Brand awareness campaigns: Should you be investing in them?

When people think of paid media ads, generally what comes to mind is making fast sales. But that’s not the only name of the game in advertising. Brand awareness campaigns play the long game, creating a presence that leaves a lasting impression on your audience. Unlike lead generation campaigns, which are more about capturing contact information and guiding people into the sales funnel, brand awareness is like planting seeds and setting the stage for sales down the line.

What Is A Brand Awareness Campaign Compared to Lead Gen

The key difference between brand awareness campaigns and a campaign for lead generation is the objective. When running a lead generation campaign, you’re usually looking for a fast result or immediate action. “Download this whitepaper” or “sign up to our service” could be examples of lead gen actions that you are targeting with this type of campaign. In contrast, brand awareness campaigns will be targeting goals such as reach and impressions, where there is no hard action for users to complete. Rather, you are trying to introduce, or re-introduce, yourself to an audience. 

The metrics act as a key difference in the results you yield from the campaign. In a way, you can see these as quantitative versus qualitative results. In lead generation, you will likely have metrics that are easier to quantify; downloads, clicks, conversions, new customers. Whereas in a brand awareness campaign you will have data that hints toward the sentiment of your audience, measuring users reached, how many of those users engaged with the content and in what way. This contrast also reflects a difference in the customer journey stage that brand awareness campaigns usually target. 

More often than not, brand awareness ads reach customers at the top of the funnel. You are pushing to a wide and diverse audience, letting them know who you are before the right individuals trickle down for lower funnel activities. This might seem a bit vague to companies used to running lead gen ads targeting low-to-mid-funnel activities. The value that brand awareness brings is not short term, and won’t create fast results like lead-gen campaigns. But that can actually be an advantage of brand awareness campaigns. 

What Do Brand Awareness Campaigns Offer?

Reaching a broad audience helps to gradually establish familiarity and trust for your brand in the long run. You can let people know you’re there in a way that feels genuine, not pushy, and encourage your brand to stay in the front of people’s minds. This should then support long-term brand growth with a loyal following. 

This is why brand awareness campaigns are especially valuable for new market entries when you are putting feelers out to attract people that will support you long-term. Once you’ve built that audience and engagement, you can then use what you’ve learned to target similar audiences that will be more likely to convert later on. 

But brand awareness is no less useful to large brands or brands in highly competitive industries. Brand campaigns act as a differentiator – they could be the reason your customers continue to choose you over your competitor despite factors like cost or availability. Branding can tie customers to your company to such an extent that your products even become an extension of people’s identities. Think Apple vs Android. 

Which Channels Work Well for Brand Awareness Campaigns?

In paid media and PPC activities, brand awareness ads appear as display ads, video ads, TV, on social media or similar. TV is a favourite choice for large-scale campaigns, delivering high impact and evoking strong emotional reaction from viewers (when done well!). In the lead up to Christmas, we see a lot of brand campaigns from the usual highstreet suspects that really play on people’s emotion to encourage brand loyalty. Still, most brand awareness campaigns are launched on social media since it is an equally creative and diverse channel with a mammoth audience but much cheaper than running ads on TV or streaming sites.

Running brand awareness ads on social media, you can target people based on demographics, behaviours and interests. These channels have an incredibly high volume of users which means higher reach for you. You don’t need to understand what they are searching for since the social media algorithms will do that work for you. Users are not necessarily “in-market” right now for your product but will see your brand alongside the usual things they like to see on their feed. 

If you’re under pressure from leadership to earn faster results, you might like to run search ads for brand awareness since there is higher purchase intent from users. However if you choose to do so, it is better to offer a solution to a problem than target keywords or so. For instance, if your company sells paint, rather than run ads targeting search terms like “green paint”, “cheap paint”, “quality paint”, you might run content that answers questions such as “What colour shall I paint my room?”. Think broader, more informative, less sales driven. 

Are there any downsides to brand awareness ads?

Of course, like with any campaign type, things don’t always go as planned. Potential downsides to brand awareness campaigns include difficulty in tracking direct ROI and long-term nature of returns. It’s a question I am asked very often when clients come to Tank: ‘Will I make sales in the end?’ When looking for short-term gains and quick conversions, brand ads might not yield these at a fast enough pace. Weighing the upfront costs versus the value payoff is a common challenge.  

You could consider a multi campaign approach, combining brand awareness with lead generation for greater impact. At the first level, you can target landing page views; getting eyes on your content pages. You could use a demographic based audience or a lookalike of a customer list. Then follow up with a second campaign that re-targets those users that engaged with the first ad, visited your site or watched a percentage of your video. This second campaign can be more sales focused. At Tank we have used this approach for several clients. By making a user aware of your brand first, the second ad has a far greater conversion rate. One client saw their conversion rate on Meta ads increase by 9.3% as a result of this approach.

Our Expert Opinion: Are brand awareness ad campaigns right for you? 

Even the biggest brands continue to invest in brand awareness, it is always useful to establish or affirm your brand. If a customer is looking to buy a TV, will they go with a company they’ve never heard of or a brand that they’ve seen regularly on the channels they like with a consistent and trustworthy identity?

Of course, there is budget to think about. In an ideal world everyone could do a full funnel approach to marketing. But if no one knows who you are, and you’re trying to get your name out there, starting top-of-funnel is a chance to get in front of people before there’s real conversion intent later on. Making use of organic social media and maybe starting with small spending on boosted content is an option until you have the budget to scale brand awareness efforts. If you’re struggling to get brand spend from leadership, try an approach that includes awareness but not solely. Investment into brand awareness should pay off long term since you’re letting more people know you exist and encouraging their attachment to you – opening their eyes and hearts to you, before their wallets!

Interested in learning more or getting started with a brand awareness campaign for your business? Find out more about our Paid Media services.