In the digital marketing world, two terms often get tossed around: marketing and sales related activities including Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation. Though they course through the same general function of capturing the attention of potential consumers, they are quite unique in their function. Awareness of this distinction is crucial in order to lay down a correct marketing plan that translate curiosity into paying clients.
Demand Generation: Sowing the Interest Seed
You may want to think of demand generation as being the e-mail that leads to initial interest, or sets the initial flame for your offering or the particular industry you are in. It centers on creating awareness of the issues people encounter in their daily lives and how your industry can help.
Here's what demand generation aims to achieve:
Build Brand Awareness: Increase the population’s awareness of your company and your reputation as an industry expert.
Educate the Market: Create high-quality content that will help people understand trends in the industry, basic issues that occur and probable ways to deal with them.
Generate Interest: Create interest and the need to know more about the particular kind of product or services in your category.
Demand Generation in Practice
Content Marketing: Write blog articles, infographics, ebooks, and white papers that are related to the issues that companies face.
Social Media Marketing: Contribute to online conversations, target groups and forums and spread opinion and intellectual pieces.
Public Relations: Interview with a news source or a tv show to gain a larger audience of the news shared.
Industry Events: Speak at industry conferences and events and also attend trade shows and webinars so that you can build your specialty brand.
Lead Generation: Defining and attracting the right audience
After you have created awareness and educated the public, lead generation sets in. This process entails the act of searching for those people who have previously expressed an interest in the products or services of a firm.
Here's the key objective of lead generation:
Capture Contact Information: Website visitors can be turned into marketing-quality leads if you give visitors something of value (an ebook or a webclass) in return for their information.
Nurture Leads: Deliver product specific or service specific communique that informs leads on aspects concerning your offerings and portrays your company as the solution.
Qualify Leads: There are always potential clients with higher likelihood of changing to customers; these should be forwarded to the sales team.
Telemarketing Lead Generation Processes at Work
Landing Pages: Organic Content Marketing: it involves creating special Web pages with specific Calls To Action that leads to the downloading of content or signing up for a free trial.
Email Marketing: Create a set of email marketing selling your solutions and involving valuable tips to your leads.
Marketing Automation: Marketing automation to ensure delivery of custom information and updates at the right time to the leads.
Paid Advertising: For instance, use advertisements that will appear on facebook or Google because these customers are likely to be searching for a solution.
The Takeaway: Why People Work: Cooperation and Accomplishment
Actually, demand generation and lead generation strategies do not compete with each other but are aligned in their purpose. Demand generation creates the awareness that leads to the need, while lead generation nurtures that need into ready markets. As you look at the different strategies that are at your disposal, it is important to comprehend the role that each one of them plays in ensuring that you establish a seamless marketing funnel for your business; one that will attract the right traffic to your site, nurture and eventually convert these prospects into customers.
