Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation: Everything You Need to Know

Demand-Generation-vs-Lead-Generation

Demand generation and lead generation are two different yet significant aspects of any business. But before we dive into demand generation vs lead generation, let’s have an understanding of each of these terms, individually.

What is Demand Generation?

It is the process of instigating the interest of people towards your product or service (that you are offering). In more detail, the marketers work toward providing a solution to their prospects. And the solution, provided by the company, can be a product or service.

Here is a demand generation example- To generate demand, companies are conducting webinars revolving around how-tos and FAQs where the marketers address general issues (in context with the product or solution offered by the company) experienced by the prospects; and later demonstrate how their products or services would help them to overcome the crisis.

Sometimes, people are not even aware of the problems that they are experiencing. The marketers leverage this gap by designing relevant content. The demand generation content is geared towards boosting awareness and providing an adequate solution to the issues. Further, these content are promoted at various channels to reach the target audience. The promotion comes under demand generation activities.

Besides webinar, some of the demand generation activities are listed below:

  • SEO-based content
  • Guest Posts
  • Articles based on trend analysis and expert’s opinion
  • Offering free resources
  • Lead scoring

These demand generation content are not pay-walled and easily available for the audience to consume. On the other hand, lead generation content is different than demand generation, as both serve different purposes. And this takes us to the next section of the post- Lead Generation.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the very next step of demand generation. This step involves pushing the interested audience towards the sale or decision stage. The content used in lead generation is gated. Access to the same may demand certain information from the audience. For example, once the audience is well-aware of your existence and the solution that you serve, the audience wants to know-how of your product. For this answer, the interested candidate would approach your website for a case study or an e-book. These are gated content and to download these content pieces, companies, usually, ask the prospective client to sign up. The sign-up form includes a name or email id as basic information. The information collected during the sign-up process is nothing but leads.

For example, Valasys Media, being a service-based B2B organization, assisted a reputed firm in software technology to generate leads using whitepapers.

Further, these leads are passed on to the sales team. The sales team approaches the leads and explores their needs and requirements.

In short, the lead generation content intends to move the prospects into the consideration and decision stages.

Read to know more about lead generation.

Some of the lead generation tactics involve-

  • Webinars
  • E-books
  • Whitepapers
  • Direct mail marketing
  • Live events
  • Retargeting campaigns

Now that we know the difference between demand generation and lead generation by now, now it will be easier for us to describe demand generation vs lead generation in the next section.

Demand Generation Vs Lead Generation- The Marketers’ Formula

Demand generation is geared towards capturing people’s attention. Meanwhile, lead generation is about collecting information from the interested audience.

Usually, people get confused between the two because the tools and tactics implemented in both of the processes are quite similar. Demand generation and lead generation, both, are about relevant, informative, and compelling content and their precise placement on different channels. However, the fundamental concept of targeting differs in each case.

How Demand Generation and Lead Generation Work Hand-in-Hand?

Demand generation and lead generation, both, work in the same direction- to boost conversion and keep the pipeline flowing. Without a proper demand generation strategy, then lead generation would not work properly. And so goes vice-versa. Without proper lead generation infrastructure, demand generation would go in loss. Eventually, we need both- demand generation and lead generation to proliferate sales numbers and increase customer acquisition.

Talking of a strong demand generation strategy, it is very important to have diversified tactics to attract the attention of a large, yet relevant audience. To do so you need to know who your prospects are and then widen your presence on multiple platforms in different ways.

For demand generation, marketers are leveraging various social media platforms, emails, and websites. Using all the possible channels, they are offering branded video, paid advertising, social media posts, podcasts, and guest opportunities to ensure that they don’t miss on valuable prospects in the market.

Moreover, strong CTAs and lucrative offers are incorporated in the demand generation stage intentionally to direct the attention of the prospective audience towards the company. This technique creates a sense of confidence and trust in the mind of the audience for the brand. As a result, collecting contact information becomes easy, which marks the beginning of the customer’s journey.

The intersection of Demand Generation and Lead Generation Strategy

Now that you are well-accustomed to terms lead generation and demand generation and have good knowledge about demand generation vs lead generation; you will be able to draw an interdependent strategy for demand generation and lead generation.

The strategy for both, demand and lead generation should complement each other- take it as a rule. There is no other way around. The goal of the strategy must be to educate your prospective audience and then convert that attention to high-quality leads to accelerate sales and multiply revenue growth.

Conclusion:

To put demand generation vs lead generation in simple words- the process of getting interested in your product or service is demand generation; on the other hand, conversion of interest into leads (in the form of names and contact details), which is further forwarded to sales teams for follow-up purpose, is lead generation.

In short, lead generation is the next process of demand generation in the line of product marketing and selling.

There are various methods for both of the generation processes. However, you must be precise with what you choose with relevancy to your business.

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