Demand Generation and Lead Generation in a parallel

Are you running a business? Or let me globalize,

If you are an entrepreneur you very well know what I am trying to plug into – “Demand and Lead”

In Economics verbiage demand will be simply “The want or desire to procure goods and services”

When we crave for something, we definitely tend to search for it, or may even buy it.

Which is the best out of two situations?

Let’s not make a choice so early

In this article,

I have explained what is Lead generation and Demand generation and what makes them more of a coincidence and not being mutually exclusive of itself.

So, keep learning!

For a business, it is absolutely crucial to establish it’s brand’s goodwill be it the service it offers or a good that it sells.

For fulfilling any of those purposes demand is a major factor.

How does a business generate demand for its product or service? 

• Social Media Post
• Whitepapers
• Video Content
• Podcast
• Blogs
• E-newsletters

This is also known as Inbound Marketing strategies.

“Lead generation is a marketing argot which simply means an inquiry made by a potential buyer or subscriber reckoned as a lead”

How the company generates a lead? 

• Sign up form
• Live Chat
• Pop up forms
• E-mail Marketing
• Social Media
• Online Marketing
• Questionnaire or Newsletter subscriptions, etc.

But wait a minute,

Why does this sound similar?

“Creating demand for your brand is the first step to spread your brand’s presence across the market we can also call it branding in short”

Generating leads is what we expect by publishing and posting contents all over the social networking channels.

What works for Demand generation might not play the trick for lead generation

Demand illustrates the intensity or emotion of the consumer towards a particular brand.

As I said before, demand for a brand can be created by marketing them,

Using content marketing strategies like –

• Creating quality content using quality visuals.
• Engaging with people openly and creating interactive communities.
• Engaging more video content.
• Become more of a giver than a taker.
• Provide solutions for problems.

In short, try to be a solution provider and target larger rooms and don’t be just restricted to quality leads relevant audience.

Demand generation is more of a long-term goal where quick results do not play any major significance whereas Lead generation strategy varies according to objectives of collecting prospects information.

Did you know?

“63% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge” (Source -HubSpot)

Lead generation has become increasingly difficult as individuals are concerned regarding sharing their personal information with businesses as they may be subjective to the potential danger of being misused by businesses for their profit motives.

LinkedIn used as a lead generation machine – 

Right from the beginning, LinkedIn has become a tool for professionals and conglomerates to dig deeper into personal and individual profiles and collect information.

It has become a directory for personal and professional information.

Some Interesting facts about LinkedIn you would like to know

• 30 million companies have LinkedIn profiles.
• 50 percent of B2B web traffic originating from social media comes from LinkedIn.
• 94 percent of B2B marketers on social media use LinkedIn to publish content (Hootsuite – Source)

Popular Marketing automation tools (Customer Relationship Management Tools) –

• Zoho Office Suite
• HubSpot
• Marketo

Digital Marketing strategies that would help in demand generation –

• Search Engine Optimization –

(SEO) can help increase the engagement as it would help your blogs rank higher on a search engine and in turn, increase its reach and spread.

• Social Media Optimization –

(SMO) will increase your social engagements and may even provide you valuable likes, shares, and feedback’s.

• Social Media Marketing –

(SMM) as we all know is promoting your brand on social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. using paid options available.

Organic reach vs Paid Reach

If you are using social media to promote your brand you would have already noticed that your posts engagement on social sites has reduced drastically and you hardly attain any good level of appraisal for your posts.

And the harsh truth is that it’s getting bad to worse day by day.

Have you ever wondered why is that so?

Social media algorithms are getting updated consistently and with every new update, the measure of performance of a post is also changing.

What content used to perform well for you on a social site might not do that well after a major update.

Leveraging video contents on Social sites tends to perform well these days.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn provide 3 times more engagement on videos than on Info graphic visuals and regular posts

So, businesses are allocating more budgets for paid advertisements and online ad campaigns as it delivers results exponentially.

Conclusion –
Demand Generation and Lead generations are part and parcel of our marketing efforts, but the strategy and approach for creating demand for our brand may be different from that what we may use for generating leads.

Demand creation is associated with branding and lead generation is to conversion optimization.