The importance of creating and maintaining awareness
- You can’t expect someone to be your customer if they do not know about you. Therefore creating awareness of your brand, product or service is essential. This facilitates the early stages of a sufficiently large pool of prospective customers who you can talk to for purposes of a sale, a consideration of your offer or a referral.
- Even though awareness building is only the start of the sales process, studies show a strong correlation between awareness and sales.
- You should have some idea as to whether your target market buys your product or services regularly, or on a very occasional basis. Knowing this will shape the frequency and nature of your communications when building awareness. This is because you sometimes may not know when someone is in the market to make a purchase from your category, but still need to balance awareness building with a limited communications budget.
- Receptiveness to a communication can depend on whether the person you’re communicating with is in the market for what you are offering. Typically, people are more likely to pay attention to a communication when they have a need for your product or service.
- Search based media strategies help you to be found by consumers when they need to buy from your category. Search engines help to address this issue. This partially helps manage the issue of being able to afford awareness building on an ongoing basis for new category buyers or potential brand switchers.
- There will however be circumstances when it pays you to have ongoing communications with prospective customers so that your brand will be top-of-mind when they do decide to buy something in your category. This is where lead nurturing communications come into the picture.
- Understanding how to use paid media (such as Google Pay-Per-Click ads, or Facebook ads) versus unpaid media (such as Google SEO or Facebook posts) will affect how successfully you achieve awareness and translate this into a communication that is regarded as being credible.
About the author
Alan Ohannessian started WisdomInc in 1999.
He has broad-based experience in how marketing strategy and analytics are practically integrated with other strategy disciplines for more effective outcomes.
Prior to starting WisdomInc, he started a Customer Relationship Management consultancy within the Ogilvy Group in the mid-1990s and worked within the Ogilvy Group over a 5-year period.
He has advised product and service organizations for more than 70 global and local B2C and B2B brands since 1995.
As a specialist across several disciplines, he is able to provide an integrated view of a solution when providing strategic insights. Areas of specialty have included Marketing Strategy, Brand Strategy, Communications Strategy, Brand Experience Management, and Pricing Strategy.
He has taught Marketing Strategy to MBA students at Wits Business School, on a part-time basis, through the “Marketing in a Connected World” course.
He holds a Master’s degree in Distribution Channel Strategy from the University of the Witwatersrand.
He has also completed a postgraduate dissertation in the area of cost-competitive mass-customization manufacturing strategies at Wits (where he taught Marketing Strategy, Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Research, and Retail Marketing over a 2-year period from 1993 to 1994.)
For further information, go to https://www.wisdominc.com or connect with Alan at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanohannessian/