Lead Generation and Brand Awareness : Do they go hand-in-hand?
Marketers are often in a dilemma on whether to pursue lead generation or focus on creating brand awareness. It may even feel like a never-ending battle; do they need to pursue one strategy at the cost of the other? Or can brand awareness and lead generation go hand in hand?
Both these strategies pay rich dividends in helping your brand grow in the long run and are important in terms of helping you find a strong footing in the market and edge out the competition. Let us look at both these strategies and find out whether it is possible to create a synergy between the two and have them play complementary roles to power the success of your brand.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness are multiple strategies devised to take your brand closer to the audience and ensure that the audience is aware of the tiniest details about your brand, including quality, incentives, name, images. Brand awareness campaigns help reach out to new people and grow a potential customer base.
Though increasing sales and revenue is the goal of every marketing campaign, brand awareness primarily focuses on increasing brand recognition, familiarity, and trust in the mind of the audience. Most marketers use such campaigns to lay the groundwork for lead generation and other marketing campaigns to follow. This strategy is important for new players in the market or when a brand is launching new products.
What is Lead Generation?
This is the process of identifying and targeting a specific group of the target audience based on their needs, aspirations, buying habits, etc. In the world of digital marketing, most marketers tend to use it as a follow-up strategy to the brand awareness campaign.
Here, the aim is to guide potential customers to specific landing pages that have products listed for sales or to online forms to gather more details about the customers. Lead generation campaigns help organizations bypass other selling strategies including cold calling and email marketing. Compared to these strategies lead generation offers faster results and higher conversion rates.
Synergising Brand awareness and Lead Generation
Now, We come to the most important question – Can brand awareness and lead generation go hand in hand? Yes, they do and ideally, your marketing team needs to strike the right balance between the two. It is possible to have these two strategies play complementary roles to increase brand visibility and sales at the same time.
Brand awareness and lead generation play vital roles in powering the success of a brand. While you might come across the argument on how lead generation can be counterproductive to your brand awareness campaign, the question is – what would you do with brand awareness if you don’t see increased conversions, or how would lead generation help if you haven’t established a strong brand presence? Hence, it need not be an either/or scenario. The best marketing campaigns in the world are those that combine the best of two strategies for achieving effective results.
Both brand awareness and Lead Generation strategies have a common goal – to drive the users towards an intended action. Seeing them as mutually exclusive is a wrong approach. While the goal of brand awareness is to take the name, the logo, and the beliefs of your brand to a new audience and bring them closer to the sales funnel, the idea being lead generation is to bring potential customers down the panel. Hence, they shouldn’t necessarily be seen as mutually exclusive. They complement each other in many ways and can work in tandem to bring potential customers closer to a purchase decision.
Digital marketing techniques are different from the traditional offline marketing strategies adopted where brand awareness and Lead Generation campaigns worked exclusively. For instance, brands would put hoardings and billboards on the road for brand awareness and use strategies such as direct mail, sponsoring events, dropping business cards, cold calling for lead generation.
New Approach to Brand Awareness and Lead Generation
In the digital world, you’d find brand awareness and lead generation overlapping in most instances. Smart marketers use the two strategies creatively to combine them to increase the conversion rate. In the past, homepages were meant for brand awareness while separate landing pages were designed for Lead Generation. But we are increasingly seeing brands integrate lead generation elements on their homepage creatively to leverage all visits to the website.
Let’s look at this example from databox and how they have integrated the lead generation element on the homepage along with their brand awareness campaign. On their homepage, they clearly explain how they pull out all data to track performance and insights in real-time and have an opt-in lead generation element to let users get started with their service immediately.
Final Thoughts
Your organization needs to choose the right strategy based on your immediate goals. Your goals should dictate the focus of your campaign. For instance, if you are looking for immediate sales you should assign more energy and resources to the lead generation campaign. This will let you convert people who are in the middle or bottom of the sales funnel and generate revenue for your business. In case you are a new player in the market and aim to dent into the client base of your rivals, spending more on brand awareness campaigns would be the way to go. This would help you get more people at the top of the funnel to sales.
If you are looking for the best brand awareness and lead generation campaigns, Growth Natives is here to help you. We have a team of passionate digital marketers who bring years of experience in various facets of digital marketing and brand-building strategies to power your brand to greater heights. Email us at info@growthnatives.com or visit our website and let’s get started with creating a niche space for your business in the competitive market.
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