Should You Focus on Lead Generation Campaigns or Brand Awareness?
Most of the companies that our agency (FlexLeads) works with are small businesses. Most of these companies focus on lead generation marketing to get customers for their businesses. A marketing campaign focused on branding is generally more effective for larger organizations that service a much wider area. That said, both can be used to generate leads for small business owners.
The Importance of Lead Generation
Effective lead generation fuels the sales funnel with potential customers. High-quality leads increase your chances of conversion, making lead generation a vital component for business success.
Defining Lead Gen and Leads
Lead generation refers to the process of attracting prospects with the intention of nurturing them toward making a purchase. A lead is a person who shows interest in your products or services, often by providing contact information.
Lead Generation Strategies
You must establish clear strategies for lead generation. Common digital marketing methods to acquire members from your target audience as customers include email marketing, content marketing, online advertising and search engine optimization (SEO).
The goal of these efforts is to generate leads that have a direct, short term result in generating revenue for the business. Customer retention and building customer loyalty helps to increase the chances that these new leads result in a steady stream of recurring revenue.
Now, let’s take a more in depth look at the different channels available for you to execute your lead generation campaigns.
Lead Generation Channels
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an extremely powerful lead gen technique for small businesses. By creating targeted and personalized email campaigns, businesses can reach potential customers directly in their inboxes. These emails can include valuable content, special offers, and calls to action that encourage recipients to engage with the business.
Here are a few tips for creating email marketing campaigns that work:
- Awesome, Engaging Subject Lines: Use subject lines that capture attention and content that maintains it by making sure your newsletter is compelling. Provide good solid information, make sure you aren’t trying to “sell, sell, sell” in each email that you send. Provide value and build trust with your email recipients and they’ll be much more likely to buy from you.
- Personalize Emails: Personalize your emails to create a direct line to your audience, and always provide value that encourages opens and clicks.
- Set Expectations with Subscribers: To avoid ending up in a spam folder, make sure that your emails are sent on a regular schedule. That way your customers expect your email instead of misidentifying an email that they signed up for as being probable spam.
Two great things about email marketing:
- Measurable Results – email marketing allows for tracking and analyzing recipient behavior, enabling businesses to refine their strategies and improve lead generation over time. You can focus your efforts on customers that present the greatest potential value to your business.
- You Own The List – with a properly vetted list where prospects have opted in to receiving your emails, you have your own access to a highly engaged audience to promote your products and services. This offers an advantage over SEO (where you’re dependent on Google and Bing algorithms). It also offers a big advantage over social media marketing and search ads where you’re at the mercy of the social media platform or search engine platform changing the rules or charging more money for access.
Social Media Marketing
A social media campaign focused on lead gen can be effective for small businesses. Social media can present solid lead generation possibilities if you focus on social media platforms where your customers tend to be very active.
Note that being too salesy with your social media efforts can turn people off and actually harm brand awareness efforts. Instead, the goal is to provide quality informational content and establish your company as the expert instead of following the “always be closing” approach. Create posts that invite comments and sharing. Use a mix of formats like images, videos, and text to sustain interest and increase views
Advertising on social media is another perfectly acceptable way to drive new leads to your business.
A Facebook Display Ad Appearing in a User’s Feed. Facebook Allows Targeting by a Variety of Demographic Data Options
Search Advertising
Search advertising with Google Ads or Bing Ads, can generate leads for small businesses by placing targeted ads in search engine results when your ideal target customers are actively searching for the products and services that you offer. These ads appear at the top or bottom of search results pages, making them highly visible.
Google is an advertising company that generates around 75% of its revenue from advertising (Search Ads, YouTube Ads, and Google’s Display Ad Network). Below we have a search that shows where the search ads appear.
Ads for Lead Generation on Google Search for “dentist near me”. Ads dominate the top of the search results page (denoted by the hard to see “sponsored” text).
Advantages of Search Advertising
- Quick Data Insights: The data you can get by running search ads can be used to get a better understanding of your customers and how to better hone your marketing message. This data can be used for other marketing efforts, including SEO, email marketing and social media marketing
- Search Platforms Want Your Money: Google and Bing welcome your advertising dollars. Unlike SEO which can be subject to volatile algorithm changes, search ads are a farily reliable way to get in front of your target audience – although you’ll want to closely watch your ROI to make sure that search ads are a good investment for your company.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Generating leads with SEO involves improving your website’s visibility in organic search engine results. By optimizing website content, structure, and technical elements, you can rank higher for relevant keywords that potential customers are searching for. This increased visibility attracts more targeted traffic to the website, which can lead to higher engagement and conversions.
You can’t pay a search engine to get results with SEO. Instead, it takes a lot of time and effort to create and implement an effective SEO campaign that drives more customers to your business. That said, SEO in many cases can provide much more effective use of your marketing budget by providing quality leads at a much lower cost per lead.
While organic search results are a bit harder to get to (it takes some scrolling down to get past the ads) don’t let that deter your organization from using SEO for lead generation. Organic search results get way more clicks than paid ads. According to a study by SparkToro, organic search results from SEO optimized listings get 10x-15x the amount of clicks as paid ads.
Scrolling down further on the search results page for “dentist near me”, you’ll see the “organic” (SEO) search results that are actually much more likely to get clicks than the paid ads.
Don’t Forget About Your Website
Your website is the most important digital marketing asset that you have. While not exactly a “channel” for generating leads, it is where your potential customer will und up after engaging in your other lead generation activities.
You need to make sure that when your customer clicks on a search ad, search result, social media ad, or email marketing link that they are taken to the most relevant page on your website for that particular marketing message. Your website must be clear, concise, and make it obvious to the prospect that you can meet their needs. That way you can convert that prospect into a paying client.
Exploring Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is key to establishing your presence in the market and connecting with your audience. Brand awareness marketing may not be a high priority for small businesses operating a highly localized area. For most local businesses, a focus on lead gen makes more sense. However, if your business has multiple locations and more of a regional footprint, digital marketing with a brand awareness campaign may make sense.
Defining Brand Awareness
Brand awareness means how familiar your audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. It’s the extent to which consumers can identify your brand under different conditions and link it to your products or services.
Brand Awareness Campaigns
Your brand awareness campaigns target increasing visibility and recognition for your company. This differs from direct response marketing with lead generation campaigns where you’re looking for someone to convert from a prospect into a customer when being exposed to your marketing message.
Instead, with brand awareness, the goal is to make sure the audience recalls your brand when they’re ready to purchase. These typically include a mix of advertising, sponsorships, and content marketing to showcase your logo, message, and values.
Role of Social Media
Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook boost brand awareness through sharing, likes, and comments which translates to broader exposure. They enable direct engagement with your audience, building a relationship beyond mere transactions. Influencers and word-of-mouth marketing on these channels can greatly amplify your reach.
Display Advertising
Search engines and social media companies offer display advertising on their platforms. Often times display advertising is used to generate strong brand awareness among visitors to search engines and social platforms. While not usually effective in generating leads, and can certainly increase brand recognition down the road when your prospect is ready to make a purchase.
Measuring Brand Awareness
You’ll be able to measure brand awareness by tracking metrics like impressions, website traffic, or search volume for your brand name. Data from social media, like shares and mentions, also offer insight into your brand’s visibility and engagement levels, while surveys can capture brand recognition and recall rates. Tools like Google Analytics can track clicks and views tied to your campaigns.
Synergy Between Lead Generation and Brand Awareness
Lead generation and brand awareness aren’t mutually exclusive. Brand awareness is located at the top of the sales funnel (Awareness), and lead generation is much further down (Action). You can use both to propel your marketing efforts and build a robust market presence.
Brand Awareness vs Lead Generation Marketing and Their Respective Places Within the Sales Funnel
Why Not Both? Integrating Both Strategies for Better Outcomes
Integrate lead generation and brand awareness to achieve a more impactful engagement with your audience. By aligning these strategies, you streamline efforts across your marketing funnel and ensure consistency in messaging. This coordinated approach can:
- Boost your brand visibility among potential customers.
- Make your lead generation efforts resonate more due to enhanced brand recognition.
For instance, when you engage prospects on social media for brand awareness, include clear calls to action that funnel these users into your lead generation process. Monitor your metrics to assess which channels yield the best ROI and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Using Both for Growth
Using both brand awareness and lead generation drives growth in your target market. Your goal is to:
- Attract prospects with brand awareness campaigns.
- Convert interested audiences into leads ready for sales engagement.
This dual approach uses your budget efficiently, focusing on building relationships at every stage of the marketing funnel. A strong brand presence makes it easier to engage leads, while active lead generation provides quantifiable results to measure against your growth strategy.
Practical Insights for Business Growth
Benchmarking Against Competitors
Identify your competition’s lead generation strategies and brand awareness activity to determine what is working for them. For products similar to yours, study their marketing strategies.
Tools you can use to reverse engineer the activities of your competitors include:
SEO Tools
There are many SEO tools that can help you to gain insights into your competitor’s SEO strategies and overall performance. The highest quality tools certainly aren’t inexpensive but they do provide a wealth of data. They can tell you about your competitor’s best performing pages as well as what keywords they are targeting. You can see what content your competition is producing as well as how it is performing over time.
SEO Tools to Consider:
Paid Search Tools
Paid search tools exist where you can see what keywords your customers are bidding on – and in many cases the landing pages that are used to
Note: the Google Ads Keyword Planner is free for advertisers but Google doesn’t generally provide all the data that you need to make informed decisions. I would strongly encourage advertisers to supplement Google Keyword Planner with other keyword data from other sources.
Social Media Tools
Many social media platforms will allow you to see ads that are running on their platform. As an example, Facebook maintains an ads library where you can access all ads that are currently running on Facebook. This is a great way to see the ads that competitors are currently running – as well as to attempt to determine the effectiveness of those ads.
Facebook Freely Provides Information on All Ads Currently Running on the Facebook Platform
Collecting Internal Data
Use tools like Google Analytics as well as reporting from Google Ads and Bing Ads to track your own online ad data. Closely track ad spend and important metrics like overall cost per lead.
Meta also has robust reporting that allows you to determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
Budget Considerations for Campaigns
Allocate your budget with precision. Balance your funds between lead generation efforts and building brand awareness. Keep in mind that investing in brand recognition can yield reduced costs and improved efficiency for lead generation over time. Delineate your budget based on past campaign performance, industry standards, and strategic forecasts. Use your goals as a guide to distribute resources where they can most effectively generate returns.