In digital marketing, lead generation engages with prospective customers via digital channels (i.e., your website, blog post, email, online ads, social media, etc.) Digital lead generation focuses on providing content to prospective customers of high enough value that they declare interest in your product or service by providing you some or all their contact information. It is important to note, however, that even after this type of engagement most of these contacts won’t be qualified at this time. These leads, commonly referred to as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), will require further engagement to become actionable leads.

When a business starts out or launches a new product or service, the brand and/or product are usually unknown. Demand generation is designed to change that by bringing awareness to the new product or service. It gives people a reason to learn and get excited about what you are selling. As awareness of your offering builds, your sales and marketing teams can step in to engage these new emerging prospects and convert them to leads. However, it is important to keep in mind that demand generation and lead generation are not the same thing. While demand generation can feed your lead generation effort, many of the people or organizations that become interested in your product will not be good prospects. Any new offering will attract interest from competitors, analyst, business students and professors, and/or businesses not suited to buy your offering. So just because your demand generation effort is producing a lot of traffic, there is more work required to validate it is right kind of traffic.

To answer this question, we need to start with the definition of a lead. Some would suggest that any interaction with any potential customer, even a visitor to your website, counts as a lead. Others would only count those companies who have directly expressed interest and had a conversation with sales as actual “qualified leads.” Let’s narrow this down by defining two types of leads:
First, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are companies that have been attached to your business through some form of marketing activity. This could include web content including blogs and whitepapers, events like trade shows or webinars, or paid forms of advertising such as Pay Per Click, radio, or TV ads.

Lead generation is the first step in growing any business. It is important because it is central to how a business attracts and engages with prospective customers and develops those prospects into new customers. The most successful businesses drive revenue growth in a scalable and predictable way, and lead generation is key.