Learn The Difference Between a Demand Generation Company And a Lead Generation Company

 Companies have explored numerous lead generation marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and generate more leads in the last few years.

Of all, demand generation services and lead generation services are the ones that make up for a large chunk of inbound sales. 

But often, marketers tend to use both terms interchangeably when both are different.

The fact is that while both share some similar traits, the way they approach things is different. However, having a clear understanding of both terms helps create better campaigns and thus generate more leads.

So, let’s get to know some of the major differences between lead generation and demand generation and how a demand generation company that provides the best lead generation services can help generate B2B sales leads.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is all about creating demand for your product in the market before gathering leads or pushing for conversion. Organizations wanting to expand their customer base can leverage this strategy. It’s not a one-step strategy but a process in itself.

Demand generation makes use of data-driven strategies to create awareness.

It helps introduce new visitors to your business, who mostly qualify as high-quality leads when done perfectly.   

In fact, lead generation is one of the many available demand generation strategies.

Some of the best examples of demand generation services are: Content syndication, thought leadership content, brand awareness campaigns, event promotion, display ads etc.

Some of the best demand generation companies will help you reach a vast audience, creates buzz, and drives traffic to convert to a particular website.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation focuses on converting audiences into prospects who might be interested in your company’s product and services.

It is ultimately the result of good demand generation campaigns.

There are multiple ways to convert leads into customers. The actual ideas that demand generation companies implement depend on the company’s needs and the type of business it is into.

Some of the best examples of lead generation include gated content, social media, white papers and case studies, webinars and infographics etc.

What’s the difference between demand generation and lead generation?

It can be said that while demand generation is based on marketing campaigns and helps create demand for your company, lead generation is based on campaigns that help collect information about potential customers and then turns them into leads.

They differ in purpose as well. While the purpose of demand generation is to create excitement about your company’s product or service and make people want to buy from you, lead generation aims to capture information about potential buyers to generate high quality leads for your company.

One of the major differences between them is that demand generation is a top of the funnel activity, while lead generation is a the bottom of the funnel activity.

Demand generation is a marketing strategy that contributes to bringing awareness before the B2B marketing lead generation kicks off. At the same time, B2B lead generation involves attracting, nurturing, generating and converting B2B sales leads.

Who does demand generation?

Generally speaking, both the sales and marketing teams execute demand generation activities, but it all depends on where each activity sits in your sales strategy.

The process involves doing in-depth research about your market, creating and promoting your content, and fine-tuning the customer experience with your brand.

This isn’t it. There are other activities, such as lead nurturing and customer retention, that the sales teams need to take care of.

This is where demand generation companies can help by bringing their expertise in finding ways to align with other teams across your organization to help you conquer new markets.

Who conducts B2B lead generation?

B2B lead generation is a process managed by sales and marketing teams. They either work in tandem or individually.

Though for B2B lead generation service to be effective, it is preferred that the sales and marketing teams are closely aligned, involving both inbound and outbound efforts.

The best lead generation companies help businesses reach the ideal prospect by giving warmed up and qualified leads.

The importance of data in B2B lead generation and demand generation

Be it demand generation or lead generation, launching any of them can be quite tricky. Some of the best lead generation services opt for a data-driven approach as it allows firms to see what works and what does not — and why. This also helps device effective campaigns based on the metrics that matter the most.

Take away

As marketing can never be a one-size-fits-all approach, companies need to identify the best lead generation service or the best demand generation service that can help them with marketing lead generation. Marketers need to understand that demand generation and lead generation services need to walk hand in hand to help an organization grow in the right path and drive sales. 

If demand generation strategies help you attract high-quality leads, lead generation marketing helps nurture them into satisfied customers.

Be it creating brand awareness, demand generation or lead generation, to drive greater B2B sales leads, a well crafted cross-channel marketing strategy is essential. Tying all of this with your People-Based Marketing solutions can enhance the success rate of your marketing campaigns.

A more advanced version of cookie-based marketing is people-based marketing that leverages technology to market to people across channels. Marketers, as well as some of the best lead generation companies, swear by it as it is one of the best B2B marketing lead generation techniques.

Comspanies may as well get in touch with some of the best lead generation service providers are also PBM servicesproviders and HQL service providers, to give their campaigns a push.

Intent-Driven Marketing – An Advanced form of Marketing

 Increasingly, companies worldwide are collecting huge amounts buyer behavior data for routine functioning. This offers a great opportunity for B2B marketers to strengthen their marketing campaigns. The collected data is a pool of knowledge and can do wonders if used in the right manner. Marketers who have access to this data can use intent-driven marketing to generate high quality leads. The following write-up will explain what intent-driven marketing means and how it can prove helpful for businesses.

What is intent-driven marketing?

Intent-driven marketing is a marketing strategy that helps businesses predict customers' purchase intent through an in-depth analysis of user behavior. It can be described as tailoring marketing campaigns to customers’ needs with specific intentions. Typically, it involves marketing a service or product based on a customer’s online activities that indicate their choice to purchase or consume that particular product or service. With this method, organizations junk the guesswork and make more effective marketing and campaign decisions for their brand.

Gone are the days for days of ‘spray and pray’ marketing as intent-based marketing, aka intent-driven marketing,  has gained traction, and for good reasons. This methodology is beneficial for marketers as it helps them increase the quality of sales leads, landing page conversion rates, which ultimately increases revenue. Marketers have already made the shift from traditional and have included intent-based lead generation solutions into their marketing mix.

Why intent-driven marketing?

Buyer intent is one of the crucial elements of intent-based marketing. It answers three questions - what customers are interested in buying now, what they want, and where they want it. In many organizations, marketing teams focus on giving customers what they want, but intent-driven marketing takes a step ahead: Intent-based networking and intent-based branding help enterprises gather a tremendous amount of information about buyer behavior and activity to get a bigger picture of what they want. 

Consumers today no longer follow a linear path to make a purchase. In fact, they are very specific about their choices. They want instant answers on their devices, look for precisely what they want, and expect brands to be able to provide it. Every time consumers search for a particular product; they express their intent.

This form of marketing takes the time factor into account. This means organizations need to be vigilant and take action as soon as someone expresses a strong intent. The key is to understand when someone is taking action that showcases a strong intent to transact with your business. This empowers the marketing teams to focus on the right customers and reach them at that apt moment when they’re most likely to make a purchase.

A good synergy between the sales and the marketing teams is essential for organizational growth. It’s also essential for the marketing teams to win the trust of sales. Intent-based marketing significantly helps with sales prospecting as it ensures only marketing qualified leads trickle down the sales funnel.

With intent-driven marketing, businesses can maximize their spend by driving more conversions than they would with more general tactics like demographics-based targeting alone. Businesses who incorporate data to understand consumer intent better and then align marketing to business outcomes can reach customers at the moment that matters — and drive sales as a result. 

Where to reach out for intent marketing data 

Some companies analyze the digital footprints of buyers. They gather information related to the content the person is consuming online. The following factors can help gather customer intents effectively -

·         Product reviews;

·         Website visits;

·         Time on pages;

·         The content topic on web pages;

·         Downloads such as whitepapers.

Benefits of intent-driven marketing

·        Reduces marketing costs

With intent-based marketing, companies can direct their marketing campaigns to people who have shown intent to make a purchase. This ultimately leads to minimizing the amount spent on broad-based marketing.

This means that enterprises can achieve their commercial goals with less budget. The remaining budget can be directed at other marketing campaigns to overscore their other targets. Many successful B2B marketers are not satisfied with achieving their target. The  focus should be to outperform and generate the most value for the company.

·        Makes campaigns more effective

Many marketers are already using a simple form of intent-driven marketing strategy. When selecting the keywords for Search Engine Advertising, organizations want particular ad groups to show when people search for certain keywords. This is a form of intent-based targeting. It is considered one of the simplest forms of intent-based marketing.

The next step, programmatic advertising, is a more advanced way of intent-based targeting. With programmatic advertising, one can place dynamic ads to people depending on the content they are reading, as an example. Moreover, people can see these ads only if they read a certain number of articles.

Here, the buying intent will be higher, and then it might even make sense to increase the bid for the ad space. Programmatic advertising is an automated process and is the best example of intent-based targeting. The money needs to be spent only once for the people with a buying intent.

Intent-driven marketing will help businesses reach greater heights

In today’s competitive environment, businesses need to make extra efforts to attract more customers. They need to state compelling reasons so that audiences trust their products and services.

Intent-based marketing is often challenging, but the results are worth it. It’s essential to follow the data. It must also be ensured that the data is of good quality. Organizations must also have good analytics to ensure sound decision making. Partnering with demand generation companies and or those providing marketing qualified lead services is a great idea, too. hey possess a deep understanding of the buyers' pain points; they can deliver on what they need and at the right time to help cut competition. 

We are a demand generation company working as an HQL service provider and PBM Service provider, we provide B2B companies, like yours, with lead generation solutions.

Get in touch with us to give your sales a boost.

Learn How to Grab high-quality for Your Business.

Generating leads is a priority of every B2B business – it is a fundamental part of the sales process that ignites the sales engine. With B2B sales being all about leads, it’s often difficult for businesses to maintain a fine balance between quantity and quality. There’s no point filling the sales funnel with low-quality leads as the sales team will ultimately end up wasting time. In reality, they need fewer yet high-quality leads that can help them strike relevant conversations.  The process of attracting new and high-quality leads in itself seems to be challenging as it’s easier said than done. It calls for a mix of inbound and outbound strategy that works well.

Here, organizations are faced with numerous challenges such as strong competition, the pressure of ongoing projects, and high overheads to hire and retain good developers, among others. Lead generation companies or any individual HQLservice providers can help generate high-quality leads. Want to know about the Best B2B Lead Generation Solutions that can deliver high-quality leads for your sales team? Refer to our guide to gain insights into B2B sales leads. We also bring some great tips that can help you convert quality leads into prospects.

Get all details from the contact form

A contact form on the website is one of the Best B2B Lead Generation Solutions. One can enhance the quality of those leads by marking the “required” fields that a prospect must fill in. This will provide valuable data about the prospects that can be used later.

It’s important to get the full name and occupation of the people as it helps improve the quality of leads. In order to make your form fields “required,” one has to enter some coding into the form CSS. Else the development team can be roped in to help.

Ask for a work email

The next important thing is to ask for their email address. Specifically, ask for their work email and not their personal email. This is more true for a B2B company.

A business email address is a great way to get the company’s name. This way, marketing strategies can be directed to help you engage with them as per their needs and showcase to them that your company is the best fit. Email marketing will give you the chance to show up where your audience is hanging out and share your value with them. We spend a lot of the time and hours at work, so the chances are ripe that you will get a response from a work email rather than a personal one. People-based Marketing Solutions, online or offline, are the most effective strategy for generating leads.

Spot and work on the decision-makers

It’s common sense that nobody would want to waste time with people who can’t make the right decisions. But it’s easier said than done when it comes to connecting with the right group of people.  If you get a lead from someone who filled the form on your website, it’s a strong indication that that particular person could be your decision-maker, though not always.

What role does your decision-maker typically play? Write your emails based on the trend for who is the target, and then create emails that will open. Sales personnel should use the right approach and make use of advanced tools to ease the process. An HQL Service Provider or an HQL Service Provider Company can do the job well.

Go forward and create a buyer persona

If organizations get leads from their website regularly, it’s great, but how many of those leads actually get converted into ideal customers? This is why organizations must focus their marketing strategies on creating an ideal buyer persona. Wondering how do we create one? Businesses must characterize their ideal customers by defining the most relevant attributes for their business, such as job title and decision-making authority, and implicit attributes that describe the desired online behavior. Basically, personas are the people who are most likely to make a purchase from you and those who may be interested in your business.

The best and proven way to create high-quality leads is to create marketing strategies that focus on a particular persona. It is also called persona-based marketing. HQL service provider companies can help you target individual buyers.

Create your buyer persona profile to target your ideal customer and generate more leads. It will also enable you to measure and improve your sales and marketing efforts. Most B2B Lead Generation Companies rely on and practice this strategy for sustainable development.

Follow the buyer’s journey

Most Lead Generation Services Company take into consideration the buyer’s journey while creating marketing strategies. The buyer’s journey describes the process that most buyers go through before making any purchase.

To this end, there are three stages – first is awareness, second is the consideration, and third is the decision stage. In the first stage, the buyer is aware of a problem and is in the process of searching for more information. In the second stage, the buyer considers all options and looks for the best solution. In the third stage, they have decided what is to be bought and are ready to pay.

Understanding the buyer's journey can help determine your leads' stage. Buyers do not want to be nagged or be hassled and want to comfortably take their decision.

One should ask for more information about the buyer's journey in each contact form. As people climb up in their buyer journey, they tend to provide more details because they have almost reached the final decision stage.

The more information one gets about the lead, the higher is the quality of that lead.

Use workflows and marketing automation

Any effort to improve lead quality without marketing automation software will yield short-term results as you are not working smarter.  When a lead receives relevant emails from your marketing automation software, they’ll automatically get a greater understanding of your business.

You can do amazing things such as customize emails based on data collected from forms, plan the strategy and nurture the leads.

Follow-up emails are a great way to nurture leads by following up on a lead’s interest with other helpful resources. With the emails being relevant and engaging, contacts will get to know more about your business. They’ll be a higher-quality lead once a sales team approaches them.

It is a later stage for a new business, but marketing strategies can take this as an end step.

Get high quality leads for your new business within no time

Generating high-quality leads is a priority of every B2B business. There are various effective strategies that SDRs can apply to produce more B2B leads, and every year there are new ways to outpace past performances.

Someone new in the business cannot simply jump to the old ones’ strategies. HQL Service Provider Companies may just do the task right here. They can understand your timeline and suggest steps accordingly. Try improving your sales performance by redefining outbound strategies with solid techniques to generate the best quality leads for your business. 

Why is Account-Based Marketing Called Need of the Hour?

 

The marketers who have been doing this particular job for ages have seen many evolutions in marketing best practices. They have witnessed a rise in digital marketing vs. offline marketing. Then, there was a visible growth of social media marketing within digital marketing. After that, there was a hype of marketing automation technologies, which replaced human marketing activities.

The recent trends in the market are Account Based Marketing (ABM) or People Based Marketing (PBM). These trends have the potential to transform everything for B2B marketers. In the article, you can learn how ABM marketing and People Marketing differ from each other.

The approach led by account based marketing is listed below in points.

Working on account based lead generation

Marketers must note that intent-driven account-based marketing is compelling because it focuses on a fixed category of buyers. The approach is personalized rather than a generic one.

Further, start gathering the data about the customers you want to reach out. There are platforms such as AngelList and Google searches that can provide a list of prospective customers in the industry. Also, visitor identification tools can give a list of companies visiting your website.

After you have the list, bring out their size, location, and industry type. If there are companies that aren’t your ideal customer, remove them. The remaining companies are your target to be reached out with the relatable and best quality content. You can also term it as the primary job of an account-based marketing company.

Make space for automation

Selling B2B is a complex process because it requires appealing to multiple persons. The method of spending ‘equivalent to a full-time worksheet” comparing alternatives, talking to numerous representatives, and taking a ton of content for third-party sources is tedious.

The negative point that lies here a lot of campaigns lose potential leads during the early stage because they fail to follow up on a timely basis. So, introducing automation with intent-based data will allow the sales development team to spend more time talking to prospects without sacrificing early lead development.

Let me explain via an example. Create an event that pops up as an email campaign when a prospect visits your rating page or add up a new lead to your CRM (customer relationship management). Once the details are collected, then assign them to a salesperson or account-based marketing company.

Intent driven marketing or personalized marketing

People have their inboxes filled with messages and emails. But still, it hasn’t been harder before. The right buyer intent data can make things better. When there are tailored messages for different people with different priorities, then marketing becomes easy. It is then able to identify and attract qualified leads, similar to lead generation services.

You can make a personalized video that will show them how your business can help them grow, or you can also describe a solution addressing specific challenges that the prospect faces. 

The takeaway

Apart from the marketing challenges, the global pandemic also created many challenges. Things are slowly moving to the track again. Some new B2B lead generation strategies that are complementary fit to the realities of the new normal are leading the way. In simple words, high-quality lead generation strategies are firmly rooted in digital and automation.

If you are not using any B2B lead generating strategies such as ABM or PBM marketing techniques, you should probably reassess the entire B2B sales and marketing strategy. You will enjoy seeing how adopting ABM techniques might help you recover from all the downfalls of your business. 

People-Based Marketing - a Handy Solution for B2B Companies

 

B2B leads could add tremendous value to your marketing strategy and play a crucial role in accounting for high revenue and facilitating business development. However, it is equally important to select the right B2B lead generation solutions to support business growth and enhance the efficacy of the marketing efforts.

Develop marketing and sales plan with correct data

In this changing business era, lead generation companies no longer depend on age-old tools. B2B companies are finding more efficient and enhanced solutions to keep their feet firm in the market. Creating high-quality leads (HQL) in good numbers is a key challenge for top lead generation companies in the present scenario.

New methods followed by B2B companies to enhance their business platform and relationship with consumers include:

·         People-based marketing (PBM)

·         Content syndication marketing

·         Demand generation solutions

·         Install base targeting

·         HQL solutions

·         Account-based marketing (ABM)

·         Intent-drivenmarketing

Are you ready to know more about PBM and its high quality lead generation value?

Let’s begin.

What is people-based marketing?

People-based marketing or PBM is also termed cross-device marketing. It entails classifying consumers or prospects as an individual and not devices or cookies.

In short, it collects consumer data from offline and online sources, and with the help of a rich consumer profile, it correctly recognizes and targets consumers across various devices.

It develops cross-channel techniques to create a multi-channel experience for consumers that will make the client come back.

PBM is known to identify real people instead of proxies or cookies and delivers marketing interactions to known individuals. It is the most effective strategy for generating B2B leads. 

B2B companies with people-based marketing solutions could take their customer relationship management (CRM) data and utilize it to identify online targets.

Why people-based marketing solutions?

B2B marketing companies prefer people-based marketing solutions to –

·         Reduce advertising budgets

·         Better understand consumers

·         Help expand reach by targeting real consumers

People-based marketing solutions are known to help brands develop relationships with consumers.

A demand generation solutionscompany could tap the PBM strategy to power sales revenue. All you need to do is discover a reliable demand generation solutions company that offers you a plethora of B2B lead generation services to fulfill all your demand generation needs.

PBM and B2B appointment setting services

PBM powers sales revenue with the help of B2B appointment setting services that concentrate explicitly on producing leads and enabling salespeople to focus on closing sales.

Appointment setting is basically getting in touch with the client/lead to set up a sales meeting. Moreover, appointment setting services play an important role by maintaining relationships with present consumers and producing high quality leads.

B2B appointment setting services are used when –

·         Consumer data is inaccurate and unstructured

·         Requires too much time to create a system to nurture leads

·         Marketing and sales teams are busy

Final verdict

PBM has been in the limelight in recent years, with about 93% B2B marketers investing in it. A data solutionscompany uses first-party data to integrate PBM in its marketing strategy.

The demand generation solutions company adopts the latest and innovative marketing technologies and tools and develops a strategy to boost today’s changing business environment.

B2B appointment setting leads to a higher-performing sales team. This is where B2B lead generation services change the game by creating a difference across several stages of the sales funnel by adding extra value before taking the process to the next step.

ABM + Content Syndication = Growth, Brand Visibility, Revenue Potential

Marketing is an incessantly developing space. As new things evolve, you need to adapt. The same goes for marketing, more specifically B2B marketing. It is not necessary what worked in the past will work today. This is why modern B2B sales leaders and marketers hunt for new tactics. The account-based marketing solutions are one such growth tactic.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing or ABM is a proven strategy used by marketing teams to focus on a specific type of consumer, one that they produce a tailored content story for.

For instance, a computer software company with a specialty in the healthcare division decided to focus its efforts on IT managers within their state. Its ABM strategy built a storyline around the target parameters’ persona and developed content targeted toward IT managers. Thus, creating an easy portal to reach the right consumer.

Account-based marketing is one of the best options to engage with highly qualified leads (HQLs). Moreover, HQL solution services will help you get high-quality leads to beat the competition around you using the best B2B lead generation strategies. ABM tactic encourages companies to eye the most promising consumers.

Joe Chernov, Chief Marketing Officer at Pendo.io, explained: “ABM aspires to be zero-waste marketing. It’s a model that targets only the companies and contacts that are likely to buy your product and that sales have pre-committed to try to close.”

Top four benefits of account-based marketing

Here are four benefits that the best demand generation company derives out of ABM –

·         ABM offers ROI (Return On Investment) clarity

·         Strong alignment between sales and marketing

·         Enhanced consumer experience

·         Effective and optimized marketing and sales funnel

“In traditional demand generation, marketing throws leads over the fence for sales to chase. In ABM, there is no fence. The collaboration is close, constant, and totally focused on defined, account-specific objectives.”

How will a content syndication program help in your ABM?

Content syndication is a web-based program in which your company content is re-published by a third-party website. Digital content such as videos, blog posts, infographics, and articles can be syndicated.

When combined with ABM, content syndication is powerful. In short, ABM and content syndication go hand in hand.

·         Make your content take the lead and increase the ROI of your content creation

·         Make the content highly personalized to increase content relevance

·         Nurture leads efficiently

·         Take benefits of social networks

·         Enhance the quality of a lead

This is how a content syndication program will help you supercharge your ABM and produce B2B leads. Content syndication can increase brand visibility with minimal effort.

Following are major content syndication programs used by a demand generation company –

·         Joint webinar

·         LinkedIn publishing

·         Guest blogging

·         Video sharing sites

·         Weekly podcast addressing consumers pain points

·         Free content syndicating networks

·         PPC promotion on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook

A Demand generation company uses content syndication to get content and an organization into the limelight that it wouldn’t usually get. Also, an HQL service provider company prefers the content syndication program to nurture their leads.

Final words

Account-based marketing, content syndication, marketing qualified lead (MQL), and highly qualified lead together form a strong pillar of a demand generation company.

The combination of content syndication and ABM could lead to a potential consumer, otherwise termed as a marketing qualified lead, which will then be nurtured to generate new opportunities for your organization.