Hello everybody and welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Kneola and I am here with Evan Hughes, VP of Marketing for Refine Labs. How are you Evan? I'm doing well.
It's been a good week. It's been a good week. It's been a good start to the year so I'm really excited to have this conversation. If you had to pick one guilty pleasure snack what would that be?
Oh pop tarts all day. Send them in pop tire. So we are starting at the very beginning Evan. We are going into definitions.
What is demand generation? Can you define create, capture and convert demand? Demand generation is definitely buzz word right now and has been for a few years. But I think that's a good thing.
It gives people talking about marketing a little bit differently or challenges maybe some preconceived notions of what it is. But how we think about it here at Refine Labs and how I personally think about it is really demand generation is just a tactical marketing strategy that's focused on generating buzz for a specific brand and or service through various channels. So it's a holistic approach where the focus is going to be education through different content format excuse me and answering common problems, feeling different objectives just creating a narrative in market that people are talking about about a specific brand or product. You can look at demand generation all up.
But I think what's really interesting when you start thinking about like philosophy, go to market approaches strategy is to break that into the demand creation, demand capture and demand convert. We speak a lot of that here at Refine Labs. It's also definitely you know cascaded across many different marketers and amazing marketers at that. So for those of you that are maybe getting familiar with this is think about demand creation as like the top of the spectrum.
This is you're really socializing content, educating markets, you're reaching individuals at prospects that you want to bring in as potential candidates for your business with content that they're interested in. So you're creating a buzz but by giving them valuable information, valuable case studies, valuable webinars. So you're engaging and educating with no expectation of any sort of consumption like click consumption or anything but you're just recognizing that naturally and organically people are going to absorb information if it's delivered in an authentic way. The demand capture piece right?
So that's moving a little bit further down the funnel. You create the buzz, you get people excited and then they're ready to say like hey what happens next? And oftentimes the buzz is created and made social channels where the demand capture happens in direct response channels. So these are typically paid search, search engines, review sites but demand capture focuses on the customers that are saying hey I'm ready to have this conversation with sales, who do I talk to and can't we get this ball rolling?
So it's usually high intent keywords on Google search that are specific to product and some sort of intent token attached to that. So how's it get started? What is the software, blank platforms, all of these signals like somebody is really eager to talk to sales so that would be demand capture. And the last few pieces convert.
So we've moved them down the funnel, we've got the buzz there, we've got the capture component, they've finally got into saying a lot of the talk to sales. The converting is really how the speed and velocity and what you can convert that hand raiser into revenue for the business. So think about this is more of an all-down motion that's using different enablement resources, different asset creations for sales, for marketing, for internal apps. It's just really anything to ignite the speed in which that individual can turn into revenue for the business and be a buyer of your product faster.
So those are the three tiers that we bucket here with fine labs under this concept of demand generation. Breaking down to the simplest form, how is demand generation different from lead generation? Yeah, I love this question. I think analogy that has been working for me recently is almost thinking of a push-pull.
So demand generation is really pushing your message out to your target market. It's pushing different content pieces out to the target market. It becomes this kind of flywheel where you're educating beyond traditional paid media. Lead generation is more of a pull.
You're focusing on capturing contact information. You're focused on pulling people in through different gated content or different webinar registration links where you can capture a piece of their identity to some degree or their contact information to reach out to them. So pushing pull is a good way that I found that kind of resonates with people maybe less familiar with it and we really want to focus on an efficient push method. That's really great.
That's a good starting point for definitions. Next time we're going to talk about the market and how buying has changed. So stick around. Join us next week for that.
Evan, thank you. Thank you.