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In this blog, I will discuss lead generation vs brand awareness and how they can be used as marketing strategies to acquire higher returns on investments and brand engagement.
Brand awareness and lead generation both are powerful campaigns for inbound marketing. Like other inbound techniques, lead generation and brand awareness function best when deployed correctly at the right stage of the marketing cycle.
Difference Between Lead Generation Vs Brand Awareness
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of educating your prospects about your organisation and nurturing their interest to convert them into a buyer. B2B marketers mostly use landing pages, PPC ads, intent-based marketing, and drip emails to generate quality leads.
By focusing on consumers’ pain points, lead generation becomes more effective in easing sales operations.
When is lead generation used?
- For building a contact list
- For focusing on specific traffic
- Nurturing of targets
While lead generation identifies your prospects rapidly and measurably, it can be unsuccessful without adequate brand awareness.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the process of getting your brand in front of your prospects. It simply means, when a consumer is going through their search journey, you want your brand to come into their mind.
Marketing teams use channels like Facebook ads, display ads, search engine optimisation, content marketing, and social media for creating brand affinity.
By integrating brand awareness into your marketing strategy, you can exponentially increase your sales potential.
When is a brand awareness campaign used?
- Differentiating yourself from competitors
- Building trust
- Increasing your brand outreach
Why Use Lead Generation And Brand Awareness, Together
When it comes to lead generation vs brand awareness, both inbound marketing techniques share a common purpose: to motivate people to take action.
Connecting to potential clients through effective brand awareness campaigns will give you enough online visibility. Lead generation activities will help you reach out to your target market and bring them into your sales funnel.
The b2b lead generation vs brand awareness combination translates to more tailored audience segments, more leads, lesser cold calls, and more new buyers.
Marketers employ both lead generation and brand awareness to target the sales pipeline actively. But the first step will start with research about consumer pain points and your competition, that assist you in understanding your target audience better.
It renders your marketing scheme in the right direction.
Key Points To Remember:
- Marketing Persona
Marketing personas help B2B marketers spend their time and energy more efficiently. You can narrow your marketing strategy to two or three buyer personas based on your product or service. This method maximises your effort-to-return ratio while providing personalisation with your client’s demand.
- Analytics
Tools like Google Analytics can help you better understand your traffic by allowing you to track campaigns and their outcomes. Analytics provides deep insights into prospect preferences and visitor engagement.
- Competitors
The competitive analysis provides you with a multitude of statistical data which supports better marketing decisions. By examining the content gap between you and your competitor, you can develop your own USPs and ramp up your advertising segments.
How To Strategise Lead Generation And Brand Awareness
For collaborative efforts in lead generation vs brand awareness, every marketer must have a well-optimised strategy. If you don’t, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to boost your ROI and discover campaign elements that fine-tune your approach to perform better.
Look at brand marketing as a three-stage process:
Stage 1: Establishing A Credible Reputation Through Brand Awareness
Prospects are more likely to purchase from businesses they know and trust. To demonstrate how good your brand is, you can offer branded content such as regular blog posts, videos, webinars related to your products or services, display ads, and special deals from time to time on various platforms.
I believe display ads are one of the best ways to increase your recall rate. With the help of such ads, you can reach new consumers, develop a good brand perception, and enhance your brand reach.
Display advertisements allow you to put your brand’s key message in front of the targeted audience using rich visuals, interactive banners, or videos. By generating rampant exposure with minimum expenditure, display ads help in amplifying your brand recognition.
Stage 2: Generating High-Quality Leads
Now that the market has become familiar with your brand, effective landing pages and ad campaigns are the best way to convert visitors into leads. To make the ultimate conversion easier, you can consider lead generation techniques like email marketing, SEO landing pages, hosting events like webinars and workshops, and offering lead magnets through Google Ads.
An excellent example of a good lead generation technique is using advertorial landing pages. These landing pages give the reader a detailed description of your services in a news story format while still matching the feel of a landing page.
As advertorials serve story-driven content, most marketers use them as click-through pages and a resourceful connecting bridge between their PPC ads and landing pages to attract higher conversion rates.
Stage 3: Analyse and Repeat
There are multiple tools available to help you obtain insights into traffic volume and manage your advertising. Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg are some of my favourite tools to track data and monitor performance.
KPIs like bounce rate, CTR, visits per channel, average time on page, heatmaps, scroll maps, etc., altogether help in generating a better retargeting strategy.
The objectives of brand awareness and lead generation campaigns are to educate and engage the audience to drive up your direct sales.
The most reliable way to determine whether your campaigns are productive or not is to connect them to relevant analytics and then work your way through the required changes to form a firm client base.
Final Thoughts
Instead of being stuck in the discussion of lead generation vs brand awareness, you can use both as an intelligent brand marketing strategy. The only catch is using the right campaign at the right time.
If you need help generating quality leads while supporting your brand awareness campaign, then get in touch with me by booking a free consultation of 30 min.
(Appointment link: https://book.apexure.com/)
