the power of an awareness campaign

Have you ever heard the following adages?:

• You have to spend money to make money.
• When times are lean, it is not the time to pull back on marketing.
• “Stopping your marketing to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”

These are perhaps counterintuitive (and a little annoying) to hear from the marketer in your life. (And we’re also pretty frugal folks who don’t like spending money for the heck of it.) However, they’re true and remain adages for good reason. In recessions or lean times, marketing is one of the first things businesses look to scale back on. Unfortunately, the long term effects of pulling back all ad dollars can be pretty staggering.

To this end, we’re semi-regularly asked about the value of awareness campaigns. We work with a lot of small and medium sized businesses who are understandably focused on their bottom line. They want to know how their ad dollars contributed to clicks, conversions, and ultimately return on investment or return on ad spend. Essentially anything that registers their prospects are taking action.

Awesome CTRs (click thru rates) are wonderful and certainly feel good to see, but they’re not the be-all and end-all. At some point in your sales cycle, your prospective customer first had to become aware of you in order to gain enough knowledge or interest to click. Any business has low hanging fruit, but at a certain point when it has all been picked–where is new interest coming from?

Take a regional banking client who runs ongoing search, for example. When they have a particular product they’d like to spotlight, they add a mixed display and social campaign to generate awareness for that effort. On average they see a Search CTR increase of 2-4% and a conversion rate 4-5% higher than the industry average for up 30-60 days after running those short term awareness campaigns. If we’re continuing the fruit metaphor (And who doesn’t love fruit? It’s basically nature’s candy.) these campaigns start to flower more and more for the picking.

At the end of the day, relatively small spends that add an awareness element to your ongoing campaigns can pay huge dividends when it translates to prospects taking steps to work with you. After all, to work with you they first have to know about you. If you have questions or want to learn more about the most strategic and budget friendly way to add an awareness lift to your ongoing marketing plan, hit us up!

Go Forth. Go Digital.

-cohort.crew