want to capture their information and nurture them into qualified leads, pass them to your SDRs, convert to opportunities and ultimately turn into customers.
Husky Creative for Demand and Lead Generation
What I covered above is an extremely high-level overview of how to understand the different terminologies of demand generation and lead generation. Reach out to me if you’d like for me to take a look at your current strategies or build a demand engine for you.
