Brand Awareness: A Vital Part of Your Digital Strategy

March 26, 2021

Focusing on the Top of the Funnel Could be the Key to Driving More Leads

As a savvy business owner, you may be overwhelmed with the scope of marketing choices your business is presented on a daily basis. We get just how challenging it can be to determine what tactics to invest in and how to get the biggest bang for your buck.

At the end of the day, the effectiveness of your marketing strategies comes down to starting a relationship even before the consumer has a need for your specific product or service.

For many, driving form submissions on their website or driving phone calls are an immediate need so the majority of marketing budgets are allocated towards lead generation tactics like Google PPC. However, it’s important to understand that these tactics only reach individuals who are actively searching for keywords related to your business. This means there’s another 80% of the population that we could be speaking to that this strategy does not reach!

So, it’s important to acknowledge that there are different digital strategies that work collectively to influence consumers throughout their decision making process (and that decision making process is no longer a linear one). According to the Harvard Business Review, 73% of today’s consumers confirm they use more than one channel during a shopping journey.

The ever-changing changing patterns of behavior in an “always-on” digital environment indicates that consumers are now being influenced by more resources than ever before, and their path to purchase looks more like a tangled ball of yarn than a linear model of behavior. However, the good news is that the basics of decision making still comes down to three primary elements of persuasion:

Ethical Appeal: A consumer’s overall trust in your brand
Logical Appeal: Quality, price, and long term value
Emotional Appeal: Your brand’s ability to address the things they care about

Today, we will dive into the first element, ethical appeal. Or in marketing terms, brand awareness tactics.

In order to succeed in winning the consumer’s ultimate decision to do business with your brand you must first engage with them before they are ever in need of your product or service. The goal here is to target your ideal audience and develop familiarity with your brand so that you can establish trust (a key component in a long term relationship, right)?

In fact, 82% of consumers searching online favor brands that they know.

Consider the following commercials:

Amazon’s 2021 Super Bowl Commercial is a hilarious example of the personalized relationship consumers have with their Alexa (planting the seed that Alexa meets any of their needs).

Another branding example comes from the burrito champion of the world, Chipotle.

In this commercial, Chipotle asserts that choosing a sustainable “real” option has the power to impact farmers, communities, and our climate. Talk about ethical and emotional appeal… we just about had tears of hope in our eyes!

These commercials are not directly asking the consumer to take action are they? They’re actually aimed at increasing brand awareness in front of the audience they want to influence. They leverage the things the consumer cares about such as convenience, intuition, flexibility, customization, fresh products, etc.

So how does all of this impact your business? Let’s break it down.

If you want your brand to be the one a consumer chooses at the end of their decision making process, then we have to get your brand name in front of them as early in the decision making process as possible . This way, we can begin to establish trust between your brand and the target consumer.

To establish trust, it’s important to ensure the consumer is exposed to your brand’s name and primary messaging frequently enough to derive conscious name recognition and recall. Once this has been established, when the consumer is in need of the service or product you provide your brand is more likely to come to mind! As a result, the consumer may go to Google and search for your brand by name instead of searching for, “best ____ near me,” which eliminates roughly 90% of the competition right out of the gate!

In our experience, some of the best brand awareness strategies online include:

Since these strategies are not direct lead generation tactics we will measure the success of these campaigns by the number of times your ad appeared on a screen, the number of clicks or engagements with the ad itself, increases in your website’s direct and organic traffic, the average session duration of the site visits, and overall lead actions coming in from your website month over month.

Over time these strategies will have a significant impact on your brand’s visibility, perception, and overall resonance with your target audience which is the most important step in earning their business when it matters most.

If you are interested in learning more about strategies that can help your brand WIN in this area. We invite you to connect with us and let’s discover if our brands were a match made in heaven or are better off as friends.