Building brand awareness with digital marketing

Ever think that if you could just help people become more aware that your company exists, your sales team would have a way easier time selling? Then this article is for you.

Focusing on building awareness of your company is a different animal than focusing on generating sales-ready leads. Why? Because when you’re trying to generate sales-ready leads, your focus is on those that have a near-term problem they want to solve. Whereas when you’re trying to build awareness, you want to engage those that are “maybe some-day” customers (i.e. good fit), even though they may not have an immediate need.

What are your good-fit potential customers interested in learning about?

Not sure? Well, you need to find out. There are many methods for gathering this sort of feedback, but the main categories are:

  1. Test the market by creating content and analyzing engagement. This is great from the standpoint of being able to experiment and gathering direct feedback. It’s bad because you only can tell so much about the people that are engaging with your content if they aren’t self-identifying (e.g. by filling out a form or interacting with a chatbot). This can make webinars a good option.
  2. Ask your existing customers. This is good because you obviously have access to them (getting some portion of them to respond is another topic all by itself). It’s bad because they don’t necessarily have the same problems as those that aren’t your customers yet. You’re also working against relationship bias.
  3. Listen and interact on social media and forums. This is good because with a little work, you can hop right into the world you’re interested in (after you find that world). It’s bad because it generally takes a lot of leg work to find the little nuggets you’re after.
  4. Get out there in the real world and chat with your potential customers. Conferences, trade shows, and networking events. These are great because you can potentially both build awareness and find out what they’re interested in all at once. The bad news is that this takes a lot of time and effort and is not very scalable for a small company. Choose your events wisely.

Where do you try to engage your potential customers to build awareness?

The short answer is: you try to engage them where they naturally are and want to be engaged.

An important point of clarity here is that just because they’re on a particular platform (eg. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), doesn’t mean they want to hear from you when they’re on that platform. If you solve serious problems, they may actually be averse to hearing from you on a channel where they’re just looking to relax and be entertained. Here are the main categories of digital channels you’ll want to consider in the B2B realm:

  1. Search
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Forums
  4. Media publications
  5. Partner channels

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be engaging with your potential customers offline at networking events, conferences and trade shows. You likely should be. The key is to harmonize your digital marketing and offline marketing efforts. The messaging and content should align both online and in person. Feedback and input from one should propagate to the other.

Challenges with building awareness

The biggest challenge you’ll have to work through when it comes to building awareness is understanding how sticky your product or service is in the mind of your buyer. Stickiness suggests how likely they are to recall your product/service when the time is right. One way to think about this is to be realistic about how differentiated/unique your product/service is in the market. Another thing to think about is how simple is it for someone to grasp the benefits and use cases of your product/service. The more complex either of these are, the more effort you’ll need to put into building awareness.

Another challenge with building awareness is determining how much you need to focus on pure awareness of existence vs building awareness and trust. Obviously the more trust you need to build, the more effort this will take.

How do you measure how your awareness efforts are going?

Awareness measurement is tough, even in the digital world, because at this stage your information is limited. Remember, you’re focused on getting people to know about you so that when they have a need in the future, they’re more likely to consider you. Some metrics to consider measuring:

  1. Engagement – this includes things like time-on-page, bounce rates, exit rates, and return visitor rates.
  2. Fit – depending on who your target customers are, this may be more or less challenging to identify whether the people engaged with your content are a good fit for your company, but regardless of how hard it is, you should be trying to measure this.
  3. Subscriber growth – the amount of energy to put into this is very scenario-dependent. If you want attention from your potential customer’s inbox, you’d better have useful and interesting things to say.
  4. Follower growth – this is another very scenario-dependent metric. If there’s a particular channel that you know your customer engages with (eg. LinkedIn), you may want to track this metric. Caution should be exercised on this one, as this sort of metric can easily become a vanity metric.
  5. MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) – if available this is a great one. It takes more effort to identify each individual manually, but if your scenario allows for it, this helps you understand specific people that are engaged with your company.

Next Steps

Looking for help building your company awareness? Reach out for a chat.

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