BroadVision Marketing Blog

Updated Jan. 2023
How many of you, business people out there, are confused about the difference between lead generation and demand generation? Raise your hands; don’t be shy. There is a distinct difference between these marketing strategies even though some marketing agencies use them both interchangeably or use the wrong one. Here’s a clue: one is focused on changing your clients’ perspective and the one wants to capture their information for you to follow up with.

Definitions

Let’s start with some marketing strategies definitions I found helpful from an article by Eric Wittlakes, Lead Generation is Crippling Demand Generation:

• Lead generation: collecting registration information, often in exchange for content, in order to build a marketing database for email or telemarketing follow-up. The direct outcome of lead generation is new contacts available for sales or marketing.
• Demand generation: the practice of creating demand for an organization’s products or services through marketing. The direct outcome is your audience is more likely to purchase your products or services.

Another marketing strategy definition of demand generation comes from Eloqua.com. “Demand generation is the art and science of creating, nurturing, and managing buying interest in your products and services through campaign management, lead management, marketing analysis, and data management.”

These make the most sense of everything I read. Getting leads is growing your lists, which is the way we tend to view general marketing practices, and is a part of demand generation marketing. On the other hand, demand generation means creating interest in your product so that people want it. Think in terms of the different ways diet drinks work to sell their products to all sorts of demographics. When I wonder who an ad is aimed at, I have not been considering that the intention behind the ad may be to create demand for the product.

I seriously thought that there was a formula for knowing the better if not best days and times to post a blog. Wrong. I have to admit I looked at infographics and charts without taking the time to read the articles I found on the subject.  OK, I did look at the bullet points to get reinforcement for the graphics I was looking at so thoroughly. Two of the most arresting items I saw were KISSmetrics’ The Science of Social Timing Part 3, which was introduced in 2011and shared repeatedly ever since. The other were Sharaholic's charts, used by Jason Keath on Jan.18.2012 in When Is The Best Time Of The Day To Blog?

These two sources actually contradict each other in some odd ways on blog post ideas.

KISSmetrics’ take-away includes these key points that the infographic throws light on revealing interesting trends. (This information is presented in Eastern Time (EST).)

• Average blogs see most traffic at around 11 AM.
• Average blogs are most likely to get maximum comments around 9AM, including Saturdays.
• Average blogs get the maximum inbound links at around 7AM, including Mondays as well as Thursday.

How would you like some new information on marketing strategies for campaign development that will get you ahead of the curve? Campaign development blogs are as many as there are marketing agencies. Some of their marketing strategies start with the macro business mission statements and funnel down to the micro particular campaign. Some are into costs and statistical analysis while others are into more creative endeavors. One thing all marketing strategies have in common is the idea of a targeted market. Just who are you trying get to pay attention to you? How can you be heard above the noise of all the competition?

In the midst of all the marketing strategies campaign development blogs I read, I found one that had the audacity to say “This decade is going to be known as the decade of change and empowerment.   Demographic segments are changing driven by a lot of aspects including the economy and consumers and are becoming more and more empowered and choosy about which brands they want in their lives.”  

Changes in demographics

Nurturing your very own personal lead is as much art as science. Advice on this is all over the internet. How do you apply it all? For example, not letting your lead go cold is important to your sales team. Then there are the ways used to describe personal relationship building by “Know, Like, Trust” or “Respect, Trust, Listening”, “How about Listen, Track and Listen Some More, then Learn from Your Mistakes and Adjust.” Much of this you can look at scientifically to see if what you try is working. But to actually nurture your lead by creating a way to hook him and nurture him fall into the art section.

What blasphemy is this, you ask. After all, everyone knows that internet marketing site visitors are people who are seeking information, shopping and coming back to your site for more. Right? Well, in actuality that is not right at all because you are not thinking about what is really going on technologically. SEO Logic in their blog post Web Traffic 101 says:

In a sense, there is no such thing as a site visitor. Instead of saying a person visits a site, it is correct to say that a person's user agent requests files which are retrieved from a website and rendered at the person's personal computer, thus creating the website traffic. The traffic is your site being sent to the person's computer after being invited by a user agent.

Personas are a way to understand your market segment. I’ll bet you think you know all about personas. But do you have them? Are you using them to define your market segment or are they sitting in a notebook somewhere totally forgotten? I thought so. I am going to breathe some life back into those market segments, known as personas, by bringing you the traditional persona criteria and another way to look at your market segments.

Made you look. I am stepping into the age-old debate on press releases where everyone wants to add his 2 cents. Last April 2012 in an article called 4 Ways to Rethink the Press Release,  Jonathan Rick said, “Every year, for the last ten years, someone has proclaimed that the press release is dying. While the rumors of its demise are exaggerated, they are not totally unfounded.”

It’s the start of a new year. Time to see what progress you made on your internet marketing site efforts if you haven’t kept up with it more often. How you analyze current internet marketing site efforts can give you insights into what you accomplished last year, including what worked and what needs work in order to optimize your current internet marketing site efforts. If you have not been paying attention to this on a daily to monthly basis, you have no hard facts to tell you if your internet marketing site efforts are working for you or not.

Let’s focus on doing some website analysis since this is the main way to check the effectiveness of your internet marketing site efforts.  Does this make you shiver in your shoes or your mind go blank?  Do you see yourself spending endless hours drowning in numbers?  If you work on your internet marketing site analysis all year round instead of once a year, you will learn how to make corrections as you go and not need to spend much time on it all at once.

Web Analytics

Oh no, you have to do some article writing. Where to start? What to say? What is the best layout? You don’t have to panic—here is a 7-part outline of the items you can use to structure your article post.

Some folks think that SMART goals are really dumb. Others worry that they only involved the left part of the brain. What’s your take on them? Did you know that SMART goals refer to an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Perhaps a quick review of what these words stand for is in order.