What is Demand Generation?

Marketing your business can feel like an uphill battle, but it all comes down to making your target audience care about what you’re selling.

What’s the best way to do that? Shifting their perspective so they understand not just what you do, but what problem you solve. Help them recognize they need what you offer to create a demand for your products or services.

This process is called demand generation.

If you do it well, demand generation can create awareness with your desired audiences, deliver more qualified leads to your sales team, and help link your marketing efforts to revenue.

Overview of Demand Generation

Demand generation is creating interest in your products or services to build a healthy pipeline of qualified leads for your sales team.

It’s a broad term covering all your marketing and sales initiatives at every stage of the sales funnel. When you can provide valuable information to the right audience at the right time, you can develop awareness and demand for what you sell.

The best demand generation strategies consider every step in the buyer’s journey, from the first time someone interacts with your company, to the moment they become a customer. Demand generation initiatives should align your marketing and sales teams to help grow your business.

Why is Demand Generation Important?

Demand generation is vital as it helps position you differently with potential customers. Rather than focusing on selling your solution, demand generation creates awareness of a need.

If you help audiences understand they have a need and how that need affects their businesses, they are more likely to be receptive to sales messaging that will come later.

If you want to grow your business, you’ll need to develop a robust pipeline of new customers. Demand generation places the focus on being attentive to their needs and creating awareness and interest before selling. If you can optimize every point of contact you have with your target audiences, you can increase the quality of the leads you’re bringing in through the funnel.

Demand generation also helps create interest and awareness so that you become a trusted source of information. It helps you create more thoughtful and cohesive marketing outreach to improve people’s experience when interacting with your company.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation

Demand generation and lead generation aren’t quite the same, so let’s look at each one to get an idea of where they overlap and where they differ.

They’re similar in that they share the ultimate goal of growing your business and increasing sales, and they both work to attract new customers to your business. However, the approach and immediate goals are quite different.

Lead Generation

Lead generation, also known as lead gen, focuses on gaining a person’s information in exchange for content. The goal is to gain that contact information to facilitate contact and engagement for sales and marketing purposes.

Lead generation assumes your audience already knows they have a …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog