So, what is a brand awareness campaign and what do you need to know before you run yours?
This is a very relevant question for any new brand leader.
Anyone with any online experience will tell you that you don’t just “build it and they will come”.
Though most of have learned this the hard way by pushing their website live and waiting to drown in a flood of inquiries…. only to get crickets.
Building a brand is one thing.
Getting the name of your brand onto the lips and into the mind of your audience is entirely different yet it is a critical part of building a successful brand.
In this article you’re going to learn what a brand awareness campaign is and what you need to know to effectively launch your brand into the spotlight.
What Is The Objective Of Brand Awareness?
Building a brand is not a quick task you bash out in a day before running to market with your offer.
Any entrepreneur worth their salt knows that you don’t just jump online, hire a designer to throw together a cheap logo and consider yourself branded.
Even if you were to invest in a designer who is a master at their craft, design is only a small element of what makes a strategic brand.
No matter the market, branding is about people.
Every business solves the problem of a want or need and every market is created by the existence of people who have a desire for that want or need to be resolved.
In other words, every brand has the task of communicating to their audience the value of their solution in a way that connects and resonates on a human level.
First, your brand needs the tools to communicate effectively, which are developed within the brand strategy.
Second, these messages then need to be placed where your audience gathers and where they’re most likely to store the value of your offer to memory.
This is the ultimate objective of a brand awareness campaign and is a critical phase of building a successful brand.
Why Your Brand Needs A Brand Awareness Strategy
If you’ve taken the time and effort to build your brand strategically, you’ll have a tool that’s built around who your audience is and what they want.
Every element should be developed to enable the brand to resonate more effectively with that target audience and should include the following strategic elements
Internal Brand
Audience Persona
Positioning Strategy
Clear Differentiator
Brand Persona
Brand Personality
Brand Voice
Storytelling Framework
Strategic Brand Identity
Brand Collateral
Brands built with all of these strategic elements aligned are at a significant advantage to their competitors, however, this is only the starting point.
Increased Brand Awareness Puts Your Brand On The Map
What good a statically constructed, well-designed brand if no one knows who it is, what it does and why that’s valuable to them.
This is where the brand awareness strategy takes centre stage.
With a well-executed brand awareness campaign you can transition your brand from obscurity, to prominence by speaking to the right pain-point, with the right message in the right channels.
If your successful, you can land your brand on the map and in the mind of your audience as a legitimate alternative to your competitors.
Your Audience Needs To Associate Your Brand With A Value
Raising brand awareness is not about getting a group of people to remember the name of your brand.
If they remember the brand name but not what it does, how it can help them or the value it offers, then their awareness is only of the name not the brand.
Leveraging the impact of brand awareness requires your messages to communicate what your brand does and why that’s valuable to your audience.
Only with this critical information will they be able to associate the brand with that difference its value during the buying consideration phase.
What Is A Brand Awareness Campaign On Facebook? Can’t I just Run One Of Them?
The term “brand awareness” has become synonymous with Facebook due to their “brand awareness” campaign type.
Facebook is a legitimate advertising platform where new brands with zero reach can pay Facebook to put their messages in front of very specific people.
So, can’t you just select a “brand awareness” campaign type and put your budget to work to raise your brand awareness?
Although you can leverage Facebook as part of your brand awareness campaign and overall strategy, its certainly not a magic solution that just “gets you brand awareness”, in spite of its name.
An effective brand awareness campaign will consider all the channels your audience engages on, the environments they’re in, when they engage and the state they’re in when they engage.
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6 Steps To Crush Your Brand Awareness Campaign
Brand awareness is a right of passage for any successful brand and something that must be achieved.
To give your brand the best possible chance of establishing itself as a legitimate option for your audience, here are 6 steps you must follow when developing your brand awareness campaign.
[Step #1]
Know Your Audience
Developing your audience persona (or multiple personas) is part of the strategic brand development process.
Only with a clear understanding of who your audience is and the challenges and pain-points they’re experiencing, can you effectively develop a solution for them and a messaging strategy to communicate that solution.
The better you know your audience and the emotional toll of their challenges, the better you’ll be able to craft a message or tell a story to resonate with them.
[Step #2]
Know Where They Congregate
Traffic is not something a brand creates.
We all live a large portion of our lives online and your audience is no different.
To that effect, they are already part of the online traffic that exists in your marketplace and the people you’re targeting tend to congregate in the same locations.
The key to an effective brand awareness campaign is to identify where these congregations take place and gauge the temperature of the conversations.
[Step #3]
Define Your Marketing Channels
After you’ve identified where your audience congregates, you then need to evaluate these congregations.
A critical factor of your campaign is not just understanding where they are, but why they’re there.
Are they entertaining themselves or are they there to find answers and solutions?
All things being equal, the congregation looking for answers to the problem your brand solves is far more valuable than the congregation entertaining themselves.
[Step #4]
Allocate Resources To Your Branding Efforts
Knowing the value of these congregations will help you to determine the resources to allocate to them.
Your audience may be looking for answers to the problems you solve, though building a library of resources they can efficiently find when searching will likely take more time and resources to develop than placing an ad where your audience is entertaining themselves.
Your marketing strategy is a game of evaluation and a balance or risk to reward.
The better you understand your market and the channels you intend to participate in, the more accurately you’ll be able to allocate resources effectively to get the most bang for your buck.
[Step #5]
Identify Success Of Brand Awareness Campaign
Before you launch your brand awareness campaign, its important to understand what success looks like.
If you have no clear goals, then it’s very difficult to analyse success or failure and without this yardstick, you have no tool with which to optimize and improve upon.
Define what you want your brand to achieve based on the budget set and the time duration it should expect to achieve it in.
[Step #6]
Track Your Marketing Results
Although “likes”, “shares”, “Follows” and “Mentions” are considered “vanity metrics” (which marketers shouldn’t spend too much time dwelling over), they’re the go to for measuring brand awareness.
It’s important to build the awareness of your brand, but as I mentioned earlier, awareness for the sake of awareness is not enough.
For every like, follow, comment or site visit, there should be a clear path for your audience to follow to go further down the rabbit hole that is your brand messaging.
Brand Awareness Marketing Is The Top Of Your Funnel
Marketing funnels allow you to engage your audience on the front lines of your messaging and entice them with an offer of value to get to know your brand better.
Whether it’s a Facebook ad, a blog post or a social post, effective brand awareness campaigns leave a trail of breadcrumbs for prospects to follow.
The more actions they take, the further down the funnel they go, the more statistically likely they are to becoming a customer.
As you build out your brand awareness strategy, it’s imperative that you leave a trail of breadcrumbs for your audience to follow with every message you place in front of them.
Conclusion
So, what is a brand awareness campaign?
In a nutshell, it’s introducing your brand and the value you offer to your target market so they can remember it and its associated value when considering their options.
You can’t go from an obscure brand to a successful brand without raising your brand awareness level and it’s the first job of any new brand.
Once your strategic brand has been developed you’re locked and loaded, ready to step into the competitive arena.
Your brand awareness campaign is your debut.
Put your best foot forward, start as you mean to go on and make sure your messaging packs enough punch to make your audience take notice.
Do you have experience with brand awareness campaigns or are you about to embark on your first?
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to brand awareness?
I’d love to know. Pop a message in the comments and I’ll make sure I get back to you.
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