Every business leader has aspirations for sky-high brand awareness. Being top of mind for customers and prospects alike and generating revenue from word of mouth—it’s the holy grail of marketing.
But building brand awareness has become a taboo topic for marketers in conversations with business leaders. Despite the desire for greater brand awareness, the ambiguous nature of the metric presents problems for business leaders. Whereas you recognize the value in generating awareness, your business stakeholders want more quantitative data on how your marketing campaigns impact the bottom line.
The problem is that building awareness for your brand is a long game while business leaders want short-term results. To satisfy both sides of the equation, you need to introduce the right data to your campaigns and clean up common measurement issues.
There are three key brand awareness measurement problems that create a gap between marketers and business leaders.
1. You’re Trying to Boil the Ocean
Generate engagement on social media. Earn coverage from major media outlets. Create long-term value from an evergreen approach. Produce a steady supply of organic traffic from search engines. And, of course, drive conversions for the sales team.
This is the laundry list of goals that many B2B campaigns contain. And while these are all worthwhile goals, it’s unlikely that a content-based awareness campaign (or any kind of brand awareness campaign for that matter) can do it all.
When you’re trying to boil the ocean by tracking so many different metrics, you run the risk of falling short of expectations. Then, when it comes time to report on your success, business stakeholders are disappointed.
By infusing intent data into your brand awareness campaigns, you can cover your bases with what business leaders really care about—conversions. Third-party intent data helps you target your marketing activities more effectively so that even when your long-term goal is brand awareness, you’re generating results for sales in the short term, too.
Beyond conversions, intent data creates a foundation for the rest of your brand awareness goals so you can feel confident in your approach to the long game. Instead of the laundry list of brand awareness KPIs, you can limit yourself to conversions and just one or two other goals for individual campaigns.
2. Measuring Campaigns Out of Context
None of your marketing activities exist in a vacuum. Maximizing awareness doesn’t just mean becoming known, liked, and trusted among your target audience—it means working toward becoming the single brand setting trends in your market. Without insight into how your competitors are perceived, you can’t understand the full picture.
Instead of focusing brand awareness metrics on internal KPIs (social followers, newsletter signups, content downloads, etc.), considering bringing competitor analysis into the conversation. With intent data included in your marketing campaigns, you can gain insight into the ways that target prospects are interacting with competitors.
Bringing competitor analysis to brand awareness reporting can help you align with business leaders more effectively. Rather than giving them KPIs that don’t directly tie to the bottom line, you can explain results in the context of how prospects are interacting with your campaigns compared to competitor content.
3. Failing to Reach the Right Audience
The campaigns that give brand awareness a bad name with business leaders revolve around vanity metrics. While business leaders want more data from marketers, tracking KPIs just for the sake of having numbers isn’t what will increase buy-in. Rather, you need to be measuring how campaigns are specifically impacting your standing amongst target accounts.
This comes down to identifying total active demand before kicking off any campaign. Even though brand awareness isn’t aimed solely at in-market accounts, tailoring your campaigns to active prospects can set you up for long-term success.
Intent data gives you insight into the keyword research and online activity that’s driving individual buyer’s journeys. Those insights will tell you which kinds of brand awareness campaigns will be most effective. And if they’re effective for current in-market prospects, chances are they’ll work for future active buyers, too.
When your awareness measurement is reported entirely in the context of the right audience, you’ll be more likely to align with business leaders.
Setting Up for Brand Awareness Success
There’s no denying the value of brand awareness over the long term. But where you run into trouble is when your campaigns see only the bigger picture. Winning the long game starts with succeeding in the short term.
Investing in the right data to create a foundation for marketing success will fuel brand awareness success. You just need to know how to put it to work for your team.