Brand awareness & lead generation lie under the umbrella of digital marketing but at different stages in the buyer’s journey. By building brand recognition or awareness, it means you need to engage strange prospects and convert them into website visitors. On the contrary, lead generation fulfills the objective is to push these visitors into the lead generation sales funnel and starting nurturing.
Your business requires both strategies as equally important for your sales goal. But how can you decide the priority of each approach as both are vital for your inbound marketing strategy?
The individual marketing strategies produce promising results when used in closed synchronization in the right manner. Maintaining an impactful brand image will also help you to generate qualified leads easily. Definitely, you need customers and want to improve your bottom line. Increasing website visitors using brand awareness strategies can also engage a new audience who can be the perfect match for your sales goal that you can later target with the valuable content and other lead generation strategies.
Let’s disclose the mystery of brand awareness vs. lead generation and how both campaigns enable you to touch the new summits of your marketing goals.
What is Brand Awareness?
Your brand awareness goal is to tell and inform people about your existence and how you can add value to their lives or business. You need to incorporate the right storytelling, images, and brand logo to engage your prospects emotionally. If someone recalls the auto-manufacturer Audi, what’s the first thing that comes to pop up in the mind? Maybe their success story, their product line, or most importantly their four rings logo.
Brand awareness is a highly subjective and abstract idea and it can be complex to measure using standard KPIs. But it is an integral aspect of differentiating your brand and drives the public interest in your brand to choose your products or services over other options.
A brand awareness campaign is mandatory for your success whether you are a startup or an established entity. The reason is there will always be people who can relate to your services but are not familiar with your presence.
When you’re going to launch a brand awareness campaign for your business, you can use your website, emails, social media platforms, and other relevant strategies. It helps you persuade people to perceive your brand positively. Don’t refrain from establishing a personality and reveal audience what you can offer as a business entity.
You have to make people think of your brand without any second thought whenever they need to buy any product or service you offer. Word of mouth marketing is the primary aspect of your brand’s success. You need to create a brand image so strong that people often recommend your products to their friends. According to the survey, over 75% of people are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand they heard about from their friends or family members.
Another impactful way to establish brand recognition is content marketing. You need to produce informative content so that people can choose your company over your rivals. Even while you’re trying to strengthen your brand awareness campaign, it is necessary to consider buyer personas.
You can do this by producing engaging and informative content that speaks to your prospects. It will also help you maintain your brand image as an industry-leading business. Ensure that the tone and approach of your content remain consistent throughout your marketing channels, including your whitepapers, articles, and social media posts.
When approached in the right way, brand awareness strengthens trust, which will earn you long-term and consistent customers. And that is one of the most important brand awareness goals – customers stay connected and spread the word to their friends and colleagues.
The following statistics can give you an overall better understanding of how important brand awareness is for any business to ensure growth:
Over 80% of prospects want their selected brand to be trustworthy before turning into customers
Using a signature theme can boost brand recognition up to 80%.
90% of customers stay loyal to the businesses that share their values.
Ensuring the presence of your brand across different platforms can boost RoI by 25%.
While it’s generally much easier to track the leads generated at each stage sales funnel, it’s not the case with brand awareness. Let’s how lead generation is different from brand awareness and how it adds value to your business.
What is Lead Generation?
“Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads. It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually buying,” according to HubSpot.
Once you gain a lead, it means your prospect is already interested in your brand and somehow in products or services. You gain this lead by running an effective brand awareness campaign we have discussed earlier. You can now shift your efforts to showing them the right content or send personalized emails as they’ve shown signs of interest and engagement.
The lead generation would be the beginning of a long-term relationship business-customer relationship down to the sales funnel.
Once you’ve engaged qualified prospects by dragging them to your web portal, you can start working on them to convert them into sales. Setup an effective content strategy to drive prospects to your landing page or product page where they can be converted. Add informative content in terms of blog posts or articles.
For a better engagement ratio, promote your blogs on your social media pages or accounts. Then lead your prospects to a strategically placed CTA. The form on your landing page must ask for the right and easy to share information. Asking for too much personal information like a phone number or national security number may put you on the verge of losing a lead.
Similarly, if you ask for too little and irrelevant information, then it’s a wasted attempt to learn more about your prospect. Always ask for the right and valuable information that you can use in a personalized marketing approach like email marketing.
Once your lead generation process starts, you need to push your prospects throughout the buyer’s journey by an approach known as lead nurturing. Produce different types of content strategies for each stage of your lead nurturing sales funnel to educate your leads according to their needs. Identify and categorize MQLs & SQLs separately for a more strategic approach by marketing or sales team respectively.
To understand how impactful lead generation is, read the following statistics:
Over 60% of digital marketers claim lead generation as their primary challenge.
Over 50% of experts invest at least ½ of their budget on lead generation campaigns
Around 70% of lead generation experts generate leads from social media platforms
Around 80% of B2B businesses consider email as one of the most effective lead generation strategies.
Now it would make sense why marketers consider lead generation tools to engage and nurture prospects and drive more RoI.
Brand Awareness vs Lead Generation – Differences Explained
Key Differences
Brand Awareness grows your audience base by attracting new prospects to your website and introducing them to your brand and its offers. Whereas, lead generation converts your prospects into qualified leads. Both brand awareness and lead generation are firmly correlated.
Brand awareness drives lead generation. First, it’s vital to attract prospects to your website to push them inside a lead generation funnel for further qualification and conversion.
Below is the breakdown of primary differences between lead generation and brand awareness.
Brand Awareness (top of the funnel)
- Boosts brand awareness
- Attract your target audience
- Strengthens trust
- Ignites interest
Lead generation (bottom of the funnel)
- Fetch prospects demographic and contact info
- Identify market qualified leads (MQLs) & nurtures them
- Showcase brand value and USPs
- Converts sales qualified leads (SQLs) into sales
With all these distinguishing aspects in approach and methodology, it’s vital to separate brand awareness vs. lead generation within your marketing campaign.
Performance KPIs – Brand Awareness vs. Lead Generation
It is necessary to measure the success and outcomes of your brand awareness and lead generation campaigns to determine how impactful they have been. Otherwise, you will not be able to identify the hidden parameters or aspects of both campaigns that needed to be fine-tuned for necessary improvement.
Brand awareness and lead generation campaigns together serve three primary objectives:
- Inform
- Nurture
- Remind
The recommended approach to determine whether your campaigns or ads are driving fruitful outcomes is by associating them with the performance metrics.
Brand Awareness
There are different ways to evaluate the brand awareness campaign. It all depends on how comprehensive you want it to be and the performance metrics you are using for your campaigns. You can perform a brand awareness survey, monitor your site traffic, or check the number of followers on your social media pages or accounts.
You can also leverage brand tracking software for better evaluation. Brand tracking tools allow you to easily reach your target niche and acknowledge how your prospects perceive and feel about your brand. Thanks to AI-based modern algorithms, brand tracking applications keep a strict check on whether you are receiving the right data. That’s why the results you get followed by the decisions you make will be based on facts rather than irrational guesses.
Lead Generation
Lead generation can be evaluated by observing the number of people who provide their contact details when they interact with your website or CRM. For instance, you can count on the number of prospects who provide their email addresses to receive blog updates, discount offers, purchase guides, product comparisons, case studies, etc.
But remember that precisely measuring lead generation campaigns is linked with just counting how many email addresses you receive. You must evaluate your RoI that shifts in nurturing these leads. For instance, if a single lead costs you $1,000 then what’s the point in investing too much for too little?
Another step is to consider evaluating your overall RoI after converting your leads into a sale. An impactful lead generation campaign means improvement in your bottom line and a sudden boost to the ROI.
Brand awareness campaign examples
Brand awareness is a long-term strategy. It involves spreading your core values, creating unique and catchy logos, and laying a platform for overwhelming growth.
Below are some specific brand awareness campaign examples.
1. SEO
SEO is the most preferred brand awareness strategy that centers around the fact that your target audience is already searching for a certain product, service, or information on Google. All you need to do is target their pain points with relevant content.
For instance, why did we produce this blog post?
For many of the blog posts we published on the SYB blog, we’re trying to rank for a particular set of keywords that most people within our niche are searching on Google.
By writing this piece of writing, for instance, we’re eager to rank at the top of Google search results for a very specific keyword: “lead generation vs. brand awareness”. This is what digital marketers and entrepreneurs are searching for to improve their understanding of both concepts.
This is an effective way to drive prospects to your website and boost brand awareness in your targeted niche.
2. Sponsorships
Investing in sponsorships for relevant newsletters, articles, or podcasts is another effective way to boost brand awareness.
For instance:
You easily scale your investment according to your budget. All you need to do is just find publications that match your budget and target your niche.
Lead generation advertisement examples
More leads mean more high RoI and it makes a consistent flow of qualified leads essential for the overall success of the business.
Let’s look at some particular lead generation advertisement examples and effective approaches.
1. Webinar
For almost every online business, webinars are turned out to be a highly effective lead-gen strategy.
A webinar can be live streaming or recorded online session. It basically informs and educates the audience about any particular product, service, or information that they want to know more about.
Look at the following example:
Webinar serves two purposes simultaneously:
- Generate leads during the subscription phase
- Nurture and convert leads throughout the session
2. Lead Magnets
Offering free courses, eBooks, tips, user guides, etc. is another impactful way to generate leads.
This strategy is called lead magnets.
Below is an example Hubspot Marketing course:
Of course, not everyone wants to be a content writer and produce articles or make content strategies. It means this lead magnet won’t attract everyone.
But that’s the bright side of a lead magnet.
The primary reason for setting up a lead magnet is to engage the prospects who are interested in your products or offers.
By offering free courses or eBooks in return for a subscription, you target two aims simultaneously — you ensure the engagement of the right prospects and you can develop a trustworthy relationship with your prospects.
Conclusion
Brand awareness and lead generation strategies are not two different things but complement the performance and impact of each other. It is necessary to use both strategies at the right time of the buyer’s journey.
The primary objective of brand awareness is to boost the outreach of your brand to the market. On the other hand, lead generation campaigns are intended to help lead gen experts nurture and convert prospects. Lead generation targets the leads who are interested in sharing their information by filling out a CRM form or interacting with your site.
Brand awareness is necessary to build a firm base for your business. Once a brand starts attracting prospects, the role of lead generation comes into play. Marketers need to start their journey by spreading brand awareness jumping to the lead generation phase.
