What’s the Difference Between a Lead Generation Agency and a Marketing Agency?
Updated: Mar 29, 2022
When growing your brand or business, it is important to expand your brand reach to increase the number of leads you have coming in. Without qualified leads or leads that are truly interested in your product or service, it is incredibly difficult to convert sales.
Both lead generation agencies and marketing agencies can help get your brand in front of the right audience so that you garner more qualified leads, but each agency type serves a slightly different function, and knowing which is right for your business goals can make all the difference between success and wasting your time and money.
To help you determine which type of agency is the best fit for your brand goals, we’ll take a closer look at each agency and the types of offerings that they provide.
If you’ve found yourself asking what’s the difference between a lead generation agency and a marketing agency, here is your answer:
What is a lead generation agency?
A lead generation agency will gather and aggregate consumer data and deliver it to brands or businesses looking for new leads.
This type of agency will use several tactics to find leads and then rank and qualify those based on warmth or the level of interaction with your brand.
These leads are commonly found through:
Social media marketing
Online advertising
Content syndication (via appropriate blogs or RSS feeds)
Targeted landing pages
While you may find it tempting (and cheaper!) to simply purchase audience data, it is unlikely that that data will be much help. To gather genuine leads, you require a targeted strategy and that is what you will gain with the right agency.
A proper lead generation agency should be able to help you set up a lead nurturing program that moves consumers through the sales funnel, from the awareness stage to the purchase stage.
What is a marketing agency?
A marketing agency helps brands and businesses develop and manage marketing strategies to achieve their business goals.
These agencies can perform audience and market research and analysis, map marketing strategy, and brand and promote products or services.
Typically, a marketing agency will:
Perform market research
Develop marketing strategies
Develop branding
Perform SEO
Website design
Graphic design
Create Email and social media marketing strategies
Develop content marketing strategies
Conduct public relations
A marketing agency can help you better identify your target audience and that target audience’s pain points so you can position your brand as the ideal solution to their problem or concern.
Growth, in whatever metric you choose to focus on, is the primary goal of a marketing agency. This growth could mean greater brand awareness and recognition, increased traffic and leads, more new customers, better retention of previous customers, or increased revenue and sales.
What’s the Difference Between a Lead Generation Agency and a Marketing Agency?
Lead generation agencies and marketing agencies sometimes perform similar tasks but the primary difference between them lies in their overall goals.
A lead generation agency will work to quickly deliver leads to your sales team while a marketing agency may deliver leads while staying more focused on growing your business in terms of overall marketing goals.
One way to look at the differences between these agency types is to think about a timeline. Lead generation tends to be a quick, short term solution for rapid growth while a marketing agency plays more of a long game.
A lead generation agency will buy lots of ads and push traffic to your landing pages, capturing visitor information, and delivering qualified sales leads. This can give you a boost right off the bat. But, these tactics can level off and produce diminishing returns over the long term without a significant shift in strategy. And, as soon as you stop paying for the advertising, the leads will dry up.
A marketing agency will spend more time trying to create a self-sustaining system. By developing a content strategy, for example, a marketing company can help you generate organic search traffic to your website by creating and posting relevant blogs, product guides, and tutorials, among other things. This type of evergreen content can bring people to your page, and connect people with your brand, over and over again.
Another primary difference between these two types of agencies is in the types of leads they return.
A lead generation company will focus on the types of leads they are collecting. They will often make contact with leads to manually verify them, categorize them, or qualify them before passing them off to your sales team so that all is necessary is a follow-up or a targeted pitch.
A marketing agency often automates this process, delivering leads that may not necessarily be as warm to your product or service. A benefit to this type of automation is that it is easy to scale up as traffic and leads increase.
Both agencies can deliver measurable results and the direction you choose to go will depend on your specific and unique business goals.
Choose Kyber Digital for the Best of Both
But what if you didn’t have to choose between a lead generation agency and a marketing agency?
Kyber Digital prides itself on being marketing AND lead generation specialists who employ cutting edge strategies and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to develop, grow, and scale your brand. Acting as true partners, Kyber Digital will analyze your business and offer advice tailored to your needs.
If you are looking for something more than a cookie-cutter approach to growth, partnering with an agency like Kyber Digital is the answer for reaching the right audience and beating out the competition!
Contact us today to see if your business qualifies for one of our growth marketing programs.
Kyber Digital
343 Harbor View
Forked River, NJ
08731
(215) 305-8769
