This Is Demand Generation

Some marketing terms are so overused they start to feel like furniture… always in the room, but easy to ignore. "Demand generation" is one of them. You’ll find it scattered across agency decks, tucked into sales meetings, used interchangeably with lead generation, and often spoken about as though it’s something only big businesses can afford to care about.

But once you strip away the jargon, demand generation turns out to be one of the most useful (and most overlooked) parts of small business marketing. It works quietly in the background, making everything else you do more effective, even if no one’s shouting about it.

At its core, demand generation is the work of helping people want what you offer before they’re ready to buy it. We’re not talking about visibility here; we’re talking about becoming wanted. Trusted. Top of mind. Demand generation is the slow and steady process of building awareness, curiosity, and interest through presence.

And in a business world that increasingly feels like one giant competition for attention, that kind of presence is rare… which is probably why it works.

A Silent Engine

It’s common to hear demand generation being described as a funnel that is made up of a planned series of steps designed to move someone from mild curiosity to becoming a qualified lead. That explanation isn’t completely wrong, but it leaves a lot out. In reality, demand doesn’t always build in a straight line. It grows through repetition, timing, relevance, and familiarity. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes suddenly. And often in ways you can’t fully track.

The businesses that do this well don’t spend all their time pushing people forward towards a sale. They focus on showing up in ways that feel natural and considered. They create content and conversations that linger, and they give people something to think about, even if they’re not ready to take action.

That might mean helping someone name a challenge they haven’t been able to articulate, or offering a way of seeing things that makes sense of what they’ve been experiencing, or sharing something that earns their trust, without needing to say so.

This kind of marketing doesn’t offer much instant feedback. You won’t always know what worked or resonated. But when you look back over time, you start to see patterns. People return. They mention things you shared weeks or months ago. They feel like they already know you.

And that’s what demand generation makes possible. But, unfortunately, no matter how big an impact it can have on your business, because it rarely feels urgent, most people overlook it. But once it’s in place, everything else gets easier.

Why It's Easier to Skip Demand Generation

When you’re running a business (especially a small one), your attention is constantly being pulled toward the things that feel urgent. The things that can be measured. The things that generate results that you can screenshot for stakeholders, or post about in Slack, or explain to your accountant.

Demand generation doesn’t usually look like that.

Demand generation looks like showing up before you have something to sell. It’s present in the writing of things that are helpful even if no one’s ready to act. When you repeat yourself… kindly, patiently… for months before someone finally says, “I’ve been meaning to reach out.”

In a world that rewards fast wins, demand generation feels like a slow burn, and because of that, it often gets skipped in favour of lead generation: the louder, flashier sibling with better KPIs. The problem is, though, lead gen only works when demand already exists.

You can build the world’s best campaign, but if the people seeing it don’t trust you, don’t recognise you, or don’t feel pulled toward what you offer, they’re not going to click. They’re not going to buy.

And when they don’t, we assume it’s the copy. Or the targeting. Or the algorithm.

When really, the problem is much simpler: we haven’t given them a reason to care.

What It Looks Like When Demand Generation Works

The most common sign that your demand generation is working isn’t a sudden spike in leads. It’s the moment someone gets in touch and says, “I’ve been following you for a while.” When someone says, “You probably don’t know me, but I read everything you post.” It’s the quiet growth of people who don’t just recognise your name, they already trust it.

You might not see those results for weeks or months. But when they come, they’re warmer, easier, and require less effort to convert. Trust me, it wasn’t because your sales skills suddenly improved; it was because demand did the work ahead of time.

And once you’ve seen that happen, once you’ve felt the difference between cold outreach and warm intent, it’s hard to go back.

So, Where Do You Start?

Please don’t start with a funnel. Or with a playbook. Or with a list of tactics pulled from someone else’s template. To do demand generation well, you need to start by making a shift from urgency to usefulness, and changing your content focus from pressure to presence.

You ask yourself:

If someone wasn’t ready to buy today, would they still find this helpful, interesting, or worth remembering?

If the answer is yes, that piece of content is doing demand work. If the answer is no, it might be trying too hard to close the sale before someone’s even in the market.

When demand generation is working, you don’t have to fight so hard for attention. Your audience is already giving it to you. And your job becomes less about chasing leads and more about showing up in a way that makes sense when the time is right.

That’s not just better marketing. It’s a better way to do business.