Demystifying Growth Marketing, Demand Generation and Lead Generation in Modern Marketing Management

Companies spend a lot of money on marketing to achieve sustainable and timely growth, but often they can’t get the results they expect.  Understanding the difference between Lead Generation, Demand Generation, and Growth Marketing will open a unique perspective on modern marketing and the KPIs of different marketing campaigns.

1. Lead Generation:

If you have been around the marketing profession for a decade and more, you probably are very familiar with the term Lead Generation. Lead Generation has been the most popular marketing term for defining and measuring appointment setting and sales generation results. Traditionally, the most popular channels for Lead Generation have been Telemarketing and, later, LinkedIn Outreach Prospecting. However, taken from the context of a well-designed long-term Marketing Strategy, the results of short-term Lead Generation campaigns may be disappointing for business owners and salespeople.

2. Demand Generation:

Unlike Lead Generation Strategies, Demand Generation strategies are designed to create demand for the product or service. Demand Generation Campaigns aim to communicate the benefits and create awareness about the brand. An example of a Demand Generation strategy would be writing an article highlighting decision-makers pains and problems and how a particular product or service would resolve them.

Another example of a Demand generation strategy would be a PPC advertising campaign promoting a webinar, event, or a poll tool to educate and research the target market.

3. Growth Marketing

As we can see from the above, Lead Generation and Demand Generation relate more to campaign execution than a long-term Growth strategy. Growth Marketing takes a broad perspective of understanding the AAARRR funnel.

AAARRR stands for:

• Awareness
• Acquisition
• Activation
• Revenue
• Retention
• Referrals

When we speak about Growth Marketing, we mean long-term, idea-generating, and data-based marketing based on a step-by-step Growth Approach.

Growth Marketing aligns all business functions and departments into one Growth team. First, we take time and extended effort to understand the Buyers’ Persona. Then, we start collecting and evaluating quality data for future Growth Marketing campaigns by connecting with the right people on LinkedIn in B2B, running database acquisition PPC ads in B2C, or buying a database of prospects from a reliable source, such as Dan and Bradstreet, or InfoCanada.

Growth Marketers and Growth Hackers rely heavily on modern marketing technology like CRM and CMS. Securing and constantly growing quality databases of prospects is a stepping stone to Growth Marketing because we need data to achieve results and measure them.

Growth Marketing strategy unites Demand Generation and Lead Generation into one highly functional marketing system. For example, from a Growth Marketing standpoint, Telemarketing or LinkedIn outreach is not measured by a dollar-to-dollar return on sales but by the amount of data obtained, the quality of connections and the rate of engagement we achieved. Yes, we want to secure prospects’ engagement, such as appointments and sales meetings, but we are realistic about our expectations. The main goal is to create a marketing culture and a system that will help our sales team repeatedly.