Advertising triggers emotional responses from potential customers, increasing your chances of making sales. As your business finalizes a brand awareness plan, you’ll need to set the right budget to set your venture up for success.
Marketing and advertising budgets can notoriously spiral out of control very quickly, so here are some important factors to consider when setting a brand awareness budget that can transform marketing ROI from 50 percent to over 200 percent.
Type of brand awareness campaign
All organizations utilize marketing campaigns in some form or fashion, so it is essential to understand the different kinds of brand awareness campaigns to invest in. Even nonprofits employ advertising principles when trying to raise money for a cause, and one of the first biggest distinctions is whether a campaign is online or offline.
These days, it is becoming harder and harder to rely on a marketing strategy without some form of blended digital campaign. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one strategy used to boost search engine rankings to reach a wider audience. Alternatively, you could focus on social media advertising to directly reach leads.
Target audiences
Perhaps one of the first and most important tasks before undertaking an advertising campaign is to know your audience. Segmentation is a phrase marketers often use to describe how they will target their audience, and it involves separating potential customers or leads into groups based on common traits.
For example, there can be geographic segmentation based on a specific region or area, demographic segmentation based on a specific age or gender, and even socioeconomic segmentation based on the economic status of individuals. Honing in on specific groups and demographics will reduce pointless dollars spent on marketing to individuals with low buying intent.
Hiring professionals
The insourcing versus outsourcing decision depends entirely on the resource capability of your internal marketing team. An internal team needs to cover a wide range of skills and experience. Even if the talent mix is there, an in-house team must have availability to commit hundreds of hours worth of time toward a successful campaign.
Professional ad agencies or marketing specialists often combine the creativity and business acumen skills to make truly innovative content. For example, SEO experts and content marketers can leverage web campaign strategies to enhance digital marketing strategies. Remember that hiring marketing experts is not necessarily more expensive, but rather a more optimal approach that will maximize the return on marketing investment.
Branding tools and methods
Think carefully about how your brand engages with current and potential customers compared to other successful businesses. Most advertising platforms require continued marketing support, because customers may think a brand is in trouble if it reduces or eliminates its advertising presence. Traditional advertising methods such as radio, television or print ads continually reinforce businesses both small and large as major players in the game.
In the digital age, a plethora of social media platforms provides a new form of invaluable yet extremely time-consuming tools for advertising. Poorly managed accounts can become a huge burden to successfully monitor and reply directly with customers.
One key to success is to focus primarily on building a presence on a single platform to centralize marketing efforts and still take advantage of benefits, such as being able to engage an audience without geographic limitations. Choosing a platform can be a challenge, but a survey of social media marketers indicated that 95.8 percent of respondents experienced the highest ROI via targeted advertisements via Facebook compared to other platforms.
Building your own story
How do you connect to the consumer? Again, the best advertising campaigns can elicit an emotional response from the intended audience. Individual consumers don’t want to feel like they are being sold something; they want to find a product or service that adds value to their life.
Building and sharing your organization’s story can go a long way toward creating a personal connection with potential customers, and that requires more than throwing up an “About Us” page on the company website. Research from Adobe indicates that brands and organizations that utilize personalization strategies when marketing to consumers receive nearly a 20-percent increase in website conversion rates, making this a key component of increasing ROI.
Real-time monitoring
While some think of advertising entirely as an art, a scientific mindset is needed to analyze the influx of instantly accessible consumer data. Common methods such as A/B testing and multivariate testing will provide real-time monitoring of how different approaches perform against each other. This instant feedback provides a competitive advantage when it comes to understanding the behavior of the customer.
By following these methods, you will be sure to maximize your advertising spend and effectively reach new customers. If you have an advertising plan you’re excited about launching but lack the capital you need, contact Reliant Funding. We can help your business grow.
