Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation – Make Your Sales Funnel Effective
For the last few years in the world of marketing, there has been some confusion between the terms “demand generation” and “lead generation” And mostly nowadays digital marketers have even begun to use these terms interchangeably and argue that it is unnecessary to distinguish between the two.
But the fact is that there is a distinction between the two terms.
Demand Generation is about creating brand awareness and converting strangers into prospects while Lead Generation is about driving the prospect towards sales.
Let’s explore the difference between these two terms and how can we use them together to scale our business,
Introduction to Demand Generation
Demand Gen is the process of creating demand and interest for your product or services. It helps you to penetrate a new market and helps you increase brand awareness, educate audiences, and generate trust.
Introduction to Lead Generation
Lead generation is a strategy that converts prospects who are already aware of your brand into qualified leads. Lead Gen is the outcome of your Demand Generation strategy. lead generation campaigns are nurturing the people who are aware of your business and have shown interest in your product and services.
Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation
Demand generation is aimed at creating awareness and interest in a company’s products and services and build an audience by attracting new visitors to your website and offering solutions to their problems. While lead generation is turning prospects’ attention into hot leads -those who are ready to become customers.
Demand Generation and Lead Generation are crucial parts of B2B marketing. If people don’t know your brand exists or what problems your solution can fix, it is hard to convert a prospect into a lead.
Let’s dive deeper into the difference between Demand Gen and Lead Gen
1. Goals
Demand generation: Build awareness among the people about your company and the problems you solve. Even if the individuals who find out about this don’t immediately require your solution, it is crucial that they are aware of who can offer the solution in the future.
Lead Generation: Converting the prospects into qualified leads. Lead Generation occurs once the prospect has moved from the awareness stage and expressed interest in your products and services.
2. Engagement
Demand generation builds trust among your audience and your brand authority.
Lead Generation represents the benefits of your products and differentiate the offerings from your competitors and persuades the prospect to convert as a hot lead
3. Impact
Demand generation is about educating your target audience through content marketing, social media, webinars, PPC etc. It typically involves creating free resources to answer questions your prospects have.
Lead Generation takes it to the next level through content that clearly nurturing leads and establishes your brand through gated content, retargeting etc.
How do Demand Gen and Lead Gen work together?
Demand Generation and Lead Generation serve the same goal, lead generation depends on successful demand generation. Without a proper demand generation marketing campaign, a lead generation marketing campaign would be low cost-effectiveness; where your sales team won’t generate qualified leads and revenue.
Here’s how both works together:
- Demand Generation: A company publishes an SEO-friendly informative blog post about its company, which begins to rank on the first page of Google’s search results page. Through the informative blog, readers get awareness and information about your solutions.
- Lead Generation: At the end of the blog post, readers will find a call to action which offers a free e-book with additional information on the topic they just read about. As a result, readers will click on CTA and submit their email addresses where the ebook will be sent. This is the point where the reader turn into a prospective lead.
- Lead nurturing: The prospective lead is nurtured via personalized emails. These emails include information about the brand’s service or product and its special offers.
- Lead Capturing: The lead accepts the offer in the email and signs up for a demo. And the lead is redirected to the sales team and moved to the sales funnel.
- Completing the sale: Prospective leads turn into a customer through a purchase
Conclusion
Demand generation marketing campaign is about educating and building brand awareness among a wide audience through free content whereas a Lead generation marketing campaign leverages the awareness generated by an effective demand generation campaign and helps to capture them into hot leads.
If you are looking to streamline your sales funnel, please ping me via [email protected] and let me know your thoughts in comment below.
