- By: Mark Jakobsen
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Getting to the bottom of the Awareness vs Lead Generation marketing debate
We’re going to start by saying the debate is pointless, your marketing activity needs to incorporate both awareness and lead generation campaigns.
The thing is to really drive customers to your products, both play a vital role and having one without the other will only give you half the benefits, leaving a gaping hole in your marketing and sales activity, that your competitors could exploit.
Before we get into the why, let’s get a better understanding of each one.
brand awareness – the basics
Simply put, brand awareness is about making people aware of your brand. The more people who know about your brand, the more potential leads you can generate. See, there’s a connection already.
But what you need to remember is, brand awareness is a long-game tactic. It’s about building familiarity with your brand, and this takes time. If you invest time and patience into it, then the rewards can be huge. An extreme of this is when your brand becomes synonymous with the activity in question. Take Google for example, when we search the internet we’ll say “google it”. Their brand has become interchangeable with the action it does. Very few times do you hear people say “Let’s search the internet”.
What makes up lead generation?
If we move onto Lead Generation, this activity is all about getting the contact details from your prospective customers for your sales team to act upon. The audience who interacts with these campaigns will usually already know about your company or product/service.
There are a variety of different tactics you can incorporate into your marketing plan to achieve this. For example, they could be either:
- Providing gated content online. Visitors to your website will need to supply their details to unlock it, this can be through whitepapers or other thought-provoking content.
- Include pop-ups or contact us boxes on your website, to achieve the same thing, just with no reward on the other side.
- In-person events
This list isn’t exhaustive, but the central nut of it all is, lead generation helps you to focus on those that have already shown an interest in your product or solution. This means you are halfway there to the final sale.
Bringing them together
Understanding the mechanics of the two now allows us to understand why you need both for a truly effective marketing campaign. It all boils down to two points, which can be linked back to the marketing hourglass (if you’ve heard of the marketing funnel, this is the expansion of it, and you can read more about it here).
In short brand awareness will deal with the top two segments of the hourglass, while lead generation runs from Interest through to Intent. So, you see by only concentrating on one you are missing other vital segments.
These factors mean if you are only concentrating on one type of marketing, awareness, or lead generation, you are not serving the entire customer journey. In short missing opportunities to convert sales. It is also a good reason why your awareness and lead generation need to be linked together to provide a consistency of voice, message, and reasoning to guide the buyer through their purchasing process.
Guiding your customer at their pace
While this may still seem like best practice and not answer your question of why you need both, especially if you are now thinking your customers know about you so let’s just focus on lead generation. There are two fundamental aspects of the customer journey you need to remember:
Firstly, not all customers enter the funnel at the same place. New customers may enter the interest phase, while others at the awareness.
Secondly, the route customers take will differ. Some will progress through all stages as mapped out, and others will retreat up a stage or skip stages altogether.
Having carefully curated content that addresses each stage with a consistent message throughout allows you to ensure you address the information needs of your customers regardless of where they enter or how they progress. They don’t end up hitting a black hole of no content only to be swept up by a competitor with a more rounded campaign.
Getting them to work together
It all comes down to ensuring you have the content your customer needs to make an informed decision. This is essentially your nurture campaign, which both your brand awareness and lead generation activities should be a part of. And with research showing a good lead nurturing campaign can result in 50% more sale-ready leads (Forrester Research), it’s worth putting the time in at the beginning to maximise your return from all your hard work.
If doing both sounds daunting it doesn’t need to be. Reach out and we will be happy to talk through where you are, where you need to get to and develop the right strategy to ensure you get the customers you need to push your business forward.