Many marketers who were early adopters of online advertising had become accustomed to being the heroes of their respective organizations for consistently wining the battle with that elusive monster called ROI. You brought home 5,000 new customers in one month for less than anyone else on your team and you were a “genius” , your boss was very impressed and consequently handed you a few more bucks and said “can you do 10,000” – you did it without breaking a sweat. You can guess what came next, a new goal 20,000. This time it was different, the most you were able to do no matter what was 12,000 – what happened? You did everything right, you applied everything you had learned; rigorous testing, constant optimization, and your go-to media placements and keywords were all covered.

Well there is a HUGE difference between demand generation and demand harvesting. Harvesting existing demand for your products or services is a hell of a lot easier than creating demand for them. That said I’ve learned that the magic sauce for scaling your business is doing both well and in concert with each other.

Very few marketers do this, in fact there seems to be some silly unwritten law in the marketing world that states you should choose a side - you are either a brand marketer or a direct marketer and these are mutually exclusive. Like being a Republican or Democrat, a sailor or a power boater. Even marketing organizations and agencies seem to come in two flavors. I say this is ridiculous. Why would you create demand for your product and not do a good job of capturing it, or conversely why would you expect to harvest more business than your brand commands.

I would attribute most early success in the online space to the inherent transparency and efficiency of the channel for harvesting demand. It suddenly became easier than ever to be a great direct marketer. You now had all the data and tools to be at the right place at the right time to capture demand. What could be more elegant than buying the keyword “purple couch” when you have a line of purple couches for sale this season? The beauty of the web is you now had the ability to reach “everyone” who had that want or need.

I’ll continue with the silly couch example. Sure before you started marketing online you typically sold 10-12 purple couches every month, and now you sell 100  - that’s real growth right? Yes, but you cant mistake that for creating demand. There were always 100 people out there (with very bad taste I may add) who wanted a purple couch; you just were simply not reaching them. Reality check - If you want to sell 100,000 of those purple suckers you’re going to need to get Opra or Martha to tell the world they have to have one before the holidays…that my friends is demand generation.