Of course—outreach is key to brand building, but what should that outreach actually look like? With a loose target, you’re likely to miss your mark. Every move should have a clear impact it’s trying to achieve—do you want more customers to know your name? Or do you want customers who already know your name to buy your product?
These questions are the ones that define what your outreach and marketing truly entail. Brand awareness and lead generation are two crucial outreach strategies to infuse into your marketing efforts, but they each have their own unique outcomes.
Brand awareness focuses on generating name recognition and authority for your brand, while lead generation involves bringing those aware consumers over the line to make a sale. Each approach comes with unique goals, metrics, and strategies to make them happen.
Ultimately, both are necessary, but how you split your resources into both outreach efforts will depend on your brand’s position, current customer sentiment, and your overarching goals. Recognizing the difference between each approach empowers you to adjust your budget so that your goals and investments are more focused and properly balanced.
You already know what brand awareness is, but we can’t over-stress the importance of approaching it correctly for successful brand-building—brand awareness is the visibility and recognition that your brand has among your target audience and the perception that those consumers have about your brand. For example, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t instantly recognize the Nike swoosh logo.
Developing brand awareness is the foundation that strengthens your future efforts—eighty-eight percent of consumers say trust is an important consideration when buying from a brand. Once you make your brand known to your audience and build brand trust, you can pivot into lead generation and sales campaigns.
The main goal behind brand awareness strategies is to make consumers aware of your brand and the unique value it offers. Within this goal lies several key pieces, from expanding reach to boosting your market presence. It’s these goals that transition into more advanced actions, like tangible sales, farther down the line.
Goals of brand awareness include:
Strategies to foster brand awareness require establishing a firm footprint in your market so that consumers know you exist and see you as a trustworthy option for meeting their needs or wants. These strategies require diving into multiple marketing channels and establishing a consistent brand voice and presence across all of these channels to become recognizable.
Common brand awareness strategies include:
Brand awareness is measured by understanding how familiar consumers are with your brand and how likely they are to recognize you and the products or services you have to offer. Metrics used to measure brand awareness include:
You can monitor these metrics using a variety of means. You can measure reach and impressions from your campaign management tools, like Google Analytics, while other metrics, like brand recall and recognition, will be easier to gauge through focus groups and audience surveys.
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospective customers who are likely to be interested in your product or service. This strategy then sets the stage for finalizing possible sales and creating lasting paying customers. After generating these leads, brands can then work towards additional strategies like nurturing leads and persuading them to act.
The key focus of lead generation is targeting customers who might be interested in what you have to offer and encouraging them to take action. To make this happen, brands must focus on getting more information from customers and nurturing these leads.
Typical goals of a lead generation campaign include:
Lead generation strategies move the needle for consumers, bringing them over the line from brand observer to actor. These strategies are designed to get consumers to act on their brand awareness and give your product or service a shot.
Common tactics used in lead generation campaigns include:
Measuring lead generation centers around understanding how many customers are taking action to foster meaningful and productive interactions. Key metrics used to measure lead generation include:
When measuring lead generation, you’re going to spend a lot of time in your customer relationship management (CRM) tools, like Hubspot or Salesforce.
Understanding the specific nuances of brand awareness and lead generation will allow you to maximize your efforts toward each. Brand awareness and lead generation are distinguished by a few key differences.
Each strategy has its own key goal and focus for its efforts. For brand awareness, the primary focus is fostering familiarity and trust. Meanwhile, for lead generation, the primary focus is driving actionable interest and capturing conversions.
Understanding the primary objective of each will help you determine which is most deserving of your time and financial investment at a given moment. Focusing in on the right strategy at the right time is key to maximizing your ROI on any campaign.
Although each strategy has its place in a successful brand-building strategy, you’re likely able to pinpoint one that is more useful based on your current brand reputation and market position. Then, when your brand goals adapt in the future, you’ll likely find yourself shifting more investment to the other.
With different intentions, brand awareness and lead generation typically target different audiences at different parts of the marketing funnel. Brands that have clear customer profiles and a customer journey map developed will take various steps to incorporate brand awareness and lead generation in a forward flow.
Brand awareness is targeted toward early-stage consumers for the sake of establishing familiarity and trust with the brand. Brand awareness is important for
These awareness strategies allow consumers to understand what a brand stands for and what it has to offer.
Meanwhile, lead generation is targeted toward later-stage consumers. These efforts involve nurturing interested consumers and converting them into sales. Customers targeted through lead generation efforts are likely already familiar with a brand but need an extra push to take that next step.
Because they focus on different audiences at different stages of the customer funnel, each strategy is going to have specific channels that are more valuable and productive. Brand awareness is more likely to use top-of-funnel strategies like content creation to drive organic traffic for awareness. Then, lead generation channels place greater emphasis on middle to bottom-of-funnel consumers who have already had a touchpoint with your brand.
The most common marketing channels for brand awareness include:
Specific marketing channels for lead generation include:
Once you pinpoint which channels are ideal for each goal and do enough testing to identify your highest-yielding channels, you can build a cross-channel marketing plan to drive maximum engagement.
Because brand awareness and lead generation each have different primary goals, they each have different metrics used to measure their success. Understanding the success metrics is paramount for ensuring that your strategy is producing the results you want and that your efforts are properly focused.
Brand awareness is often measured by some of the following metrics:
Meanwhile, the success of lead generation campaigns is often measured by metrics such as:
You may find some overlap between both strategies, but being able to differentiate your metrics and the strategies used to meet them will allow you to pinpoint where your customers are in the customer journey.
Although each strategy has its advantages, you will need a balanced mix of both in order to maximize success as opposed to taking a one-or-the-other approach. Brand awareness and lead generation efforts each have their place in an overall marketing strategy, and they work hand-in-hand to drive results.
Brand awareness approaches are focused on long-term brand building, whereas lead generation efforts are geared toward short-term conversions. Brand awareness is an important foundation for effective lead generation—a successful brand awareness effort will create a group of loyal customers who are positioned to be more likely to make a sale or purchase. Once you have that foundational audience and a firm brand reputation, you can pour more resources into getting that audience to take action.
Altogether, any successful brand will need to incorporate both, but the balance between the two won’t always remain the same. Depending on your current customer sentiment and market position at any given time, you may push the gas on one strategy while tapping the brakes on the other to meet your goals.
The following brands have demonstrated the ability to succeed with a combined strategy that integrates both brand awareness and lead generation approaches.
Hubspot regularly incorporates both strategies into its outreach approach, finding the sweet spot between both, largely thanks to its content generation efforts. Hubspot positions itself as a thought leader for successful inbound marketing by creating helpful content like blogs, webinars, and free resources like marketing templates. Industry professionals who use these resources gather a level of awareness and trust in Hubspot, making them more likely to utilize its services down the line.
At the same time, Hubspot also generates content that is focused more on lead generation, using gated content like free eBooks, industry reports, and HubSpot Academy courses that gather leads’ contact information. Professionals at this point in the funnel are aware of Hubspot and the valuable information they offer and are more likely to make a sale.
These two strategies do not conflict with each other and, in fact, are closely correlated. By creating two different styles of content with slightly different goals, Hubspot is able to utilize similar in-house resources for multiple types of outreach.
Athletic brand Adidas and its Trefoil logo have become instantly recognizable in a competitive market for fitness wear and shoe brands. This recognition has been strategically developed through extensive outreach efforts and lead-generation tactics that pull in loyal consumers.
The brand has generated massive brand awareness through sponsorships, celebrity partnerships with exclusive product lines, and creative ad campaigns. You will find the logo on dozens of soccer (or football) teams’ jerseys and at countless sporting events, highlighting the use of Adidas products.
On the other hand, the brand has thoughtful lead-generation efforts as well. Adidas offers the adiClub membership for exclusive rewards, as well as convenient training and running apps that athletes can download to track their fitness regimen. Both channels collect an email address to then target users with communications and products that resonate with their lifestyle and preferred activities.
By closely intertwining these two strategies, the brand is able to maintain a steady inflow of current and future athletes who benefit from their products.
Although both of these strategies are important for building your brand, they each have a time and place. What stage your business is in will inform your strategy, so it’s important to consider your overarching brand goals at a given moment and what outreach efforts you should prioritize based on your brand position.
Some key questions to consider include:
If you find that your brand goals align more with a startup or that you are entering uncharted territory and you do not yet have a large following, you may be better off prioritizing brand awareness efforts before focusing on driving leads. Meanwhile, if you find that your brand is well-known among your audience and receives engagement, but your sales numbers are down, you may be better off prioritizing lead generation efforts.
Of course, every brand’s case is unique, so finding that balance is not always straightforward. A skilled agency may be able to help you bridge the gap between your goals and the strategy you need to meet them.
Balancing brand awareness and lead generation is a dynamic process in that you’ll have to adjust the levers regularly depending on your current business position. Taking a few best practices into account will help you find the right balance between both so that you can enjoy tangible benefits.
Consider the following steps in your process:
Ultimately, the key to your ideal balance is constant information-gathering. The more data you have about your customer perception and the success of the strategies you’ve implemented so far, the better you can refine your outreach efforts to propel your brand forward.
Both brand awareness and lead generation are valuable approaches to marketing outreach and relationship building, but each method has its own advantages for consumers at different points in the marketing funnel. The most successful marketing strategies know how and when to leverage both—and a creative-led integrated marketing agency can help you develop a successful strategy that merges both.
At PETERMAYER, captivating audiences to build brands is our bread and butter. Combining data-driven intelligence and consumer insights straight from our Brand Joy Lab, we’ll work with you to map out and develop campaigns that speak to your target audience, foster brand trust and awareness, and generate meaningful leads. Then, in our strategy development, we’ll compile these efforts to unlock joyful interactions that create lasting, loyalty-driven relationships between you and your customers.
Let’s talk about your ideal marketing strategy. Reach out to our team to discuss how we can drive your brand forward together.
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