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What is the difference between demand generation vs lead generation? And where does one end and the other begin?
You've probably heard both tactics used interchangeably or that one is more important than the other.
The difference lies in the fact that demand generation is focused on brand awareness activities to attract potential buyers, while lead generation is focused on converting those potential buyers into qualified leads.
When you use these two powerful strategies, you’re able to increase your ROI and improve your marketing and sales funnel.
By the end of this article, you’ll understand the clear difference between demand generation and lead generation, how they work well together to help your business succeed.
If you're buzzing to get your lead generation campaign off the ground, don’t miss this video—it’s packed with tips and strategies to help you launch a successful campaign and attract the right leads!
Demand generation is the act of driving awareness for a product, brand or service to generate new interest from a wider audience or niched clientele.
In other words, brand awareness is the driving force behind demand generation. There cannot be a demand for your product or service if no one knows it exists. That’s why this is one of the most successful methods of increasing visibility in your market space.
Demand generation is primarily focused on top of the funnel (TOFU) activities that promote awareness and interest. such as webinars, social media, blogs and partnerships, to name a few, t
Ultimately, this helps position your brand as a solution to a problem your ideal customer needs to solve.
Demand generation includes using content types, activities and strategies such as:
Lead generation is the process of attracting interested potential customers so that they can be converted into a lead or a prospect. Unlike demand generation, which focuses on awareness and interest, the goal of lead generation is collecting data from a lead that can be used to nurture them into paying customers.
Lead generation works with an audience that already has some form of awareness/information about your brand. The ulate goal is to a move them from a lead to an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), then to an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).
That's why a lead generation strategy doesn't stop at TOFU activities alone. It includes the middle (MOFU) to bottom of the funnel (BOFU) activities, which are closely integrated with your sales cycles.
The data collected in the lead generation process, which can include a name, contact information, position and other details, allows the sales team to:
Lead generation includes using content types, activities and strategies such as:
So, how are demand generation and lead generation different? This question gets asked a lot, even by seasoned marketers, because there are many misconceptions around them.
While both are important, they are very different strategies, but they can work together symbiotically. In fact, their differences are what make them both work so well, either alone or together.
Below, we’ll dive into these key differences so you’ll have a better understanding of their metrics, channels, expectations and more:
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Based on what we’ve covered so far, you can see how demand and lead generation work well together.
Without demand, you won’t have enough leads to qualify, and without lead generation, you’ll lose the opportunity to convert potential buyers into qualified leads.
Summing it up, where demand generation ends, lead generation begins. This creates an ongoing cycle that helps both the marketing and sales teams work in sync to generate the most and best leads possible.
Now that we’re clear on this, what does that actually look like in real life, and better yet, how do you make them work together effectively?
In this section, we’ll show you the steps needed to create a seamless demand generation to lead generation process, along with a few tips, tools and ready-to-use templates.
Marketing and sales play crucial roles in both demand generation and lead generation, working together to drive business growth. For:
Demand Generation: The marketing team is the primary driver of demand generation. By leveraging content marketing, SEO, social media campaigns, webinars, and PR efforts, they aim to build brand recognition and educate potential customers. Marketing liaison with sales to understand what type of content needs to be created to attract the right audience.
Lead Generation: Once demand is established, marketing and sales collaborate on lead generation. Marketing focuses on capturing potential customer information through tactics like landing pages, gated content, and email campaigns. They help qualify these leads, transforming marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
From there, the sales team takes over, converting these qualified leads into customers. They engage directly with prospects, using personalized communication and sales strategies to address specific needs and close deals.
This process requires strong alignment between marketing and sales to ensure smooth handoffs and consistent messaging. A Linkedin Business Report found that 87% of sales and marketing leaders believe collaboration between these teams is crucial for business growth, with highly aligned teams driving 208% more revenue.
Yet, many businesses focus on revamping the buyer's journey or adopting new tools instead of focusing on the most important strategy: clear communication and goal-setting between marketing and sales.
According to HubSpot's 2024 State of Sales Report, 52.2% of sales professionals said the biggest impact of sales and marketing team misalignment is lost sales and revenue.
All that to say misalignment is not only costly but can build a huge gap between your lead and demand generation.
So, let’s admit it here and now, marketing and sales are known to be plagued with a silo mentality. When marketing and sales are doing their own thing with no alignment, the disconnect that happens results in poor leads and low prospects.
Here are two simple but extremely effective ways to fix that:
Before the end of the quarter, host a meeting with the sales and marketing teams. Quarterly meetings are just often enough to keep on top of crucial projects without taking too much time away from your teams.
To make the most of your sales-marketing meetings, you can ask the following questions:
While you’re hosting these meetings, you can turn them into a quick whiteboard brainstorming session or use a meeting agenda template to keep track of topics in the interest of time.
You can even use Visme’s Brand Wizard to ensure that your templates match company branding. Simply input your website URL and watch the AI-powered Brand Wizard at work.
You can use this quarterly team meeting template to kick off your session or dive into the extensive library of Visme’s whiteboard templates to find one that suits your needs. You can make any of these interactive, add data visualization to share stats or share and publish as a live link to reflect real-time updates.
Use Visme’s collaborative and workflow features to invite team members and work simultaneously on projects, add comments, assign tasks or make changes in real-time. Or, take full control and decide who gets to view, comment on, or edit your whiteboard with your user controls.
Talking about your goals is easy, but having them written clearly for anyone on the team to see is another thing.
Researcher and psychologist Gail Matthews found that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if they are written down. This applies to both personal and professional settings.
So where are your sales and marketing goals written?
If you haven’t fully documented your goals or KPIs, try using the S.M.A.R.T goals method. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
Maybe you’re short on time to gather the team and write all of these down. In that case, use the power of AI to get your SMART goals written and ready for you. With Visme’s AI Document Generator, you can create a first draft in a template that suits your style in seconds.
You can also jump into the AI Writer and use it to summarize all of your team’s ideation sessions into the SMART goals format, allowing you to save time to focus on the work involved in meeting these goals.
If you already have SMART goals, then you can do the following:
When it comes to content marketing, you’ll find that some demand and lead generation strategies will need complementary content types. After all, they are the main forms of inbound marketing.
However, because lead and demand generation objectives are based on their goals and positioning in marketing, their content types must reflect this differentiation.
Remember, demand generation focuses more on top of the funnel content, where lead generation focuses on bottom of the funnel content. They overlap when it comes to the middle of the funnel content types, as that’s where the viewer’s chances of converting into a potential lead increases.
Lead generation can also be seen as sales enablement content, whereas demand generation is not.
Here are a few main examples of how both demand and lead generation work perfectly when using content marketing:
Visuals play a key role in grabbing and retaining your audience's attention, no matter how good your copy or content may be. You can use eye-catching infographics to break down complex data, or beautiful graphics to draw your readers to your in-blog CTAs.
Visme allows you to create and add striking graphics, icons, royalty-free images or videos, motion graphics, and even 3D animations. And, if you’re struggling to find the perfect image or graphic, use the AI image generator. Instantly bring your idea to life as with a single prompt.
Visme also offers a suite of AI Editing tools, to resize, unblur, sharpen images, to name a few. So, whether you’re a DIY marketer or a seasoned designer, Visme's visual resources and tools are easy to use, making it simple to create compelling content.
Real-Life Example: Visme has a blog focused on providing educational content regarding content creation, marketing, sales and design to equip readers to tackle these challenges with confidence. Like the blog you're reading now!
Our blog addresses commonly searched pain points throughout, and smartly placed CTA’s and links drive interest in our products as the solution.
If you need help creating eye-catching interactive, animated lead magnets or popups for your blog, Visme Forms is a game-changing, no-code form builder proven to increase conversions by as much as 207%. Click here to see how quickly and effectively Visme Forms can work for you.
Real-Life Example: Lucky Orange is a SaaS company that regularly partners with brands to craft amazing webinars. By partnering with brands, they’re able to tap into another brand's audience for brand awareness through promotion and email campaigns. They can drive more attendees with great topics and build trust carried over by the participating brands.
After the webinar is finished, you can turn it into gated content. You can instantly start funneling the emails of the attendees into an email campaign to convert them into leads.
Since both lead and demand generation use top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, it's common for them to leverage free resources or tools, often in the form of lead magnets, to generate brand awareness and leads.
Real-Life Example: CoSchedule, an all-in-one marketing calendar for social media, blog content, and more, caters to a broad segment of marketers. It employs a combined method of demand and lead generation using free resources and tools to meet potential customers and leads based on their current needs. For example:
By using these two strategies, CoSchedule takes a 360-approach to getting more customers at different stages of their journey, offering valuable tools while generating demand and capturing leads.
Other resources that can be used to master both lead and demand generation include, but are not limited to:
Lead scoring is the method of assigning a numerical value to a lead.
Sender found that 75% of businesses see increased conversion rates with lead scoring, proving its effectiveness.
The higher the score, the higher the likelihood that this lead will turn into a paying customer.
For example, a lead that booked a demo has a higher lead score than a lead that signed up for a newsletter. Both are obtained from demand and lead generation but are scored differently.
This is why, earlier, we spoke about ensuring that the marketing and sales teams are aligned and on the same page. By doing that, marketing should have a clear idea of how a lead is scored based on what actions or part of the funnel the potential lead has taken to be qualified by the sales team.
Once this is done, marketing can provide sales with qualified leads, ensuring efficient use of the sales team's time and resources. Sales can provide insights on lead quality, and marketing can track the buyer's journey to optimize their strategies.
Teams have to ensure that their demand generation and lead qualification activities are coordinated so that the lead management process is smoothly producing qualified leads.
This working method helps both teams master the demand generation best practices that will bring in the right potential leads using a top-to-bottom approach.
If your team is already using Hubspot or Salesforce as a CRM to help track and manage lead scoring, you can easily integrate it with Visme to create an all-in-one workspace so your marketing and sales team are always in sync.
Still, have some burning questions about demand generation? We've compiled a list of commonly asked questions, along with their answers, that you might find helpful:
A demand generation strategy focuses on creating a demand for a specific product or service by targeting potential customers.
Demand generation is also used mainly to position the brand as a solution to the customers unmet needs or pain points. On the other hand, brand generation, or brand awareness, aims to build brand recognition and loyalty by creating a positive, memorable brand image in the minds of consumers.
Demand creation is geared towards identifying a niched audience or market and strategizing how your brand, product or service can solve their main pain points. On the other hand, demand generation is the execution of specific marketing activities to drive interest to the selected target audience.
The stages of demand generation include: finding your ideal target audience; creating valuable content and offers; using the right distribution channels within your marketing funnel; and effectively converting potential customers into leads using lead generation.
Yes. Since demand generation is focused on driving interest and awareness from potential customers by providing valuable information and highlights of their pain points, it’s mostly used for the top of the funnel (TOFU) in marketing initiatives.
The two most successful demand generation tactics are content marketing and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). This is because both cater to long-form strategy planning needed to drive the best ROI when executing demand generation.
Content marketing includes creating and distributing engaging and relevant content to attract potential customers.
It utilizes SEO to drive brand awareness and education to drive interest. Content marketing is also created with demand and lead generation in mind.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is driven by finding high-value accounts, companies or brands with personalized campaigns to acquire more qualified prospects and leads.
But webinars are also considered a must-have and should be added to any B2B demand generation strategies.
While demand generation requires a well-thought-out strategy and consistent execution over a long period of time, whether it’s hard or not is subjective.
It’s important to have clear demand generation KPIs and understand that your ROI will start to increase over time.
This comes with having a great understanding of your target audience, creating valuable content, leveraging the right channels and aligning sales and marketing efforts.
Demand generation isn’t hard; it just requires a lot of time, effort and resources to pull it off.
Both lead generation and demand generation are crucial to quality leads. They each have different purposes that greatly complement each other.
To help effectively bridge the gap between lead generation and demand generation, you’ll need an all-in-one solution that allows your marketing and sales team to work effectively together.
With Visme Forms, you can start creating demand and generating leads. Its interactive and animated features have been proven to increase lead conversion rates up to 40% and reduce the estimated cost per acquisition up to 18%, so you can do more than collect leads and drive revenue to your business.
With our easy-to-use, no-code builder, anyone with little to no design skills can create lead forms, contact forms, popup forms, feedback forms, registration forms and much more.
Curious to see Visme Forms in action? Click here to create your own form for free!
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