AdsIntelligence is Anti-Gravity: Starting with the BASE and Building Up
If you find yourself here, and you haven’t read our first anti-gravity post, where we replace the dusty old sales funnel with our shiny new pyramid, give it a look. It sets this post up nicely and has a meme from The Office, so it’s a can’t miss.
To continue our Anti-Gravity series, we’re going to introduce you to the bottom of our Pyramid. A section we call BASE (Branding & Awareness Strategic Engagement). What’s that you ask? Did we name the base of our pyramid BASE on purpose? Yep, we’re super clever. It’s part of our Brand. 😉
For anyone who has engaged with us for any length of time, you’ve likely heard us bang the drum of lead generation. That’s typically our main objective: drive highly qualified leads to our client’s website.
So why the focus on Branding and Awareness? Because people are far more likely to meaningfully engage with you – a phone call, form fill, chat or purchase – if they know who the heck you are!
People Buy from Brands They Know
People buy from brands they know. BASE puts your brand in the know. If someone comes across a Paid Search ad, an eblast or even a bandit sign, it will have a much larger impact if they have already heard of you.
Awareness is the foundation for EVERY next step that leads to a sale. Hence why we’re presumptuous enough to trash the sales funnel and replace with our pyramid. It just makes sense tactically.
The biggest problem with Branding and Awareness is it can strain a wallet worse than George Costanza.
That’s where BASE comes in – our Branding and Awareness Strategic Engagement tactics are not a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a tailor-made combination of tactics designed to increase awareness to a hyper targeted audience.
Let’s build a base of awareness, but let’s make that base with people who are actually in your target market. If you can effectively drill down on your target market, you can save media dollars by not needing to get in front of everyone.
As famous marketer Seth Godin said:
“If you’re the best in the world, the market cares. The secret, if you have limited resources (don’t we all) is to make ‘world’ small enough that you can actually accomplish that.”
Two Myths about Branding and Awareness
Advertising efforts, such as lead gen, aren’t part of a Branding and Awareness strategy.
- False! Although the main objective may be lead gen, the increased exposure from these efforts, particularly since they are
lower funnelupper pyramid, is a valuable method for increasing awareness for a highly qualified audience. In fact, when we launch a lead generation strategy, we nearly always see an increase in both Organic and Direct website traffic. Why? Because more people have become aware of the brand and are finding the website on their own.
Branding and awareness is expensive
- False! Well… true actually. Okay bear with us. It USED to be true, but it’s becoming less true (aka false) with more sophisticated tactics. With our BASE strategy, we create a bespoke Branding and Awareness effort for you utilizing tactics that get more needles than haystacks – meaning a much more cost-effective program.
- Branding & Awareness is balance of time and money. The more you have of one the less you need of the other. The goal, of course, is to build a program that needs the least amount of both to be effective. And targeting the right audience goes a long way in accomplishing that.
What’s Involved in BASE?
It’s about having the right tools in your toolbox. It’s also about knowing which to keep out of your bag. There are a lot of shiny tools out there – our job is to sift through them and figure out which are best for your objectives. BASE is going to include tactics that you may already be aware are part of the Branding and Awareness tactics such as programmatic, CTV, Radio, Signage. These are going to hit a broad audience, but we’ll construct these in a way that shrinks that audience down by filtering out people outside your target demo.
We also utilize tools you may not have heard of, such as Resale Geofencing, which targets people physically touring resale homes and convincing them to buy new. Other tools such as Google Performance Max or Meta campaigns can be setup in a way to produce maximum exposure to your brand to a highly tailored audience.
Lead Gen as a Branding and Awareness Tool
Even our Lead Gen efforts are designed to also build out the foundation of the pyramid. Our ads are designed to entice only the correct audience to engage while gating and weeding out those outside our market. We intentionally discourage clicks from the wrong audience. And clicks typically mean $$.
This means that the sophisticated algorithms of platforms like Google and Meta can quickly understand who they should show our ads to, based on targeted engagement, and begin increasing impression share to that audience. So, while not everyone is going to click and convert immediately from our lead gen efforts, they will be seeing your brand repeatedly and getting that “sticky” factor that will bear fruit down the road.
What’s Next?
While Branding and Awareness is a time commitment (but a worthy investment) the good news is you can lay your foundation with BASE while simultaneously working through the other parts of your pyramid. Next steps up on The Pyramid are Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing and The Sale (and back) which we will be covering more in depth in following articles. But we’d be happy to discuss all of this in person any time you want to reach out!
