In the last decade, due to heavy digitalisation, the vast majority of the marketing activities have become performance based. Traditional marketing teams have been transitioning to more agile and result oriented digital marketing teams. That’s only good for businesses, start-ups and small businesses in particular. Inbound marketing significantly increases marketing efficiency resulting in doing more with fewer people and budget. However, there is one noteworthy problem with performance-based marketing: neglecting brand awareness.
Performance-based marketers always go after conversions and results. In other words, they tend to focus only on the bottom of the funnel activities. That’s understandable because they like to turn their investment into revenue right away.
Online Advertising platforms also encourage them to do so. Conversion ads are by far the most popular among Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives and Google Ads.
Although, modern and effective marketing strategies suggest we focus on the entire funnel. To do that, companies should start investing in creating a brand first, quickly raising some brand awareness.
This is a great way to hit all three stages of the customer journey. Moreover, the ROI of brand awareness is remarkable.
Once your target audience starts searching for you with your brand name, you can pretty much stop paying for long-tail keywords and enjoy organic traffic without spending a dime on Google Ads or other keyword-based advertising activities.
3 Solid Reasons to Invest More In Brand Awareness
Now that we laid some foundation on brand awareness and its importance, we can get more specific with 3 Solid Reasons Why You Should Invest in Brand Awareness.
1. Top Funnel Activities Have a Higher Success Rate
As marketers, we often get better results when involved in top-funnel activities, particularly brand awareness campaigns.
But why? Here is the math! Let’s apply the same 1% success rate to our campaigns that address different stages of the customer journey in each niche below:
| Buyers’ Journey Stage | Number of People | Campaign Successful People (1%) |
| Awareness | 1M | 10K (Often Neglected) |
| Consideration | 100K | 1K (Targeted Only by Chance) |
| Decision | 10K | 100 (Heavily Targeted) |
For a given product or service, there are always more people in the awareness stage, right? Therefore, as you can see, the number of campaign successful people is significantly higher in the awareness stage in our sample.
All in all, we are suggesting that focusing on that often neglected 10K instead of heavily targeted 100 would be collecting low hanging fruits!
When we do brand awareness, we tend to use more generic terms that everyone can somewhat relate to. That really helps with reaching wider audiences as well.
For instance, an automobile brand can choose between a product-focused campaign or an awareness campaign focusing on addressing climate change.
Now, you know what difference it makes and how to strategise around your campaigns in a really smart way.
2. Brand Awareness Ads Are Cost-Effective
Videos are brilliant content to raise brand awareness for any business. They can be distributed by social media and still reach more people than a regular post. But if you distribute your videos using digital ads, whether Facebook Brand Awareness type or Google Video Ads, you can reach millions of targeted people.
This is exactly what we want: reaching wider audiences. The good thing, though, when you use videos and brand awareness ads, the whole thing is also cost-effective. You might have heard from your paid social specialist or CPC expert friend that acquiring a single lead or a conversion on ads cost her 100 + dollars now and then.
But that’s not the case with brand awareness ads. Since not many advertisers are using awareness ads, the competition is minimal. That’s a significant reason to low cost. In Facebook brand awareness ads, we face Cost per Estimated Ad Recall Lift (People), which means we are paying for each person likely to remember us.
Our data shows that after reaching 18 million + people around Europe using these ads, our cost per estimated ad recall lift has been 0.0097 AUD! It’s an unbelievably small amount to pay for each brand-aware person! And that’s why you should let us set these types of ads for you as well.
3. Brand Awareness Aims Long Term Success
Effective marketing strategies are balanced, hitting short, mid and long terms equally. When you build a new brand, it makes perfect sense to initiate an acquisition strategy and get the first sales. But once you start selling, the next challenge is the sustainability of your business.
For us, this is the biggest challenge that all new businesses will face, and the ultimate cure is building a brand. When you constantly work on building a brand, in other words, raising enough brand awareness, you will always have a steady flow of sales.
But when you investigate those sales, you will see that those are not unexpected but a result of your constant brand awareness efforts. So why not switch more towards a 70% awareness, 20% conversions, 10% remarketing model instead of 90% conversions!
