Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation — What’s The Best Choice For You?

Demand and lead generation must work in tandem in this age of social media and a new generation of buyers.

And one of the best online portals to start this journey for B2B is LinkedIn.

Did you know that 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation, and 62% say it generates great leads?

Indeed, LinkedIn is a great tool for both lead generation and demand generation.

Those phrases — “demand generation” and “lead generation” — are often used interchangeably. 

But they aren’t the same. 

So in this article, we’ll break down demand generation vs lead generation, including their purpose and goals, outcome, mindset, where they fit into the sales funnel, common strategies and tactics, and how to implement them into your LinkedIn strategy.

Here’s what we’ll cover for demand gen vs lead gen:

TL;DR

• Demand generation is the process of building demand for your brand, products, and services. Its ultimate aim is to convert leads into customers, and it focuses on increasing brand awareness. 
• Lead generation is the process of gathering contact information from leads so that your sales reps can nurture them. It aims to convert brand or product-aware prospects into customers. 
• Lead generation vs demand generation differ in six key segments:  
  • Purpose and goals — Demand generation exists to drive interest in leads, while lead generation exists to get contact information from leads. 
  • Outcome — Demand generation’s ideal outcome is planting seeds of desire in leads, while lead generation’s ideal outcome is collecting usable contact information.
  • Mindset — Demand generation is customer needs-centric, while lead generation is scalability focused.
  • Impact — 
  • Where they fit into the sales funnel — Demand generation fits into the very, very top of the sales funnel, while lead generation fits slightly further in.
  • Common strategies and tactics – Demand generation involves website, content, social media, LinkedIn marketing, and more, while lead generation involves strategies like scraping LinkedIn event attendee lists for proactive outreach. 
  • Implementing them into your strategy using LinkedIn — You can conduct demand generation using posts, events, and networking, while you can conduct lead generation by scraping posts, events, and groups for contact information.  
• Expandi can help you transform your LinkedIn outreach strategy. You can try Expandi with a 7-day free trial.

What is demand generation?

Demand degeneration builds product, brand, or service demand through inbound and outbound marketing strategies to motivate prospects to act. 

For example, a company may collaborate with a popular industry influencer for a podcast where he or she reviews the company’s product and shares positives. The podcast’s snippets are shared over social platforms, thus garnering attention from the right target audience and generating demand.

Demand generation is the process of building demand for your brand, products, and services through inbound and outbound marketing strategies to ultimately motivate prospective customers to act (i.e., make a purchase). 

The main purpose of demand generation efforts is to make your offering seem desirable. Secondarily, demand generation helps potential customers overcome common pain points, offers a solution, and helps you nurture prospects into qualified leads. 

Demand generation activities can be conducted using multiple channels. These include: 

• Paid-Per-Click (PPC) marketing
• Social media posts
• A landing page
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Infographics

The defining characteristic of demand generation is the publishing of free content. This content introduces your solution to the consumer. 

Effective demand generation tactics should significantly shorten the buyer’s journey in the sales funnel, create demand and new leads, and drive sales. 

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is what comes after demand generation. It involves creating leads by collecting their contact details and reaching out to them in hopes of conversion.

Once you have a lead, you use sales funnel campaigns to nurture your leads into customers. 

There are two types of lead generation: inbound lead generation and outbound lead generation.

If you’d like a complete overview of lead generation, read our article Lead Generation — How To Get High Quality Leads With Expandi.

Demand generation vs. lead generation: 7 key differences

The primary difference between demand generation and lead generation campaigns is that demand generation helps you to build desire within your target audience, and lead generation enables you to collect information on leads so you can start nurturing them.

Learning all the differences between lead gen vs demand gen can help you understand how these strategies work at a deeper level so that you can maximize your conversions.

So without further ado, here are the seven key differences you need to know:

1. Purpose and goals

Demand generation is a top-of-the-sales-funnel marketing strategy as your targeted leads are still learning about your product, brand, and services.

87% of sales and marketing leaders say the collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth. So, the goal of the demand generation process is to build desire for your brand and product using marketing so that your sales reps have an easier time selling to prospects who are already sales qualified.

In short: it exists to drive interest during the initial buyer’s journey.

Lead generation also takes place at the top of the funnel — but it’s part of a slightly later stage. Its purpose is to find, qualify, and start to nurture inbound and outbound leads.

The goal of lead generation is to identify high-quality leads that fit into your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Specifically, you want to identify those with a very high chance of converting.
In short: it exists to get contact information for sales reps to use.

2. Outcome

Demand generation’s ideal outcome is to initiate “desire” for your product or solution in your target audiences, thus converting problem-aware leads into solution-aware ones.

Often, potential customers may not realize they have a problem to solve or require your product or services. When you conduct demand generation, you show them how your product can help them so that you get them interested.

Lead generation’s ideal outcome is collecting high-quality contact information from leads. This includes obtaining: 

• Phone numbers
• Names
• Emails
• Company information 
• Online activities, such as LinkedIn groups joined, events attended, etc.

This handy information will help sales reps communicate and engage with prospects efficiently instead of using generic communication strategies. 

Lead generation and demand generation also share a secondary outcome: increasing customer acquisition as they aim to attract only qualified leads.

3. Mindset 

Demand generation campaigns are customer needs-centric. They focus on increasing the demand for your product or services by telling leads why they require them. 

For example, a B2B brand hosts a free webinar around potential customers’ major pain points and subtly introduces how their solution meets their needs—thus generating demand.

Meanwhile, lead generation campaigns focus on scalability and capturing quality leads in bigger volumes. 

For example, using LinkedIn to research common factors salespeople have with leads, be it similar LinkedIn groups, attending the same events, etc., and using these points to personalize outreach on a larger scale.

But how exactly does the leads’ mindset differ in the demand and lead generation phases?

During the demand and lead generation processes, leads want to feel like they can build lasting relationships and gain value from your company. Leads also want to know if your product or service is cost-effective, practical, and trustworthy. 

In short, they’re looking for a strong USP.

Therefore, sales reps and marketers must use a value proposition that directly speaks to the consumer. You can learn more about value propositions in our article: LinkedIn Sales Message: How To Stand Out With a Value Proposition. 

4. Impact

What’s the ultimate impact created by demand and lead generation strategies? 

Here’s what to look forward to:

• Since demand generation focuses on educating your target customers, you create free, valuable, and ungated resources that answer your prospects’ questions. For example, free lead magnets like eBooks or webinars. 

• Lead generation goes a step above demand generation. You create more explicit content that positions your solution better and use lead contact information to fine-tune your outreach strategies.

5. Where They Fit into the Sales Funnel

The original theory of sales funnels started with the company-focused acronym AIDA. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Decision-making, and Action.

A sales funnel is a metaphorical way to visualize, optimize, and measure the performance of a company’s sales and marketing efforts.

As discussed earlier, both demand and lead generation belong at the top of the sales funnel. 

However, demand generation is at the very, very top of the sales funnel because its main purpose is to build interest and encourage leads to engage with your brand instead of a competitor’s brand.

In comparison, lead generation is slightly further into the sales funnel because its main purpose is to gather information from leads and push them further into the sales funnel.

6. Common Strategies and Tactics

One area which largely differentiates demand and lead generation is the tactics and strategies you use in each of them.

Demand generation includes: 

• Content marketing — Especially video marketing and blog posts.

• Social media marketing — Including marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

• LinkedIn marketing — LinkedIn allows you to network via posts, events, mutual connections, and more. If you use a data-driven LinkedIn strategy, you can reach a connection request acceptance rate of up to 90% and generate very high-quality leads.

• Case studies — These boost your brand’s authority and showcase your expertise. They also provide social proof and show leads how other members of your ICP have solved their problems. 

• Website marketing — Including landing page marketing, developing service pages, and building knowledge bases for customers.

Read: How to Use the Best LinkedIn Practices for Demand Gen. and Social Selling. 

Lead generation includes: 

• Content marketing — Including using video content, blog posts, articles, and white papers as lead magnets. You can learn more about lead magnets in our article Lead Gen. Forms LinkedIn: How To Create, Connect, and Automate. It’s also interesting to note that 67% of B2B companies use lead generation metrics to determine the success of their content marketing.

• Social media outreach — Including outreach techniques like scraping Twitter follower lists or Facebook group participants. 

• Cold email and cold call outreach — When done effectively, these can provide a high Return on Investment (ROI).

• Scraping LinkedIn events and groups — This is an easy technique to use, and if done correctly, you can earn yourself many qualified leads. Try searching for events or groups on LinkedIn from a popular competitor or LinkedIn page. Then, scrape leads from it using Expandi. 

You can learn more about LinkedIn groups for lead generation here: How To Get The Most Out of LinkedIn Groups With Expandi.

There’s another popular technique marketers and salespeople use to conduct lead generation — an omnichannel sales approach.  

Omnichannel strategies use a consistent sales funnel across many marketing channels. Learn about the key differences between omnichannel and multi-channel approaches in our article Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: What’s the Difference?

7. How to Implement Them Into Your Strategy Using LinkedIn

To carry out demand generation on LinkedIn, try hosting events, starting groups, posting about your product and customers, engaging with other creators, and sharing informational videos. 

To carry out lead generation on LinkedIn, try scraping contact details from events, groups, and posts, network with prospective customers, and try an outreach campaign. 

LinkedIn is the perfect place for both demand generation and lead generation. Here’s why:

• You can increase engagement with your brand and get more leads — According to a study from Databox, 93% of marketers reported that engagement with their brand on LinkedIn has increased in the last year. 
• LinkedIn (especially when used in partnership with automation software tools) can help you reach potential leads — 70% of B2B leads generated on social networks come from LinkedIn.
• You can reach your target audience quickly — Connecting with your target audience on LinkedIn can lead to faster conversions than other social media platforms. You can learn how to get more connections on LinkedIn in our article How To Get More Connections on LinkedIn. 
• LinkedIn helps you build backlinks — You can use LinkedIn to expand the reach of your content marketing, thus, winning you more backlinks and leads.
• You can nurture leads subtly without being overly promotional (something that often scares leads away) — For example, you can use sponsored posts, comments, or events to build demand for your product while providing value to leads.
• You can use LinkedIn advertising to expand your reach outside your existing network — Ads can increase your ROI and introduce your brand to prospects who wouldn’t have stumbled across it naturally.
• You can automate your marketing efforts — Automation tools like Expandi can carry out your lead generation efforts automatically. Expandi can also help you bypass LinkedIn’s 100 connection requests a week limit. 

Now, some may prefer taking the manual route in LinkedIn demand and lead generation.

Here are three reasons why this may be a bad idea:

1. Manual LinkedIn campaigns can be time-consuming, expensive, and unsafe. For example, LinkedIn has a strict connection limit where crossing it means you risk an account ban.

2. Manual outreach restricts scalability as it’s tough to maintain and time personalization in networking or sending connection requests.

3. You may never be able to track how well your manual lead generation has performed due to a lack of automated tracking of metrics and insights. 

The solution?

Automation tools like Expandi can help you scale your LinkedIn efforts without sacrificing quality. Expandi, for example, can help you personalize your outreach messages with personalized images and GIFs. 

Expandi’s smart sequences can help you interact with prospective leads without needing to press buttons yourself. For example, you can send a connection request, like their posts, view their profile, and email them. 

Expandi also makes it easy to manage your B2B outreach campaigns. You can set up your campaigns in only 15 minutes.

How to combine your demand generation and lead generation efforts

Ultimately, it’s not demand generation vs lead generation, but demand and lead generation.

When you integrate your demand generation and lead generation strategies, you can shorten your sales funnel, get better leads, nurture leads efficiently, and increase conversions. 

Ideally, your lead generation, demand generation, and lead nurturing efforts should feed into each other. 

For example, you can generate demand by posting short videos on LinkedIn that educate people about topics related to your product. You can then scrape these posts for the contact information of people who liked them. Then, you can use Expandi to reach out to these leads on auto-pilot and nurture them. 

Or, you can create a lead magnet and market it through PPC ads or LinkedIn posts. Once people sign up for the lead magnet, you can use their contact information to reach out to them with a targeted email campaign.

To combine demand and lead generation, you need to develop brand messages, a brand tone, and dedicated brand talking points so that all your marketing efforts are consistent. 

You must provide a positive, consistent, and valuable experience for leads. Otherwise, you won’t succeed in building trust with them. 

Trust is vital for successful demand and lead generation. 

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Where does demand and lead generation collide?

There are many times when demand and lead generation strategies collide. After all, they are geared toward slightly different consumer groups at slightly different stages of the sales funnel.

Demand generation is for people who are new to your brand. Lead generation is for people who are slightly more familiar with your brand.

Sometimes, a demand generation tactic will send unintended messages to a lead. And sometimes, a lead generation tactic will scare a very new lead away. So, if they sometimes collide, why should you implement both lead and demand generation strategies?

Implementing both strategies can help your business grow exponentially, as they have similar goals and outcomes. Eventually, the purpose of both is to convert leads. So, you need both to succeed as a brand.

Final thoughts: Demand generation vs. lead generation

Make demand and lead generation work in tandem.

You really can’t use one or the other: demand and lead generation work best when used together.

And while the demand for high-quality demand and lead generation campaigns is growing, businesses often select the wrong channels for their target audience. 

Amazingly, LinkedIn drives more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs — so you don’t want to neglect it. 

That’s where Expandi comes into the picture.

Expandi combines LinkedIn and email outreach, uses sales follow-ups, and measures your outcomes with real-time data analytics and insights.

All this, with results in just 24 hours. 
See what Expandi can do for you by testing it out with a 7-day free trial today.