The idea behind inbound marketing is to offer valuable content on your website that will attract and engage prospects.

[Shakhawat]

Lead generation focuses on bringing in and converting prospects. Inbound marketing creates content that does the additional legwork of adding initial value.

Companies that adopted the inbound methodology started creating quality content that accounted for the changing SEO algorithms and also helped buyers better understand their own problems and the different ways they could address them.

This educational content combined SEO and lead generation mom database strategies into a clear conversion path that brought prospects to the business’s website and then helped them move through the stages of the buyer’s journey.

Demand Generation
Demand generation builds upon all the methodology that came before it to cover the spectrum of both attraction and engagement, while also taking action to create demand through any means necessary.

Inbound is the ideal marketing strategy, but when those efforts peak or cap off, demand generation helps supplement inbound strategies with specific outbound tactics like account-based marketing.

Demand generation also follows prospects from initial attraction all the way through marketing and sales to when they close as a customer.

We’re now seeing a shift from lead generation to demand generation because a lead will only get you so far and nurturing a prospect will only get you so far, so if you’re not focusing on the entirety of your funnel through to your flywheel, you’re missing out on a key component of what your marketing efforts should be providing for your business as a whole.

Since demand generation focuses on the entire funnel and takes an interest in the marketing-sales handoff that other methods ignore, conversational marketing also comes into play.

Conversational marketing is the newest demand generation tool to make the marketing-sales handoff as quick and efficient as possible by capitalizing on the immediate interest that visitors have on a website. People don’t browse B2B websites for fun; if you can capture that reason in the moment through a chatbot, the chances of converting the lead are much higher than if a follow-up email is required.