DEMAND GEN
Demand generation, or “demand gen” for short, is the process of creating awareness and demand for your company’s product or service.It is a discipline that is constantly evolving. Buyer behavior, technological advances, and the emergence of new platforms and avenues for meaningful customer connections keep the demand marketer in an everlasting state of strategically flux. In short, demand gen aims to bring new visitors to your website or business in order to introduce them to your company. The end result is to build your target audience, establish trust, and to spark interest in your company.
Types of demand generation content include blog posts or articles, resource pages, infographics, YouTube videos, social media posts, press releases, slideshares, podcasts and interviews, free tools, case studies.
Statistics
Improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact was a top demand generation priority for 61% of organizations in 2017 (Demand Gen Report).
According to Justin Gray, CEO at LeadMD, 50% of the average marketing database is useless, largely because of duplicate records. Records that don’t represent real opportunities can cost firms between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to support bloated database usage. While demand generation budgets are rising at many firms, lead data validation technologies can divert these dollars away from databases to other demand generation tactics.
Also, 54%of B2B marketers measure success via revenue-based quotas, while 45% measure success through lead-based quotas (NetLine).The latest survey from NetLine supports the fact demand generation is on its way to becoming B2B revenue marketing. Similarly, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns increased by 225% in the past 12 months (NetLine).
Account-based marketing is a subset of demand generation that’s driving success for many B2B organizations. This strategy concentrates demand generation resources on a specific, pre-defined set of client targets within a vertical. Per Altera Group research, ABM tactics are driving superior ROI for 97 percent of demand marketers.
Advantages of Demand Generation
It saves time: Demand generation saves a lot of time when it comes to sales. This can be seen from several demand generation strategies such as YouTube videos, Infographics among others. All you have to do is post your content online and within no time, it’s out there for your audience to view. This is why it’s taking over & recommended as it saves a lot of time.
Saves money and requires small capital: When it comes to saving resources, demand generation does well. This is because all you need is internet in most cases. Small capital is spent on activities such as advertisements and blog posts.
Increases deal sizes: Having the ability to reach a larger audience within a short period of time increases your deal sizes and thus earning profits.
Disadvantages of Demand Generation
Need skills in when convincing customers: In order to use demand generation, you need to be skilled in convincing customers. You need to be fluent to your audience & share crucial information to attract more customers to your channel.
It’s expensive in terms of widening the market: Market widening requires a lot of resources. This is because reaching out to people globally, you will need translators or to increase your knowledge in terms of marketing to reach a wider market.
LEAD GEN
Lead generation (or “lead gen” for short), alongside trusted lead generation companies, involves bringing new customers with genuine interests in what your company has to offer. Here, you bring in customers with the aim of buying your products.In short, lead gen is a way to funnel-in eventual purchasers of your product or service down the path of buying. Lead gen typically involves creating “gated” content and then asking for someone’s contact information in order for them to receive that piece of content.
The end result is to find qualified leads for your company so that they then can be added to a lead nurturing process or so that a salesperson can follow up. Nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities and businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. This is why effective lead generation software combines both lead generation and nurturing capabilities to qualify and transition leads from marketing to sales.
Types of lead generation content include any type of gated content (such as an eBook, PDF, checklist, cheat sheet, whitepaper, etc.), courses, free-trials, product demos, viral contests (where someone needs to enter their email or other contact information to enter), email subscriptions, events and so on.The three most commonly used B2B lead generation strategies are email marketing (78%), event marketing (73%), and content marketing (67%) (Source: Demand Metric Research Corporation via Direct Marketing News)
Statistics
According toB2B Technology Marketing Community, 61% of B2B marketers think generating high-quality leads is one of their biggest challenges.Increasing quality leads is the top priority for 68% of B2B professionals, followed by increasing lead volume.Similarly, lead generation from LinkedIn was successful for 65% of B2B companies (Source: LinkedIn)
Also, 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal according to Content Marketing Institute. As mentioned in HubSpot, companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. And verifying business leads before passing it to the sales team is conducted by 56% of B2B companies.
Advantages of Lead Marketing
It is important in ensuring that customers stay loyal to your services or products. It also generates important feedback from your customers regarding your products or services thus creating room for improving and generates crucial information about the Audiences you are targeting.
It assists greatly in optimizing of revenues by awarding working strategies to the interests of customers. It plays an important role in ensuring that you get points from your customers and also builds important database regarding interest. It is a win-win situation for both the buyers and sellers in that a buyer can request for information of products or services that he or she wants.
Disadvantages of Lead Marketing
It is very expensive as it needs a lot of resources to have a stable market and inflow of customers to like your products and services. Different clients have different priorities and this makes it even harder to know the perfect product to offer to your customers. Not everyone prefers what you have to offer. According to Marketing Sherpa, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of nurture is the main cause for this.
No control over speed as at some point, it requires a lot of time for results to be accomplished. B2B marketers say their greatest barriers with lead generation are the lack of resources in staffing, budgeting, and/or time.68% of businesses report struggling with lead generation (Source: CSO Insights)
DEMAND GEN VS. LEAD GEN
What’s the difference between demand generation and lead generation? Simply, demand generation is the process of getting people interested in what you have to sell (creating demand); lead generation is the task of turning that interest into names and contact details (leads) that you or your sales teams can follow up with.
Demand generation takes prospects all the way from establishing their awareness that they have a problem you can solve, through increasing trust and confidence in your brand, to definite interest in what your solutions can do for them.
It might include raising awareness of your product features and why they matter, sharing thought leadership content that demonstrates your sector expertise, distributing free resources and tools that show how useful you and your services can be, or sharing influencing posts from your leadership that showcase your brand values. Lead generation translates the interest that all of this activity creates into something tangible and actionable.
The most obvious difference between a demand generation campaign and a lead generation campaign is therefore whether the campaign asks for contact information or not. If you gate your content behind a form asking for contact details, and then pay to distribute it to a target audience, then you are running a lead generation campaign.
Your main objective for that piece of activity isn’t to get as many people as possible engaging with your content – it’s to capture as many leads as possible by giving people a reason to share contact details and making it easy for them to do so.
On the other hand, if you make content freely accessible, and then pay to distribute it to as many relevant people as you can, then you are in the business of generating demand. You’re paying to have as many people as possible engage with what you have to say, learn more about your business and your point of view, appreciate your expertise, and start to think about why they might want to buy from you. You want as little friction as possible getting in the way of that happening.
So far, so simple: demand generation doesn’t prioritise capturing people’s contact details; lead generation does. Is that the most obvious difference between them? It certainly should be. But is it the only difference that matters? Of course it isn’t.
Part of the reason that demand generation and lead generation tend to get confused is that they use many of the same tools and tactics. They both benefit from compelling, relevant content, and they both depend on smart, precise targeting to be effective. However, demand generation and lead generation use targeting and content for different purposes.
