“If you build it, they will come.” Wouldn’t it be nice if life were that easy for B2B companies?
Building a great product is only part of the battle. You know that there’s a lot more you have to do if you want to stand out among your competition. Unfortunately, there’s consensus among marketers that building brand awareness is one of the top challenges of the job.
One reason brand awareness can be such a mystery is that it doesn’t necessarily fit into the new world of data-driven marketing. Brand awareness metrics can be vague, leaving executive stakeholders to wonder whether or not you’re making progress.
However, you don’t have to fly blindly when you’re trying to build brand awareness. Using intent data to overcome the following three key brand awareness challenges will make it easier to drive tangible results.
1. Lack of Content Visibility
Content marketing is one of the main ways to boost brand awareness. But while you might have been ahead of the curve if you published content a decade ago, the competition for attention is more intense than ever. Publishing content won’t get you anywhere if no one sees it.
To improve brand awareness with content, marketers often turn to search engine optimization (SEO). However, you can’t just game a keyword system and expect to hit the first page of Google for every important search term.
Building brand awareness by improving content visibility starts with understanding what content you should actually be creating. This is where intent data can help. Investing in third-party intent data gives you insight into what content really matters to your target audience. From seeing what industry media sites prospects visit to gaining visibility into the competitor content they engage with, intent data offers a foundation for promoting content more effectively. And that, in turn, will lead to improved brand awareness.
2. Inability to Reach the Target Audience
Because brand awareness can be so vague, it’s easy to start chasing any kind of tangible metrics/results. Everything from page views to social shares and email open rates can seem like your key to proving that marketing tactics are building brand awareness.
But there’s a problem—what if all of those vanity metrics are coming from the wrong audience? When brand awareness is coming from the wrong people, you risk wasting marketing resources on an audience that will never make a purchase.
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Intent data is your key to identifying the total active demand for your products and services. It goes beyond your first-party personas to include the hidden prospects you don’t realize are actively looking for a product in your market. Not only that, but third-party intent data helps you build more complete prospect profiles, ensuring that the audience you’re targeting is showing purchase intent.
When you spend your marketing resources on in-market prospects that fit well with your product’s features and benefits, it will be easier to drive brand awareness and convert leads.
3. Low Engagement with Digital Advertising
In a perfect world, you might be able to rely on organic search and content promotion to generate brand awareness. Even though it’s great to focus on improving organic brand awareness, we all know that digital advertising plays a key role.
Building brand awareness requires more than just going through the motions with digital ads, though. It’s not enough to just throw together copy for social media and try to blast a message out to your industry. You need to take the time to properly segment the audience, personalize the copy for specific segments, and time the ads correctly. Doing all of these things successfully requires a strong foundation of data.
Intent data provides the insights you need to boost engagement with your digital advertising. Instead of scrolling right past your ads, you’ll get your target audience to stop and recognize your brand. With so much digital advertising noise competing for buyer attention, you can’t afford to waste your budget without setting yourself up to make good data decisions.
Find the Right Intent Data for Your Brand Awareness Needs
Don’t make the mistake of blindly investing in third-party intent data. Every provider has its advantages and disadvantages, leaving you with the challenge of deciding who can help you overcome your brand awareness challenges.
However, if you’re just getting started with intent data, it can be difficult to know what to look for in a third-party dataset. Your first step is to educate yourself on the ins and outs of intent data.
Download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data, for all the information you’ll need before choosing your intent data provider.