B2B Demand Generation vs. B2B Growth Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Is there any distinction between these two buzzwords marketers use all the time? Well, there is, actually, and when you want to achieve high-level recognition and impressive customer retention, you’ll have to invest in both types of marketing activities.

In this article, we will clarify what tangible results b2b demand generation and b2b growth marketing can bring. Additionally, you’ll find why having an ideal customer profile at the core of your marketing strategies is crucial.

The Purposes Behind Growth Marketing & Demand Generation

Growth marketing and demand generation processes are similar in terms of using the same set of inbound/outbound marketing tactics and channels. However, demand generation evokes and nurtures the initial awareness of what your company does and what types of products/services it provides. Such an approach warms up leads without setting a goal to convert them immediately.

In contrast, growth marketing prioritizes lead nurturing and customer acquisition. Besides customer acquisition, it aims to retain them to maximize revenue per customer.

Lead-Focused Strategy

If you’re set to grow the lead base, you should put the demand generation first. The whole idea of demand generation efforts is to create buzz and fuel the interest of unqualified audiences.

The b2b demand generation is mostly recommended for companies that are starting out. Although you came to the market as a novice, you can prove yourself an industry expert aware of highly discussed trends and issues, somebody the audience can relate to.

Therefore, your primary objective is to build reliable and appealing communication. Make an audience follow you, subscribe to your newsletters, and scan your blogs and social media posts. Consequently, engaged audiences will move to the pipeline that fills your upper funnel with qualified leads.

Sales-Focused Strategy

Growth marketing zeros in on maximizing revenue both from acquired leads and converted customers. Therefore, besides optimizing every stage of the funnel, growth teams devise efficient customer retention tactics to increase the lifetime value of buyers.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the core practice that allows growth teams to achieve cost efficiency in converting leads to customers. It minimizes the nurturing period by providing leads with information that resolves their concerns and makes them want to purchase sooner. Therefore, more leads convert faster,  ensuring quick returns on investments.

On the other hand, a growth-oriented approach aims to retain the acquired customers. So growth marketers develop personalized approaches to keep existing clients happy and extend their lifecycle.

Growth Marketing as “Full-Funnel” Approach

The above-mentioned definition points out that growth marketing is a “full-funnel approach.” It means that revenue-growth objectives are achieved by developing the right messaging to move prospects to the next funnel stage. Growth practices improve both leads’ quality and quantity to sustain pipeline flows that ensure the highest profitability.

Fair enough, to make growth marketing clockwork, marketers need solid customer data, analytics tools, and a lot of testing and improvements. That’s why your company must leverage state-of-art martech and ensure strategiс Marketing & Sales alignment to achieve the best ROI possible,

Demand Generation as a Data-Driven Strategy

The end goal of demand generation is to form a considerable volume of pre-qualified prospect lead gen teams that can push further to pipelines.

It is worth noticing that even though demand generation focuses on the early stage of the customer acquisition funnel (Awareness stage), it matters a lot for long-term growth. ICP prospecting can guide content marketers on what channels and messaging would work best for prospects that are most likely to buy from you.

Integrating ICP Marketing into Demand Gen and Growth Strategies

An ideal customer profile or ICP is a generalized vision of your business’s ideal sales opportunity. Since ICP attributes are initially taken from the history of highest-value contracts and repeated sales, you can use them as definite targeting criteria for high-intent and high-value prospects.

B2b companies that utilize ICP marketing to drive their revenue growth and demand-gen campaigns can succeed with their goals even with relatively small budgets. Moreover, ICP consists of qualitative and quantitative attributes you can set to filter b2b databases on marketing intelligence platforms and build list-based audiences that fit it best.

Leverage Data Enrichment to Make the Most of ICP Marketing

Thanks to audience data enrichment, you can go beyond proprietary datasets of b2b data providers and build truly comprehensive, hyper-targeted audiences. Ad targeting software with data enrichment capabilities like Primer allows you to pull together data from 10+ data providers into a single dataset.

With such enriched audiences, you’ll manage to:

• Serve personalized cold e-mails with open rates up to 90%+
• Meet match rates of 80-90% for Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaigns
• Import custom audience lists to CRMs and e-mail automation tools.

Data enrichment is a sure way to supply growth and demand gen teams with up-to-date and relevant customer data. Try it, and your campaigns will hit the high-intent audience each time.