We’re bringing the ClearEdge team directly to you with our new short-form video series, Spark the Space, designed to energize and elevate your marketing game!
In this episode, Nikki Leonardi, ClearEdge Marketing Strategist joins Devyn Gaydos to clear the air around two of the most often confused marketing terms: demand generation and lead generation.
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation with Nikki Leonardi
What Is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is any activity that is focused on increasing brand awareness and generating interest in and understanding of a product or service.
Demand generation activities would be things like:
- Informative blog posts on industry trends or market interests
- Hosting free webinars with top-of-funnel education
- Running social media campaigns with educational content
- SEO website content that can be found through search engines.
Demand generation efforts aim to build trust, authority, and credibility with your audience while positioning your brand as the solution to challenges.
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is any activity that is focused on converting brand-aware prospects into qualified leads for sales follow-up.
Lead gen activities would be things like:
- Offering downloadable content like a white paper in exchange for someone’s contact information
- Running target ads with clear calls to action (CTAs) for free trials, a demo, etc.
- Pop-up forms on websites.
Lead generation aims to convert interested people into actionable leads ready for sales engagement.
How to Align Demand Generation and Lead Generation in Your Marketing Strategy
When it comes to demand gen and lead gen, it’s a matter of how to utilize both rather than one or the other.
To align the role that they each play in your current strategy, take a look at the data. Are you getting leads? If so, how ready to buy are they? Are they within your ICP (ideal customer profile)?
If you’re getting leads, but they’re not converting…you likely need to up your demand generation efforts.
If you’re not getting leads…you likely need to up your lead generation efforts.
The fact of the matter is that lead generation works better when prospects are pre-educated and ready to buy. So when in doubt, go for a demand-first approach to build a strong pipeline of engaged, informed, and active leads.
How to Use Demand Generation and Lead Generation Effectively
You know you need to have both in your marketing strategy…but how do you actually do that?
Plan for Both From the Start
No matter your marketing goals, you need to have both demand gen and lead gen activities in your plans. When you’re building your marketing campaigns, what demand gen are you doing? What about lead gen? Can you point to which activities support which goals?
Focus on Content
How are you utilizing your content for both demand and lead gen efforts? If you’re writing a lot of top-of-funnel content, like “What is…” blog posts, you’re doing the demand gen work.
But how can you develop the lead gen side of things? Consider adding more bottom-of-funnel content like case studies, whitepapers, testimonials, etc. that help people envision you as their business partner rather than just their teacher.
Measurement
It all comes back to data! Make sure you’re tracking the right KPIs and metrics for each kind of effort. For demand generation efforts, consider metrics like website traffic numbers, social engagement rate, and content performance metrics.
For lead generation, it’s pretty simple. How many leads are you driving? Beyond direct lead numbers, you can also look at things like click-through rate, conversion rate, and lead value.
Consistency and Patience Will Win
Avoid constantly changing your strategies. Marketing takes time and you need to let your messaging and content simmer for a bit to see how they’re working. Demand generation efforts often take a bit longer to gain traction, whereas lead generation tends to be quicker, but you still need to be patient with both.
If you want more Spark the Space, see all the videos here!