Growth Marketing vs Demand Generation: Choosing the Right Strategy

Intro

The effective success of your brand marketing and growth relies upon your demand generation and growth marketing strategies. They both have different roles and are very essential in your brand growth.

But growth marketing vs demand generation, where should I focus my efforts for my business? Well, this article gives you insights and tips on the two strategies and how you can use them to drive more business sales and growth.

With the knowledge about these strategies, marketers can know where to focus most of their energy to drive more sales and revenue for the business.

What is demand generation?

It’s the marketing strategy that aims to increase brand awareness and get target customers interested in a brand's products or services.

Source: Drift

It’s the best strategy brands get to place their offers before their target customers and get them engaging with their business. You create prospects' interest in your business offers and get them to see possible solutions to their pains with the offers you have. HubSpot is a great CRM tool and it’s known for its great demand generation campaigns that run through different content types they create.

Source: Hubspot

Demand generation focuses more on the top of funnel marketing for a business. Getting more prospects aware of the business solutions they can use to solve their pain points.

What is growth marketing?

This is the use of data obtained through marketing campaigns and brand marketing experiments to drive growth. The strategy keeps testing and getting feedback to know what’s working and use it to drive more engagements, leads, and conversions for the business.

Source: Mighty.Digital

You know how to get leads to convert into customers and retain them for as long as they use your business products or services to solve their pains.

Why demand generation is important

• Generate more leads. You need more customers to use your products or services and keep generating revenue for your business. Your brand demand generation can help get leads for your business and nurture them so you can get them to trust your brand and convert to your customers.
• Increase brand awareness. Demand generation helps more target customers know about your business offers and the pains they can solve for their customers. The blog content, email newsletters, webinars, social media posts, and others get prospects to know more about your business and the solutions they offer to solve pains.
• Create sales opportunities. Driving demand and awareness of your services or products creates an opportunity for the target audience to know the offers they can use to solve their challenges and create an opportunity to convert them and make sales for your business.
• Drive traffic to your business. For example, brands use different ways to drive traffic to the website and get prospects to engage with the business. Here are some of these ways.

Source: Major Impact Media

Why is Growth marketing important?

• Help grow customer base. As you nurture and improve your customer experience, you attract more loyal customers through referrals from your past customers. Using the best growth marketing strategy keeps your customers happy and makes them advocates for your business bringing more conversions and growing your customer base.
• Improve customer experience. Growth marketing helps nurture your customers to ensure you give them the best experience while using your business products or services. You get in touch with customers, know how they are enjoying the products or services and their feedback which can help you improve and solve their pains better. For example, here is a testimonial of one of your clients.

Source: Ranktracker

• Improve customer retention. Using the best growth marketing strategies will help retain more customers and get them to purchase from your business repeatedly increasing the sales and overall revenue for the business.
• Manage and nurture customers. You need to generate and retain customers for long, driving more sales and repeat sales from your customers. The right growth marketing strategies help you nurture your customers, keep delivering the best solutions to their pains, and get them to stick with your business for long.

Best growth marketing strategies

• A/B testing. To offer the best experience and retain more customers, run a/b test campaigns on your business. Tests like the features of the products you offer and what you can add to make the best experience for your customers. The design of your website makes it easy for users to engage and use your business well. Test the best communication channels to simplify the process to handle your customer challenges as they use your business.
• Cross-channel marketing. Since customers don’t use a single channel to engage business, employing cross-channel marketing increases the chances to engage different customers through communication channels they prefer and improve their experience with your brand. For example, some customers prefer engaging brands through their social media channels while others love one-on-one conversations with a sales representative.
• Best onboarding experience ( welcome campaigns) Use the right keyword tools to get keywords the target audience uses most in their search and include them in your campaigns. See the example below for such a keyword tool.

Source: Ranktracker

• Free product/ service trials. You can offer free trials for your business, and let the target customers have a first-hand experience with your business products or services to see the value you will deliver them. After the trial period, you can collect feedback from potential customers to help keep improving your products or services.
• Customer lifecycle ( introduction like welcome, onboarding, nurturing, and retaining)

Examples of growth marketing campaigns

• Referral marketing. Affiliate marketing is a perfect example of this. Here is an example of our business. Customers and other users can refer them to the business and get commissions.

Source: Ranktracker

• Loyalty campaigns. You can offer incentives and discounts to get more target customers.
• Best onboarding process. Giving the new customers the best experience to retain them and get them to use the company products or services for a long time.

The best way to adopt growth marketing

• Businesses that are starting and need to generate more customers for their products or services.
• Brands with long-term investment plans as they aim to grow their brands and get more companies
• Products or services for a business with a high potential to scale and grow as they solve customers' pain points.

Demand generation strategies

• Email marketing. Here is an example of an email in your newsletter

Source: Ranktracker

• Paid ads. To drive demand for your business products or services, you can create ads targeting your customer needs and providing solutions through your business. Include a captivating CTA and an ad copy that shows prospects how to solve their challenges.
• Attending conferences and trade shows. These are great places where brands can engage their target audience and also get to meet new potential customers who can use their offers. Through trade shows, brands can showcase their offers to prospects and give insights on how they can benefit from their products if they use the business to solve customer pains.
• Webinars. Run surveys from your customers, understand their pains more and what interests them about your business. Get experts with experience in those topics and discuss them with your prospects via the webinar sessions.
• Social media marketing. Prospects engage and look for brands on social media. To drive demand for your business, you can join communities and forums where prospects hang out and engage them. Answer questions and share expertise about topics discussed. With your expertise, prospects will want to know more about your business and end up engaging and even converting to customers.
• Video Marketing. With the high video consumption, you can drive more demand for your business if you create high-quality engaging videos showing target customers the value your brand gives to solve their challenges.

Growth marketing best metrics and goals

• Customer churn rate. This shows the percentage of customers who stop using your business products or services.
• Upsells and cross-sales. You can offer products or services that align with what your customer is currently using while upselling is selling a more expensive offer to your customer.
• Customer referrals. These are the number of customers using your business products or services who were referred by your customers or friends.
• Sales qualified leads. These are leads who are ready to make a purchase from a brand.
• Marketing qualified leads. These are leads who meet the criteria of marketing for a business.

Demand Generation Metrics to track

• Cost per lead. The metric measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in generating a lead for your business.
• Cost per acquisition. The cost a brand incurs in acquiring a new customer.
• Conversion rate. These are the visitors to a business website who perform a task such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or making a purchase.
• MQLs to SQLs. This is the ratio of the marketing leads ready to convert and become customers.
• Customer lifetime value. This is the revenue a brand gets from a customer over a period of time the customer uses brand services or products.

Where demand generation is suitable for your business

• Short-term campaigns for your brand marketing and driving leads to the business
• Brands with high demand and in need of increased market share.
• Established companies are working to keep their lead funnel full.

The similarity between Growth marketing and demand generation

• They are all data-driven
• Help build your brand sales pipeline
• Lead nurturing process

Their differences

Source: Oneims

Conclusion

You need both growth marketing and demand generation strategies to grow your brand. However, demand generation is more focused on short-term efforts and objectives for your business.

On the other hand, growth marketing strategies are the long-term objectives as they aim to get customers and retain them for a long time while driving more sales and revenue for your brand. You can adopt both strategies as you scale your business awareness, lead conversions, sales, and revenue.