What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is any activity that pushes awareness and interest in a product, service, or offers from a business with the goal to generate leads. In other words, demand generation is any action that generates demand amongst your target audience in hopes of growing your business.
Overall, demand generation is actually an umbrella term that encompasses all marketing and sales initiatives from every checkpoint of a customer’s journey, i.e. from initial interest in a product or service to upselling customers.
It is important to note that demand generation has changed recently in that it is no longer just about creating demand for sales. Something known as conversational marketing has actually changed the role of demand generation by creating the opportunity for marketers to connect with their audience via conversations online.
With marketers able to start conversations with future buyers early on in the customer journey, they have a better chance of continuing the conversation with that same customer all along their path. Ideally, this will lead to a sale, making that potential customer a full-blown patron.
Lastly, keep in mind that demand generation is not about forcing demand. Rather, it is about naturally driving demand through marketing practices. By providing the right information at the right time to the right people, demand generation effectively meets your ideal customer’s needs and offers a necessary solution to a real problem or query.
How is Demand Generation Different from Lead Generation?
In a regular search of demand generation, you’ll likely come across the term lead generation as well. While many marketing professionals tend to use both terms interchangeably, they’re really not the same. Demand generation is a much more holistic process and long-term marketing strategy that works to cover each stage of the customer journey through the marketing funnel. This means from awareness and consideration to research and justification, demand generation plays a part.
Lead generation, on the other hand, is actually a subcategory of demand generation. It has a narrow focus on the top of the marketing funnel with a simple goal: to convert targeted audiences into quality leads. By collecting information from leads, lead generation marketing works to nurture them into customers naturally rather than through paid methods.
Though demand generation and lead generation have differences, you want to have a marketing strategy that generates both demand and leads. This means you need to develop a demand generation strategy that includes lead generation tactics that draw in useful information for long-term success.