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.
What Is Demand Gen?
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.
Lead Gen vs Demand Gen
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
Creates awareness for products or services.
Targets a broad audience to generate interest for a business’s website.
Uses strategies like display advertising and brand-focused campaigns.
Its goal is to increase brand visibility, engagement and consideration with potential customers.
Lead Gen
Aims to capture contact information and generate leads for potential customers.
Targets a specific audience who are likely to be interested in the product or service.
Uses strategies like lead forms, gated content and call-to-action-focused ads.
The goal of Lead Gen is to acquire contact details of potential leads for further nurturing and conversion.
Benefits Of Using Demand Gen Campaigns
Demand Gen campaigns combine engaging creative formats with AI-powered optimisation, offering several benefits for businesses:
- Expanded brand awareness
- Discovery of new potential customers
- Drives sales or conversions
- Helps to attract high-quality leads
- Enables businesses to engage with their audience
- Provides a competitive advantage
- Lays the foundation for sustainable business growth
Demand Gen Features
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.
AI-Powered Ads Optimisation
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.
Campaign Goals
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.
Granular Audience Targeting
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.
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Joe Turner
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