Is Demand Generation the New Norm over Lead Generation?
“Demand Generation” and “Lead Generation” are the ever-green buzzwords for marketing as they are closest to the conversion or sales process — which translates to revenue for the company. The key question many managements have on their mind, “what exactly are the similarities/differences between “demand generation” and “lead generation?”. It is accurate to say that both encompass building a relationship with prospects and bringing them through a specially curated marketing or sales cycle. For me, the main difference is that demand generation is much more than just capturing a lead, it is about building awareness and interest — triggering consumers’ desire to explore, purchase and more importantly, willingness to pay the price for the marketed good or service. Without further ado, let us explore the basics of each to understand how demand and lead generation can be used independently and how omnipotent they can be when used hand in hand.
Demand Generation
Demand generation is an approach to marketing that is designed to build awareness and interest — triggering consumers’ desire to explore, purchase and more importantly, willingness to pay the price for the marketed good or service.
As prospects engage with the multiple marketing touch points that you have set out in your integrated marketing strategy along a carefully curated consumer journey, your marketing content optimally should make prospects feel that they need your product/service, building a relationship with them over time. Indeed, demand generation is a more complex process with a specific goal. It begins with the process of understanding who your customers are, where they exist, what problems and pain points they encounter, and ultimately, how the marketed product or service can help solve them.
In short, demand generation requires an integrated marketing approach to reach prospects, delivering relevant messaging or information at the right point in their consumer journey, which creates the need and demand for your product or service. A key point to note is that the approach of demand generation is usually designed to bridge the seems-to-be-ever-present gap between marketing and sales function.
Lead Generation
If demand generation is triggering or realisation of the want or need for a product or service, lead generation is then naturally the qualification of consumers that your marketing efforts have successfully attracted which hopefully will guide them through to purchase.
In short, when it comes to lead generation, marketing content and campaigns are specifically designed to capture a prospect’s contact information — usually done by having gated content, lead forms or sign-ups.
Lead generation is usually done by creating something of value to your target audience, which prospects will perceive it as receiving an incentive to release their contact information. Awareness of such content can be enhanced by boosting its reach by running paid ads and promoting it to the identified target audience.
Demand Generation and Lead Generation: The Perfect Marriage
As explained above, a well thought through and executed demand generation strategy should automatically be driving and bringing you leads. However, by strategically combining demand generation with lead generation tactics, marketing and sales could potentially get the most qualified leads with a high conversion rate.
If you think about it, running demand generation strategy without also strategising a way to ultimately capture a lead, sales goals will never be optimised and vice versa, if a lead capture form is set up without any proper plan and execution for attracting prospects to it.
If that lead capture form is strategically placed, such that prospects from your demand generation campaigns lands on this form with his or her needs triggered — and now there is a very enticing and seamless call-to-action that is going to help that person, marketing and sales can be ready to receive a valuable and qualified prospect to follow up on to convert.
On the flip side, a complete nightmare situation would be if the prospects’ needs and wants were triggered because of your demand generation tactics but because there were no clear or structured ways, such as an online form (lead generation) for the prospects to indicate interest to the marketing or sales teams to follow up, the company may not only lose the conversion, but this demand generated from your content could lead to new business for competitors instead!
Conclusion
If a demand generation strategy is in place, the key thing that the marketing team needs to be thinking through every step of the sales cycle — macro view. To achieve this, marketers need to have empathy towards prospects, putting oneself in the prospects’ “shoes” and getting a sense of their needs and wants. This is why demand and lead generations strategies need to work in tandem to achieve the most optimal results for both marketing and sales performance.
In the dynamic marketing world of 2020 and beyond, companies must start embracing this model to be productive, build effective and long-lasting relationships with customers, and become thought leaders in their domain.
