Growth Marketing vs Demand Generation: What’s the Difference?

by Frankie Karrer

6 Min Read

Building your brand through digital marketing efforts is a process that requires balance and precision. You’ll need to leverage multiple tactics at once, all while ensuring you don’t ignore any key segments of your customer base. One of the key challenges you’ll face involves finding a happy medium between two particular practices: growth marketing vs. demand generation.

However, before you can balance your investments in these two tactics, it’s important to understand what they are — and the differences between them.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a proactive approach to digital brand building that focuses on expanding a company’s customer base, revenue, and market share.

Unlike traditional marketing, which often centers on short-term campaigns or promotions, growth marketing is a long-term, data-driven strategy aimed at sustainable development.

In its simplest terms, growth marketing involves identifying the milestones you’ll need to hit to build your business. From there, you’ll create a holistic strategy aimed at acquiring new clients, nurturing leads, retaining existing customers, and maximizing sales volume.

The scope of that strategy will be much broader than that of other types of campaigns, which is what makes growth marketing unique.

Learn more in our guide on B2B growth marketing.

Importance of Growth Marketing

Through growth marketing, your business can reach new incremental customers and drive measurable performance. Additionally, as an integral component of your marketing mix, growth marketing can complement other advertising efforts, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click ads, and social media outreach.

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to marketing, and that means you need to take a holistic approach that utilizes omnichannel marketing. Growth marketing represents a vital component of that process.

Strategies for Growth Marketing

When building your growth marketing strategy, these three key tenets are essential:

Data-Driven Decision-Making: Use data analytics to identify opportunities, understand customer behavior, and optimize campaigns in real-time.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Enhance the user experience and site design to maximize the percentage of visitors who take desired actions.
Customer Retention Programs: Keeping existing customers loyal is more economical and productive than retaining new ones.

On that last point, one classic Harvard Business School study found that boosting customer retention by 5% can boost profits by 25% or more. Selling to existing customers is easier, as well, which means that increasing retention can help reduce your total advertising costs.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand generation is the process of creating brand awareness and interest in a company’s products or services among potential customers.

However, unlike growth marketing, which focuses on the entire customer journey, demand generation specifically targets the top of the sales funnel — generating leads and nurturing prospects until they are ready to make a purchase.

People can’t purchase your products if they don’t know they’re available, or are unaware of the value they provide. Demand generation works to break through that sales barrier by:

Creating awareness: Making people aware that your goods are available
Demonstrating your value prop: Showcasing functionality and value
Positioning your product as the solution: Promoting the item(s) you sell as the means of resolving customer pain points

In some instances, you may be able to accomplish all three steps in a single advertisement. However, there are many cases in which repeated exposure is necessary to increase brand awareness.

Just remember, though, that demand generation doesn’t necessarily drive sales (at least not at first). Your goal with it is to get customers into the sales funnel and talk about your products. From there, your other marketing strategies can take over.

Importance of Demand Generation

A good demand generation strategy lays the foundation for sales and revenue growth by ensuring a steady stream of qualified leads. By building brand awareness, educating prospects, and fostering engagement, you can set the stage for successful conversions at the bottom of the funnel.

The tactic also plays an important role in long-term growth. If you want to ramp up sales volume and total revenue, you’ll need more prospects. Luckily, demand generation assists with breaking into new markets and getting your products in front of different audiences.

Strategies for Demand Generation

There are many ways to generate buzz about your products and obtain quality leads.

Content marketing, which involves creating valuable materials such as blogs or videos that address customer pain points, remains one of the most impactful strategies.
Paid and organic social media marketing should be part of your marketing mix as well. Use social platforms to amplify your brand messaging, engage with followers, and drive traffic to your company’s website or landing pages.
Email marketing is yet another resource that deserves a place in your toolkit. Sending targeted, personalized emails to leads and prospects can help nurture relationships and promote offers.
Last but not least, Connected TV (CTV) ads, which have gained significant traction over the past few years. Thanks to dynamic monitoring and delivery platforms like MNTN Performance TV, you can run targeted streaming TV ads and reach niche audiences with engaging content. CTV possesses the power and impact of traditional TV advertising, with the measurement capabilities of a performance marketing channel.

Summary of Key Differences

Understanding the subtle differences between growth marketing vs. demand generation will help you decide when to use each set of tactics. With that in mind, these strategies differ along three key areas: focus, objectives, and tactics.

Focus: Growth marketing encompasses the entire customer journey, from acquisition to retention. Demand generation focuses on targets at the top of the funnel.
Objectives: Growth marketing prioritizes long-term goals, whereas demand gen looks to create immediate awareness and interest among prospects.
Tactics: Growth marketing may involve examining a broader set of data to inform your decision-making. Demand generation strategies won’t have as wide of a view into trends and customer responses.

Importance of Full Funnel Marketing

Though the differences between demand generation vs. growth marketing are clear, integrating both practices into a cohesive full-funnel marketing strategy will yield the best results.

Without top-of-funnel tactics, you won’t have enough leads to feed the sales team. And if your middle-of-funnel strategies are lacking, the most promising prospects will get lost before they ever make a purchase.

By aligning your marketing efforts across the entire funnel, your company can attract, engage, and retain customers more effectively.

How MNTN Performance TV Can Help

MNTN Performance TV represents a versatile marketing tool that can elevate both your demand generation and growth marketing efforts. Alone, MNTN offers real-time insights into your CTV advertising campaigns, promotes precise ad placement, and empowers you to better connect with target audiences.

But more importantly, MNTN can boost the efficacy of your pre-existing marketing efforts, especially paid search and social campaigns. During an examination of our first party data, we explored the impacts of adding CTV to campaigns that already incorporated social and paid search.

We found that the ads:

Increased average session duration across B2B and B2C businesses
Boosted conversion rates for paid social by 8.52%
Increased conversion rates for paid search by 22.27%

Our platform also helped clients increase email conversion rates by adding value to omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Need inspiration? Check out these demand generation examples.

Growth Marketing vs. Demand Generation: Final Thoughts

Instead of thinking about these two tactics as one versus the other, it’s important to view them as essential components of a successful marketing strategy. They both serve distinct purposes and employ different tactics to further your brand goals.

By integrating both approaches into a cohesive, full-funnel marketing strategy and leveraging innovative solutions like MNTN Performance TV, your business can achieve remarkable results and thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. With MNTN, you’ll enjoy access to premium inventory, marketing automation tools, powerful integrations, reporting tools, and more. Request a demo today and see how our platform can take your growth marketing strategy to the next level.