Eli5 What is the difference between marketing and lead generation?
In: 5
Lead gen is a component of marketing, but not the only one.
Lead gen is specifically creating the *first* contact between your business (typically a sales team) and a potential customer. But marketing can occur before that contact (e.g. your brand image) or after that contact (e.g. detailed materials on why a customer should purchase your product).
For example, if I ran a company that sells houses, lead gen would be just making people aware that we have houses for sale and getting them on an initial call. But marketing might involve a campaign to convince people (in general, not just our current leads) that our houses are good, or a one-pager that we can give to potential buyers after they contact us to tell them about how our houses are better than our competitors and you can have one today for just 10^4 payments of 19^(95).
Lead generation usually refers to the first part of the marketing process. It specifically means finding a potential customer and then handing them off to someone else within the marketing department.
Lead gen is one component of marketing. Depending on what type of product you’re selling, some may use the web more to collect leads (enterprise software, real estate, cars) vs. direct eCommerce (selling shoes, computers, groceries). But even direct eCommerce sellers want to do lead gen, to be able to regularly market to their customers with new products, seasonal offers, discounts, etc.
Latest Answers