Demand generation
Demand generation is the marketing motion aimed at buyers who are not actively searching yet, through paid, content, events, and brand.
Demand generation is the top and middle of the funnel. The job is to create awareness and interest among buyers who would not otherwise find the product. Paid ads, organic content, podcasts, webinars, field events, and brand campaigns all live inside the function.
The classical structure splits demand gen from growth marketing (performance channels) and from product marketing (positioning and messaging). In practice the lines blur. A content marketer writing a launch post is doing PMM work. A paid ads manager running a retargeting campaign is doing growth work. The function is defined more by its goal (pipeline from non-searching buyers) than by its tactics.
The hard part of demand gen is attribution. A buyer who saw a podcast ad in March, downloaded a whitepaper in April, and bought in June credits the whitepaper in most attribution models. The podcast gets nothing. Every demand gen leader wrestles with this.
The Amdahl view
Most demand gen content is written from vibes. A marketer remembers a call from six months ago, pulls a phrase from memory, and writes the blog post around it. Grounded content, written from real customer language, outperforms ungrounded content by a factor big enough to show up in pipeline. The demand gen teams that win in the next two years ground every asset in what buyers already said. The rest will keep writing for the algorithm and wondering why nothing converts.
Frequently asked
Related terms
- GTM FundamentalsBuyer intentBuyer intent is the signal that a prospect is actively researching or evaluating a solution, used by sales and marketing teams to prioritize outreach.
- GTM FundamentalsPositioningPositioning is the strategic choice about who a product is for, what category it competes in, and why a specific buyer should pick it over the alternatives.
- The IntersectionGrounded AI contentGrounded AI content is AI-generated text anchored in proprietary source material with traceable citations back to the original evidence.
- The IntersectionContent velocityContent velocity is the rate at which a marketing team can ship grounded, defensible content from idea to publish.
- The IntersectionVibes-based messagingVibes-based messaging is the common B2B practice of writing positioning and copy from intuition rather than real buyer data.
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