Zen and the Art of Brand Awareness
Whenever a client comes to us for recommendations about strategy, targeting and creative, we start with reviewing a full funnel framework. We've written about this extensively, from our step by step funnel. From our step by step funnel guides to our deep dive strategy papers, we’ve made an effort to ensure that our clients know how to build out their campaigns for each funnel stage and understand the goals and strategies that make each funnel unique. Still, we often get asked questions about how to tell if your campaign is working, particularly in the Awareness stage.
The Awareness stage is unique in that you will not be judging success based on conversions alone. In fact, many highly successful Awareness campaigns run their entire course without getting a single conversion at all! This might sound antithetical to the goals of your digital marketing but if you think about it in context of the lower funnel strategies we think you’ll see how all these puzzle pieces fit together and form one big effective ad campaign. So, let's discuss how to stay zen and have a highly successful Awareness campaign
Know the goal of the Awareness stage
The first hurdle we need to overcome in order to reach a stage of higher understanding in your upper funnel is to understand the primary goals of this particular funnel stage. The Awareness stage is so named because it is the stage where you are building Awareness of your product and brand among people who have never heard of you. This process is also called “prospecting” and “discovery” because it is where you will be “prospecting” for new customers and “discovering” where your key targeting demos lie. Success isn’t measured by conversions at this stage because your customers haven’t yet had the time to get familiar with your brand and learn all the reasons they need to make a purchase from you.
Instead, in the upper funnel your primary success indicators will be clicks, site visits, and time on site. These are all indicators that people saw your ads, liked what they saw, and decided to take a closer look at what you have to offer. Once you’ve begun to get traffic onto your site the Awareness stage has succeeded! Your new customers will trigger your tracking pixel and we can begin to build out mid-to-lower funnel strategies to help push them to convert.
Trust the data
A huge roadblock we see to Awareness stage success is when our clients start their Awareness campaigns and don’t see the results they want within the first few days or weeks. This can understandably give some clients cold feet, why continue a marketing campaign that’s ostensibly not working? The reality is that sometimes traffic doesn’t just immediately turn on when you run an Awareness campaign. As we’ve discussed before, sometimes ad traffic can act less like a faucet that you turn on and off at will and more as a “runway”, building up momentum before finally taking flight.
This process can take some time, but the data provided by an Awareness campaign that has run its course can be invaluable to your brand. It will teach you what audiences respond best to your messaging and creative, what DMAs to target or to leave behind, and what demographics are most likely to engage with your brand. All of this is reliant on your willingness to let the Awareness traffic build up its momentum and take flight, so don’t get scared off if your campaign has a slow start.
Know how to make it work for your brand
So how do you ensure you’ve set up an Awareness campaign that will work? What are the steps you take to ensure that it is driving all the traffic you need and that your targeting and creatives are working? There are some pretty basic rules we tell our clients to follow.
With your early targeting, go as wide as possible!
It’s easy to come into a new ad campaign with a predetermined set of customers in mind. If you sell hiking shoes for example you might already think that hiking intenders are your primary audience, which would drive you to create ads specifically for people who hike and trail run while excluding people who buy other types of shoes. This isn’t entirely misguided but for upper funnel strategic purposes it is a mistake! Instead of going granular and focusing on hiking intenders alone, go wider and target all shoe buyers across all intender groups. This will allow you to catch intenders from groups you may never have known existed but fall into the broader targeting pool of “shoe intenders”. You never know when someone who buys a new pair of sneakers every couple months might want to buy your shoes as well!
Don't make too many changes too early
As we discussed above the best strategy with Awareness is to set it and let it build up its momentum across a longer period of time. This allows us to give you a full picture of how your chosen audiences respond to your ads and gives people who might have been intrigued by your ads on first sight a chance to click on the second or third. That said, a “longer period of time” can vary from client to client. We know brands aren't sitting on unlimited piles of money and want to ensure that their campaigns are working if they are investing in them. If you have enough of a budget our standard recommendation is that you leave the campaign alone for at least a month to take a full picture of performance and make informed decisions on next steps. Our smaller clients should maintain their Awareness campaign for at least two weeks. This gives your campaign plenty of time to ramp up and gain the momentum it needs to really succeed.
Maintain awareness marketing zen
The Awareness stage is where new customers are first discovering your brand and sometimes it can take a little while for them to get to know you. This is understandably scary for some brands who turn to digital advertising for a high-performing marketing solution and many might cringe at the thought of spending money on a marketing campaign that doesn't immediately begin to turn out the results they signed up for. However, with a smart understanding of the goal of Awareness marketing and a follow-up campaign of mid-to-lower funnel retargeting ads, we’re confident that clients of any budget size can pull off Awareness campaigns that drive lots of new traffic and potential customers onto their websites and eventually turn them into long-time customers!