The way that people search and consume content online is constantly changing, making it more important than ever to stay ahead of new technology and emerging trends.
In this article, we’ll guide you through what Demand Generation (Demand Gen) is, explaining its features and the benefits of integrating it into your marketing strategy. Let’s get started.
Demand Gen campaigns are a relatively new visual Google Ads campaign that has been designed to help businesses generate interest and demand for their products or services. They’re highly relevant campaigns used to reach customers in the sales funnel, whether it’s for increasing conversions or building brand awareness.
Much like Discovery campaigns, Demand Gen uses artificial intelligence (AI) to push visual ads to new and existing customers across platforms like YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover and Gmail. Below, we have added an example of how a Demand Gen video ad would appear on YouTube.
Although Lead Generation (Lead Gen) and Demand Gen are fundamental campaigns in any successful marketing strategy, their objectives, audience targeting and tactics used to achieve results vastly differ.
Demand Gen | Lead Gen |
Creates awareness for products or services. | Aims to capture contact information and generate leads for potential customers. |
Targets a broad audience to generate interest for a business’s website. | Targets a specific audience who are likely to be interested in the product or service. |
Uses strategies like display advertising and brand-focused campaigns. | Uses strategies like lead forms, gated content and call-to-action-focused ads. |
Its goal is to increase brand visibility, engagement and consideration with potential customers. | The goal of Lead Gen is to acquire contact details of potential leads for further nurturing and conversion. |
Demand Gen campaigns combine engaging creative formats with AI-powered optimisation, offering several benefits for businesses:
Demand Gen campaigns use a variety of strategies to drive awareness, interest and demand for a business’s products or services to ensure potential customers see the ads at the best time in the buyer journey. Let’s take a look at some of the key features of Demand Gen campaigns that you should know about.
Google’s AI technology plays a key role in the success of Demand Gen campaigns. It analyses the creative assets and automatically tailors them, not only to the right audience, but it also effectively places them across a number of different platforms and channels. This ensures that the ad reaches the most relevant users to maximise its impact.
Demand Gen campaigns can be customised for various goals based on marketing strategy and campaign objectives. You can aim to drive website traffic, increase brand awareness and product consideration, or even target conversions and sales.
Unlike traditional Search Ads that target users via keywords, Demand Gen aims to reach audiences based on behaviour and intent by using AI algorithms to interact with and engage customers at key moments in their buyer journey.
Similar to Performance Max campaigns, Demand Gen allows businesses to compile audience groups based on behaviour (on and off-site), intent, interests and demographics and to develop lookalike audiences based on this data. It then uses this data to target users across multiple touchpoints of Google’s eco-system.
Ultimately, Demand Gen is a fundamental driver of business growth and success in today’s competitive digital marketing landscape. Using Demand Gen campaigns, we can help you get greater visibility for your brand, connect with the audience you’re targeting and achieve significant results.
If you want to get the most out of your paid marketing efforts with Demand Gen, get in touch with our team today. Our paid specialist will work with you to create a strategy that meets your business goals, ensuring you get the most out of your paid marketing campaigns.
Written by
We work in partnership with ambitious and forward-thinking retailers who share our values of continuous improvement and honest, clear communication. If we can’t improve it, we don’t do it.
Our relentless commitment to championing our client’s success is at the heart of everything we do.
If you’re interested in working with us, we’d love to talk. We work with ambitious eCommerce businesses that generate over £2m in annual revenue.
Complete our form or drop us a line and one of our friendly team will be in touch.