Demand generation is the set of marketing activities designed to create awareness and interest in your product or service among your target audience. It is one of the primary responsibilities of a marketing team and a critical input into your revenue pipeline.
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation encompasses every activity that creates awareness, builds interest, and generates leads. This includes content marketing, paid advertising, email campaigns, webinars, social media, and outbound prospecting. The goal is to fill the top of your sales funnel with qualified opportunities.
Demand Generation vs Lead Generation
Demand generation and lead generation are related but different. Demand generation focuses on creating awareness and interest in a broad audience. Lead generation focuses on converting that interest into specific, identifiable leads. Both are part of a complete marketing operations function.
How Demand Generation Fits into Marketing Operations
Marketing Operations provides the systems and infrastructure that make demand generation scalable. Your CRM like HubSpot captures and manages every lead your demand generation activities produce. Your analytics tools like Google Analytics measure which activities are generating the most qualified pipeline. Your outbound tools like Apollo support the prospecting side of your demand generation efforts.
Measuring Demand Generation Performance
Track demand generation performance through pipeline metrics rather than activity metrics. The question is not how many leads you generated but how much qualified pipeline those leads created and how much of that pipeline converted to closed revenue.
