Demand Generation
Demand generation is the set of marketing activities that build awareness of a problem and interest in a solution within a target market, so buyers come to the company when they are ready.
Also called: demand gen
Why it matters
Demand generation works on the market before anyone fills in a form. It includes educational content, LinkedIn posts, webinars, podcasts, communities and paid ads aimed at the right audience. Teams judge it over longer periods through signals such as branded search, direct traffic, self-reported attribution and inbound pipeline, rather than by counting downloaded assets.
People often confuse it with lead generation. Lead generation captures contact details from people who are already interested, often in exchange for gated content. Demand generation creates that interest in the first place and often leaves content ungated. Most B2B teams run both: demand generation shapes how buyers think about the problem, and lead generation or outbound turns that interest into conversations.
Example
A company that sells contract management software publishes a weekly LinkedIn post about common clause mistakes, runs a monthly webinar with in-house lawyers and keeps its guides ungated. Months later, a legal operations lead who followed the posts searches for the company by name and books a demo. No form fill started that deal, but the demand generation work created it.
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