Your Ultimate Guide to Awareness Advertising

What is awareness advertising? Awareness advertising is a marketing strategy that aims to increase consumers’ familiarity with a business’s products or services.

While you may be tempted to focus solely on bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) goals, like conversions and revenue, BOFU efforts alone won’t sustain business growth.

Brand awareness campaigns, great for earning recognition and trust, are crucial for getting new leads into your marketing funnel.

If you want to understand awareness advertising and how it can grow your business, keep reading to learn:

• What is awareness advertising?
• What is the goal of a brand awareness advertising campaign?
• How to run a brand awareness advertising campaign
• How to measure awareness campaign success

A hole in your marketing funnel will drain your sales.

Learn how to patch it with our free tool.

Fix Your Marketing Funnel

What is awareness advertising?

Awareness advertising is a marketing strategy that aims to increase consumers’ familiarity with your business and offerings. It’s a strategic approach that you can employ to increase visibility and reach new leads.

Awareness advertising isn’t typically done to generate profits in the short term. Instead, it aims to grow brand recognition among your consumers. Increased brand recognition results in trust, which becomes your foundation to attract prospects you can cultivate relationships with and convert into customers.

What is the goal of a brand awareness advertising campaign?

The ultimate goal of an awareness advertising campaign is to increase brand awareness. As your target audience becomes more familiar with your brand through frequent exposure, they’re more likely to remember you. In fact, 82% of consumers feel more positive about a business after content exposure.

These positive associations nurture your relationship with prospects. As a result, you will stand out among your competitors. When it’s time for prospects to decide which product to buy, they’ll turn to you, the brand they’ve become familiar with and grown to like.

How to run a brand awareness advertising campaign

Now that you know what awareness advertising is, it’s time to go through the steps to run a brand awareness advertising campaign that amplifies your brand awareness:

1. Know your target audience
2. Set your campaign’s timeframe
3. Craft a marketing campaign message that resonates with your audience
4. Use different channels and platforms for your awareness advertising campaign
5. Create a referral program

Let’s go through each step:

1. Know your target audience

It’s not enough that you know your target audience’s demographics. You must also understand their psychographics.

What would motivate them to become loyal customers? What do they value the most? Use your martech stack to collect and analyze your customer data, and use the insights to create personalized ad campaigns.

Tools like Google Analytics can help you understand how your site visitors interact with your site pages. In addition, it also helps you discover their interests and other demographic data.

Our proprietary marketing software MarketingCloudFX and our customer relationship management (CRM) platform Nutshell can give your business valuable intel about your current customers and leads. Tools like MarketingCloudFX and Nutshell enable you to easily segment your contacts for your different advertising campaigns.

Example

Let’s say you’re an automobile distributor. To know your target audience well, you must gather your existing customers’ demographic data to identify the consumer segment that’s likely to purchase your vehicles.

In addition, you can use your martech stack to understand your customers’ psychographics. What drives them to make certain purchases and choose a product over a competitor?

Your demographic and psychographic data can power your awareness campaigns targeting your high-value customer segments. If your customers are parents and they value safety over fuel efficiency when shopping for a vehicle, communicate the features that speak to them in your awareness ad, like this example from Subaru.

2. Set your campaign’s timeframe

Give your campaign enough time to run to build momentum and reach your target audience. It’s also important to run the campaign based on your target audience’s behavior and energy. Time your campaign strategically with an impactful start or end based on your customers’ energy and to keep them engaged.

Example

Let’s say you have a special offer for your customers and prospects for only one day. You can run awareness ads for a week leading up to the day of your special promo, like this example from Dunkin’.

3. Craft a marketing campaign message that resonates with your audience

Now that you know your target audience well enough, it’s time to craft a marketing message that resonates with your audience. Pique their curiosity, and create excitement to get the attention of your prospects.

Example

Let’s say you own a travel agency offering tours and trip packages to Europe. You wanted to generate more leads from your Google search ads.

Based on customer and prospect data you’ve gathered, your target audience is young and looking for affordable trips to Europe with their friends.

You then revise your ad messages to highlight the affordability of your packages, which are perfect for groups of young travelers.

4. Use different channels and platforms for your awareness advertising campaign

Reaching your audience in various channels is important when you’re trying to increase brand awareness. Your business’s visibility in different channels and platforms helps drive more engagement.

A multichannel approach also increases the frequency that your audience sees your message and ad. In addition, you’ll have data on your audience’s preferred channels or platforms.

Do they spend time looking for solutions by using search engines? Or do they spend time on a particular social media platform?

Example

Take Cheetos’s brand awareness campaign called Hands Free, which playfully depicted the product’s messiness as the inspiration for the modern, hands-free technology we know today.

The campaign had ads on social media. The brand also ran a TVC and a Cheetos Hands-Free House activation, which engaged its audience with the campaign messaging that Cheetos indeed drove the development of hands-free tech.

5. Create a referral program

Did you know that referrals from family and friends make a consumer four times more likely to buy? Creating a referral program can help you boost your brand awareness among new prospects.

Example

Take this example from LinkedIn. By inviting its current LinkedIn Premium subscribers to refer colleagues to the paid service, more users will become familiar with the benefits of Premium. If they liked the paid subscription, they might subscribe in the future.

Measuring awareness campaign success

How do you know if your brand awareness advertising campaign is successful? A few metrics can tell you when your awareness advertising campaign is boosting your brand’s recall, such as:

• Reach
• Impressions
• Website traffic
• Organic search volume
• Engagement with your content
• Frequency of returning website visits

Google Analytics provides you with your website’s traffic data, including organic search volume and the number of returning website visitors. Each ad platform also has its own analytics to provide you with your ads’ reach and impressions.

MarketingCloudFX, our proprietary marketing platform, can house all your data from different analytics tools so you can easily analyze the performance of your awareness ads from various channels.

Launch effective awareness advertising campaigns with WebFX

Awareness advertising campaigns can help increase your business’s brand recognition. In the long run, these campaigns can help support your bottom-line growth.

If your team needs help planning and launching awareness advertising campaigns, look no further than WebFX. We’re a full-service digital marketing agency that can help you develop your marketing strategies for each stage of the funnel.

We’ve helped our clients launch over 650 ad campaigns to grow their businesses. Our team of 500+ digital marketing experts is excited to help you launch awareness advertising campaigns that boost your brand recognition and improve your bottom line.

Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital advertising services!