April 2024

Welcome to the first edition of The Monthly ThoughtTap – Comprend’s monthly newsletter. Once a month, we bring you in-depth marketing and communications insights from the people in the know. Each edition will tackle a different topic, ranging from branding and marketing to tech, analytics and corporate communications. So, if you haven’t already, subscribe today and join the conversation.

Kicking off our first edition, our Managing Director for Brand Emma Widerberg and our Lead Conversion Strategist Andreas Bossen discuss? the fine balancing act between brand awareness and lead generation and the age-old question: what should we marketers focus more on, building brand equity or generating leads?

To master the interplay between brand awareness and lead generation, we mustn't become too narrow, says brand specialist Emma Widerberg

Establishing yourself as a trusted brand and converting customers are like yin and yang. One is about becoming a viable choice, and the other is about being chosen. Yet, when thinking about those sales targets you need to hit to keep your business profitable, it’s easy to become too focused on the latter. The reality is, though, that they go hand in hand and brands need to master them both to stay successful over time.

Brand awareness and lead generation – what are they and why is it important?

First, let’s just clarify what we mean by brand awareness and lead generation.

Brand awareness is the art of creating a memorable and distinct brand image in the market. Establishing recognition, building trust, and differentiating yourself from competitors. The task is to build association between your brand and specific, carefully chosen attributes, and to be recognised for those over time. For example, RyanAir is known for its low prices, and Apple is known for its user-friendliness. Brand awareness can happen at any time of your audience’s buying journey - often long before it begins.

Lead generation is the targeted process of attracting and influencing individuals who show interest in your offer. It’s about capturing valuable contact information like names and email addresses and nurturing those leads into paying customers. Typically, this is done through engaging content on social media and websites or through email marketing.

So with brand awareness, you become attractive and trusted. By lead generation, you foster interest and drive sales. Now the question remains: how can we master both? And why should we?

Selling your offering

Creating sustainable growth for your brand ultimately comes down to how you sell your offer. It’s not enough simply to rely on rational attributes such as features, functions and price. It’s also about emotional values such as e.g., a sense of belonging, status and prestige. To sell a product, customers must see and agree with that value. Relying just on rational attributes to sell your offering makes your business vulnerable to changes in the market and the competitor landscape.

Brand awareness is also built over time. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario, using luxury car brand, Maserati as an example.

Kevin is 40 years old and thinking of buying a luxury car. He has loved Maserati cars as the ultimate luxury car brand since he was eight years old, when he first played with a toy version of the car. The accumulated brand equity built over that time explains why Maserati can charge 50,000 EUR for the car (their rational offer) and an additional 150,000 EUR for the prestige of owning it (their emotional offer). Had Maserati disregarded brand awareness from their marketing strategy and only focused on lead generation, they’d have to resort to rational arguments to sell their cars, such as lowering the price to stay competitive in the market.

Keeping it broad

We’ve now established the importance and time it takes to build brand equity. But how do we do it? While brand awareness is about connecting with your target audience, to do it successfully, it’s important to not become too narrow when defining your audience. On the face of it, this might appear counter-intuitive. After all, the beauty of digital marketing is to reach only your potential customers, ensuring efficiency and ROI. But if you become too narrow in building brand awareness, you limit the impact of your emotional offering and, as a consequence, run the risk of eroding your sales premium over time.

Let’s continue with Maserati as an example. We’ve just concluded that Maserati can charge a price premium of 150,000 EUR for the status of the car (their emotional offer). What would happen if they only targeted potential buyers who are financially strong when building brand awareness? Well, it would mean that only this group of people would be aware of the prestige of the brand. This in turn would make the emotional offering of the brand, the prestige, weaker, as this value in itself comes from widespread respect and admiration felt for the brand and the people who have it.

For example, assume the main reason why Kevin, our hypothetical Maserati customer, admired the car was to show the world that he could afford such a luxury car. If only a small group of people with the same wallet size as him knew of the expensive brand, he would no longer have a reason to buy the car. For Maserati, this would mean that the price premium of 150,000 EUR, driven by their emotional offering of prestige, will shrink – in the worst case to 0 EUR. In other words, targeting a too narrow of an audience when marketing your brand may in the long run have the same effect as not focusing on brand awareness at all.

The key to driving sustainable growth

The lesson to be had is that whilst lead generation is important for driving sales short-term, brand awareness is crucial for long-term, sustainable growth. And to successfully build brand equity, we need to be careful about getting too focused on our short-term ROI and ensure we target a wide enough audience – one that’s likely to be wider than the buying audience who we’d normally target to generate leads. In fact, doing so is likely to help us generate leads and drive sales long term, as we can now rely not only on our rational offer but also on our emotional.

So, when setting the parameters for your target audience, make sure they are wide enough. Because the difference between being efficient (reaching the potential buyers at a low cost) and being effective (selling the Maserati at a high price premium) might be hard to see when developing your marketing strategy but will be painfully obvious when looking at your results down the line.

This month’s newsletter was written by Comprend’s Managing Director for Brand, Emma Widerberg, and Lead Conversion Strategist Andreas Bossen.

What do you think is the right approach for balancing lead generation and brand awareness? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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