Blog Post

Demand Generation

Growth

Demand Generation vs Lead Generation: What's the Difference?

It's normal to ask if there is a difference between demand generation vs. lead generation. On the surface, they sound like two sides of the same coin—like calling your pipeline the Buyer's Journey vs. a Sales Funnel.

But demand gen and lead gen are different concepts.

Understanding that difference transforms the effectiveness of B2B SaaS marketing strategies. It re-focuses your efforts on what matters at the end of the day—the quality of the lead.

At the same time, you'll avoid wasting your limited time, resources, and talent on leads who will never—I repeat "never"—become paying customers.

When you're finished here, you'll know the difference and how/when to use both to get more out of your SaaS marketing.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: The Definition

Demand Generation is the act of deploying marketing campaigns to create demand for a product or service. It uses data to determine when, where, and how to accomplish this effectively.

Lead Generation is the act of leveraging marketing to collect contact information from people who may be interested in your product or service now or in the future.

The Purpose

With demand generation, you create buzz. Get the right people excited and talking about a problem your SaaS fixes. You want them to want you and see you as the solution to their business problems. As demand progresses, you become the missing link to meeting their goals, something they can't do without.

While demand gen does generate leads through landing pages, its purpose is to play the long game. You want awareness and positioning that can only happen over time.

By doing so, demand generation expands your reach and becomes a magnet for your ideal customers.

Lead generation, on the other hand, focuses on capturing identifying information, like an email. This allows you to personalize and continually improve the effectiveness of your nurturing.

Through it, you achieve a higher and faster MQL-to-SQL and Lead-to-Close Ratio in the shorter term. You increase your ability to deliver the most relevant marketing messages and content.

Additionally, that data reveals the precise moment a lead meets qualified lead criteria. This makes it possible to time the hand-off to sales and Speed the Lead expertly.

In the long term, you're gathering both quantitative and qualitative data. This helps you understand which leads are worth your time and energy. What are the signs that a lead is ripe for a conversation with sales?

Now, take this information back to the demand generation side. Through it, you improve your demand generation targeting precision.

And it comes full circle.

You have a clearer understanding of who to target. As a result, you generate demand from the right people, refining your top-of-funnel.

In doing so, you generate higher quality leads. And the cycle begins again, leading to exponential outcomes.

So it's no wonder 78% of marketers say they plan to commit a higher percentage of the marketing budget to demand gen, or at least keep it the same. While the top priority is generating leads, they recognize demand gen is critical to meeting that KPI.

Timing

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation isn't an either/or proposition. You need both to grow your company effectively, but timing matters.

You have to create the buzz first. Any lead generation efforts will trickle if you're not implementing strategies to generate that demand first.

You can break this timing down into three stages of awareness:

  • Stage 1. Non-aware. They don't even know they have a problem. Top-of-funnel (ToF)
  • Stage 2. Problem-aware. They know about the problem but not how to fix it. Middle-of-funnel (MoF)
  • Stage 3. Solution aware. They know solutions exist but aren't sure which is right for them. Bottom-of-funnel (BoF)

This all comes down to the right message, the right time. One way to achieve this timing is through educational content.

This serves two primary purposes.

  1. It generates awareness. Of the problem, then the solution.
  2. It builds authority. Why should people listen to you in the first place? Content builds your authority and expertise. At the end of the day, they have a reason to choose your brand over another.

You'll focus on creating demand by ensuring the right people see the right content at the right time. To this end, specific content formats work well at each stage.

  • Stage 1. Non-aware. Make it easy and "low-risk" to start learning about their problem. Become present where they are but don't push them. Use long-form guides, blog posts, etc.
  • Stage 2. Problem-aware. Get them to take action toward learning more in-depth information. At the same time, you build trust and authority. Offer white papers, eBooks.
  • Stage 3. Solution aware. Help them finalize their decision. Share case studies, free trials, and demos.

Timing matters. Throwing problem-aware and solution-aware content at non-aware people will bounce right off. Sadly, a lot of B2B companies are doing just that.

Only 2% of B2B companies create non-aware content at ToF. This represents a tremendous opportunity for those who do.

At any given time, many more people don't know they have a problem.

Creating Demand

The gurus can argue all day long about whether demand is created or products merely fill a void already there. Both are true to some extent.

The problem exists. It's real, and it's impactful.

But with so many moving pieces in the typical business, it's not always easy for your future customers to name it, let alone find a fix.

If people aren't talking about the problem, few are aware of how impactful it is. They don't know others share the same frustrations. So it doesn't cross their minds that there could be a better way.

You need to create that buzz. That's where demand comes from.

By doing so, you start a chain reaction.

More leads. Better leads. More Leads. Better leads. Higher and higher revenues. Exponential growth.

Time to Create that Demand

It's all about timing. It's time to take your business to its next growth stage—generate demand, so high-quality leads come to you.

Curious about the power of demand gen? See how Dropbox increased targeting engagement by 6.5X.

Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

Blog Post

How To Leverage Growth Marketing

Traditional marketing is where brands broadcast a one-size-fits-all marketing message describing the product’s features. It is expensive, broad, and doesn’t consider the unique requirements of the customer.

This doesn’t work well for budding businesses that are targeting a particular niche and have a limited marketing budget.

Enter growth marketing

Growth marketing focuses on sending personalized customer-centric messages to the target audience explaining how the product will give them the value they are looking for.

In this article, you’ll learn what makes growth marketing unique, its strategy and characteristics, and how you can leverage it.

Growth Marketing Vs. Regular Marketing

Growth marketing attracts prospects, keeps them hooked, and turns them into loyal buyers. With techniques such as content marketing and lead nurturing, customers are nudged through the funnel until they make a purchase. 

Various marketing channels are auto-optimized through the latest tools and data-backed processes for sustainable growth. The primary advantage of growth marketing is that it nurtures customer relationships and increases your average customer lifetime value.

Traditional marketing approaches include ideation of marketing operations, publishing the ad copy and design, implementing Call-To-Actions (CTAs), outlining the ad spend for the campaign, and so on. 

All these efforts follow a traditional “set it and forget it” strategy. This strategy is great for increasing brand awareness by focusing on the top of the sales funnel.

The image below highlights the difference between traditional and growth marketing.

Source: Mondial Trends. A graphic showing the differences between traditional and growth marketing.

What a Growth Marketing Strategy Includes

Market Penetration

Growth marketers exclusively focus on the niche where you offer products/services or look for potential customers in your competitors' niche to penetrate the market better.

This growth hacking technique pushes brands to look for differentiators. Here, growth marketers answer two specific questions:

  1. What sets you apart from your competition?
  2. What are the specific areas you are better than your rivals?

Strategic Collaborations and Partnerships

Growth marketing teams facilitate rapid growth by finding and teaming up with other brands that offer products your target audience uses — for instance, telecom providers partnering with smartphone manufacturers.

Apart from keeping customer acquisition costs low, this strategy could get you lots of new customers and result in sustainable growth. Sometimes, you might have to create new products or services to form a partnership.

Market Development

This strategy involves running growth marketing campaigns where you advertise the products or services to new markets to facilitate demand generation. It is done in two ways:

  1. Targeting new niches and buyer personas.
  2. Moving to new geographic regions.

Product Development

Your product development growth strategy has to be tailored to your brand’s specific needs. To attain rapid growth, you should diversify your marketing efforts to find creative solutions in the following ways:

  • Product Updates. Build on what you have (this is also great for customer retention). 
  • New Products. A great way to enter new markets and target different user personas.

Characteristics of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Data-driven

Before growth marketers invest in a new marketing tactic aiming for rapid growth, the idea has to be backed by data. As growth marketing tactics involve taking risks, intuitions and “do this because competitors are too” have no place.

Read: “How to Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy.”

Product Focused

Your business needs to consistently improve its product to remain competitive in the market. Whether it is adding more features or functionalities, your product needs to evolve with the changing needs of your target audience. 

Growth marketing facilitates this by collecting data that can guide this product development and keep your target audience updated about the values you offer.

Limited fear of failure

Apart from being data-driven, the high success rate of growth marketing can be attributed to the diversification of efforts. With multiple marketing strategies at play at once, the best growth marketers keep a close eye on the numbers and scale up the efforts that have the highest marketing ROI.

Storytelling

Considering our endless appetites for stories, growth marketers use a story where a person with similar problems to the target audience gets their problem solved with their product. This makes the brand’s message more realistic and relatable, motivating more prospects to make a purchase.

Retargeting

Retargeting reminds your website visitors, prospects, leads, and customers about the value your product offers. This also keeps the customer acquisition costs low.

Should You Hire a Growth Hacker or Outsource Growth Marketing to an Agency?

Having an in-house growth marketer has the following pros:

  1. They will be familiar with your product and processes completely.
  2. 100% dedication towards your brand growth.
  3. You can gain a lot of insights into your industry.

However, it is challenging for the following reasons:

  1. It's expensive to hire new professionals, get new tools, and set up new growth marketing strategies.
  2. After some time, they could run out of ideas by falling into a "creative rut".
  3. You still have to pay your growth marketing team even if you pause your strategy. 

Growing brands with a limited budget risk a lot in this scenario.

In these instances, outsourcing growth marketing to an established agency such as Matter Made is ideal because:

  1. You get experienced, accountable professionals.
  2. It’s cost-efficient; pay until you are leveraging their services.
  3. You will be kept in the loop at every stage through timely reports.
  4. You can reinvest the saved resources elsewhere.
  5. You get expertise from successful growth marketers. 

Growth Hacking, Demand Generation, and Matter Made

Matter Made has helped product-led companies like Dropbox and Loom achieve hypergrowth through demand generation, product-led growth, and bespoke growth strategies

Our seasoned marketing team can help your brand achieve similar results.

Interested in knowing what a growth marketing strategy brings to the table for your brand? Let’s talk.

Ready to drive efficient demand?

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