What is the difference between demand generation and growth marketing?

Demand generation: reaching out to prospects, engaging with them and building pipeline. More broad based and focused mostly on customer acquisition.

Growth marketing: more focused on the entire journey from customer acquisition to retention. This would include cross-selling, upselling to customers, so the journey continues. This also is a lot more data driven, where you’d access information about the customer’s usage of your product and leverage in-app features to reach out to customers.

For reference look up AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) for Growth Marketing.

The most simple answer I can give is that they are both very similar - demand gen and growth marketing roles drive X% of the company's Pipe Generation and Revenue. Both are responsible for driving cross-selling, additional users and add-on/upgrades, new logos and new business for the business. Now the difference is what channels demand gen owns vs. what growth owns. As a result of this, where demand gen and growth will sit in an organization might differ (i.e. demand gen within the CMO org, vs. grown can sit within Product).

Here are some of the stages that I think which function owns what.

Customer Acquisition (Demand Gen & Growth)

What are we trying to solve for? We want to optimize the traffic we get from all of our marketing tactics - like SEM, SEO, retargeting - so we get as many people into the conversion funnel as possible.

In-trial Experience (Growth)

The ultimate goal here is to build a product that is so great and valuable and the product creates active daily users on its own. But we know people are busy and it’s easy for people to forget all the apps and trials they sign up for. 

Retention (Growth)
The first 90 days is a critical stage for customer success. If a new customer is not onboarded correctly, they will attrit. What can Growth do to help encourage our users to onboard correctly? (i.e: Onboarding newsletter with tips and tricks on how to get started, scalable webinars to get users to onboard correctly, partner with support to provide the right marketing assets/how-to guides/blog posts, and more).

Cross-sell, Upsell and Upgrades (Demand Gen and Growth)

There are 2 paths to generating more business from our existing install-base: Self-Service (Growth) and routing a hot lead delivered to Sales (Demand Gen)

Self service: We look at feature usage and all the 1st party data we’ve gathered via a form. We then target our users with the “next best action” that is just for them. 

This type of promotion is in the apps you use everyday - like Netflix - they will show you a recommended list of shows/movies based on the ones you’ve viewed already. So my list of “next best” shows to watch is going to be different than yours. 

Same concept here. 

The recommended “next best action” is going to dynamically change for your users based on their app usage. That’s self-service.

Lead/Opportunity Generation: The second cross-sell/upsell motion falls under Demand Gen. You can build propensity to buy scores based on the 1st party data (titles, what company segment they’re from) and then we pair that with what features they’re using inside the app. These can be signals for a product qualified lead score model - just like lead scoring but you’re now looking at product signals. 

For example, 5 mean they will buy regardless if a sales person is involved or not - so we leave those leads alone and let them Convert. A 4 or 3 might indicate buying interest but they’re not fully ready to self serve - and we can route them back to our direct sales channel. A 1 means they have the lowest probability to convert, so let’s not pass them to sales and nurture them via marketing journeys. 

As you can see there are so many ways to build marketing programs and we’re just getting started. Think about what AI can do on top of this.

This is one of my favorite topics! Usually, the answer is no difference at all. The term "Demand Generation" came first, and over time has evolved into "Growth Marketing." Many organizations still use DG as the term, even through they actually mean Growth Marketing and the DG leader is responsible for Growth Marketing.

Officially, however, Demand Generation is a subset of Growth Marketing. Growth Marketing encompasses all of the marketing tactics focused on Pipeline and Revenue: funnel management, events, marketing programs, ABM, SEO, social media, lead generation, etc. Demand Generation is a subset of Growth Marketing - typically focused on digital marketing programs, inbound, and lead generation.

Nand generation is going out into the market and generating interest in your product. Growth marketing is a process in which you develop a hypothesis, test that hypothesis through AB testing, measure the results, continuously iterate.