As a small business owner trying to better understand your digital marketing, you have probably read about brand awareness and lead generation. While the two approaches used to be considered mutually exclusive, BOTH brand awareness and lead generation should be a part of your marketing strategy for maximum success.
But wait! What are brand awareness and lead generation?
If you’re a newbie to digital marketing, don’t worry…let’s break them down.
Brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable a brand is and how much brand equity (i.e., the value of a brand, determined by the consumer’s perception of its quality and desirability) it has.
Brand awareness is key to a business’s success or failure because it can determine whether consumers buy – and keep buying. Plus, it keeps your business top of mind until consumers are ready to buy. Building a successful brand means consistently delivering a positive look, feel, and message to the right audience through the most effective channels.
If you haven’t fully thought out this aspect of your marketing, you should. Otherwise, your business could end up looking less professional and more amateur. Think about it this way: have you ever looked up a brand online and decided not to buy after seeing they don’t exist on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google? We have!
To build positive brand awareness, you need to:
- Create a strong brand identity. A unique, attractive logo, color palette, and tagline will make your brand pop.
- Take part in local events. These might include tabling events, open houses, networking events, etc., where you mix and mingle with potential customers/clients.
- Strut your positive feedback. Showing happy customers and testimonials is indispensable to building positive brand awareness, so be sure to share as many success stories as possible.
- Incentivize, incentivize, incentivize! Discounts, referral fees, and free services might be just the ticket to inspire customers to refer friends and family. This is all part of creating positive brand awareness.
While it’s not possible to build your brand overnight, doing it right will help you earn the trust of potential customers over the long term. They might not be ready to buy from you now, but they will seek you out once they’re serious about buying—and they will know where to look with consistent brand awareness.
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your business. It involves capturing contact information for potential customers in various ways in order to market directly to them. Ways to capture contact information might include buying email lists, creating social media ads, scrolling LinkedIn, or putting out an email capture list at your next tabling event. Ways to market directly to those potential customers include cold calling or email marketing.
Lead generation is all about identifying and capturing potential customers for your products or services. Lead generation is important because it builds your customer base. On the other hand, brand awareness keeps people engaged until they are ready to buy.
For lead generation, you can:
- Use social media such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, etc., to create social ads targeted at your specific audience.
- Create an email funnel that captures leads and takes them through an automated sales process.
- Attend events where you can capture emails of potential customers and clients.
The differences between brand awareness and lead generation
- Social media management versus social media ads
- Newsletters versus sales email campaigns
- Attending a networking event versus asking for potential customer contact information at that event
- Content marketing versus Google ads
Why do you need both lead generation and brand awareness in digital marketing?
To get the best results for your efforts, lead generation, and brand awareness should be used at the same time. Brand awareness works best when employed consistently over time. Lead generation should be used before your well runs dry, so to speak, and leads run out.
Good brand awareness and lead generation together will help you get the most bang for your buck.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
Before you start building brand awareness and generating leads, you will need to research user behavior, audience trends, and your competition. The data you dig up should help point you in the right direction. Don’t just join every social media platform that exists. Know where your audience is going, and go there.
Building brand awareness and generating leads are long-term activities. You’ll need to keep at both for a long time to reap long-lasting benefits. Unfortunately, most small businesses lack the expertise, time, and resources to focus on both brand-building and lead-generation activities. That’s where delegation comes in.
Brand Awareness with Watch Media Group
If your business is struggling to do both lead generation and brand awareness effectively, the experts at Watch Media Group can take brand awareness off your hands with social media management, email marketing, and content marketing. Just send us a message when you’re ready to learn more.
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