What's the difference between demand generation and lead generation?

What are the two jobs marketing does?

Strip marketing back to first principles and there are two jobs. Generate future demand, which means building a list of people who are going to buy later. Capture demand, which means helping the ones who are ready to buy, buy now. Branding sits over both and makes each one cheaper and more profitable.

That’s how I describe what Backbone does. We’re generating demand, we’re capturing demand, and we make it look good the whole way through.

Everything else is a tool. Klaviyo flows, Meta ads, quiz software and pop-ups are all just ways of doing one of those two jobs. Even your email database is a tool. It’s a way of holding people between the point where they’re ready to talk to you and the point where they’re ready to buy from you.

Which activities fall on which side?

Demand generation is the slower work that fills the pipeline. Content, education, quizzes, lead magnets, SEO and ads that teach people about the problem you solve. Its job is to get people onto your list and warm them up.

Demand capture is the faster work. Offers, sales, events, retargeting, brand search on Google and last-chance emails. Its job is to turn people who are already interested into customers.

One campaign can do both. A quiz builds the list and generates demand, then an offer retargeted to everyone who took the quiz captures it.

Why does revenue drop after a big sale or event?

Because you sold to everyone who was ready and didn’t build anyone new to sell to next.

Only a small slice of your market is ready to buy in any given month. A good offer finds them. Then you send the “last chance to grab this offer” email and wring out whoever’s left. I call it squeezing the cloth. It works, and then the cloth is dry.

The mistake is pouring everything into capture around a big moment and switching off the work that was building future pipeline. I’ve seen it on campaigns we run. On one event campaign, we put all our funnel effort into capturing the existing demand and turning it into leads, and we turned off the stuff that was building future pipeline. Revenue dipped afterwards, which is exactly what you’d expect once you see it this way.

How much should go into demand generation?

Keep a fixed share running all the time, including while your big offer is on.

For that event campaign, the plan I put forward was to keep the quiz and a downloadable guide running at about 30% of media spend for the next six months. That way we’re constantly pulling through pipeline for the next event, and every offer lands on people who already know the brand.

Treat 30% as a starting point for any store. Put it into always-on pipeline builders like quizzes, lead magnets, SEO and content ads, and don’t raid it when a sale comes round. While the sale runs, point a list-building campaign at a separate audience, so you finish the promotion with a bigger database than you started with.

Why does Google look so good in my Shopify reports?

Because Google claims everything. Someone sees you on Facebook, doesn’t buy, then goes to Google a few days later and searches for your website. That gets claimed as a Google sale. Shopify’s sales-by-channel report shows you who caught the sale. It doesn’t show you who created it.

So a cheap brand search campaign can look like the best money you spend, when it’s mostly catching demand your social ads made. For every one person who comes to your website from Meta, a thousand people are seeing the brand. Some of them search for you later, by name or by category, and Google gets the credit.

That’s why turning off Meta often drops your Google traffic too. Google works when Meta is doing the demand gen. Before you cut a channel because the dashboard says it isn’t selling, ask whether it’s the one filling the pipeline for everything else.