For B2B marketers, the topic of brand awareness can often feel like a double-edged sword. On one hand, we know the power of a strong brand identity in driving leads and sales. It works magic early on the buyer's journey. But on the other hand… the reality is that building serious brand awareness, and creating strong brand awareness, requires significant time and budget - resources that many small and mid-sized companies simply don't have.
We’re predicting strong focus on brand awareness will be one of the ways in which future marketing agencies can help CMOs and their teams reach crazy goals. That’s why I recently discussed this with the GOAT, Shiri Katalan, Head of Marketing at Global Dots, from two distinct perspectives: One of us is tired of being bombarded with talk and over-emphasis on brand awareness, while the other believes too many companies don't emphasize it enough... Let’s see if you can guess who’s who 😉
Want a TL;DR? You can just watch this video instead:
You know how it is. You’ve got a great B2B product (and a great budget), so you go wild with messaging and marketing around it. “Think different”. “Just do it”. “I’m loving it”. “Where work happens”. “Intel inside”. And their audience instantly can identify the powerful brands and logos behind these words.
But here’s one thing that sooooo many people advocating for brand awareness seem to forget about–not every brand has enough resources to invest heavily in brand awareness. Startups, for example, with a glorious marketing department of one person. Or more established companies, but with extremely little budget for paid campaigns. Shiri claims injustice:
“I feel like this discussion is made as if every company is Nike or Apple, and doesn't take into consideration how expensive brand awareness is, and how unreachable it is for quite a lot of companies in the market.”
And she's absolutely right. For early-stage startups and small-to-medium businesses, aiming to achieve the same level of brand recognition as industry giants is unrealistic, daunting, if not impossible. These companies are often "living deal-to-deal" and lack the strategic planning and budgets required for large-scale branding efforts.
How do we make room for brand awareness then?
Brand awareness doesn’t need to be expensive or take decades to build. Importantly, without strong brand (and valuable content to support it), the ROI on all your other marketing activities, especially lead gen, will be mediocre at best. After all, no one will click on your demo ads if they don’t know your brand. No one will give you their email address just to view an ebook. No one will memorize your brand just by scrolling past one of your ads in their feed. And no one will care about your SDR’s opening lines if it’s the very first time they hear about your brand or product. Yes, brand awareness is one of the ways to go if you want to stop burning through your PPC budget.
But it’s important to add that the goal of brand awareness is not for all the people on the planet to know your brand. That would be nice, sure, but not very realistic and, in all fairness, not at all necessary. If you’ve researched your market and you know your ICP by heart, brand awareness means focusing on the few dozens to few hundreds companies within your reach and making sure they know your brand. Essentially, brand awareness doesn’t have to mean splurging all your budget (and more) on huge campaigns to advertise to a mass market–but it still means spending your resources on advertising to those smaller segments.
The key is to find creative ways to integrate brand-building into lead generation and demand generation efforts. With the limited budget and time that you have to spend, creativity will be the key here. At Envy, we’ve worked with 100s of companies on their marketing activities, and if there’s one message I want people to take away from all this, it’s this:
"You can't just hit the jugular with lead gen, because you're going to be disappointed. Nobody knows who you are. Let's start with some brand awareness, or let's at least do brand awareness in parallel with lead gen activities."
Brand should be included into everything you do–and yes, that means lead generation & demand generation campaigns as well.
So how do we even approach brand awareness when we’re a small company, or on a really tight budget? We want to improve our brand visibility & recognition through the buyer’s journey, but the restraints is something that all the guides and playbooks out there don’t seem to consider–it doesn’t mean it’s impossible though.
First, just like I said above, focus your campaigns on your target audience and ICP instead of everyone. Second, get creative with direct outreach! Here are some great ideas Shiri shared:
Earlier this year, I invited Shiri to speak at one of our events about, what she likes to call it, ABM For The Poor 😉 and her approach to generating leads through B2B podcasting. You can watch her presentation here:
The general idea is this: when you’re a startup that no one wants to talk to (aka you’ve no brand awareness), try changing the perspective of the talk in the first place. Don’t make it a pitch, in fact, don’t make it about your company at all–make it all about them, your ICP.
Shiri invited people she wanted to engage with to be featured in her podcast. They spoke about their pain points, perspectives and experiences, many of which would be common across her target’s ICP.
Those episodes served multiple purposes – i) information sharing ii) podcast material to broadcast iii) short videos shared on social media (everyone’s into thought leadership these days), iv) blog content with which to create nurture flows v) and of course a relationship to nurture for perhaps future sales. They were the podcast episodes that kept on giving (valuable insights!)
First, you’ll get leads–that’s what you’re after. But second, you’ll be able to reach these people’s audiences too with your brand–and here’s your brand awareness.
Forget branded Swiss chocolates or champagne. Think mini arcade games to help people relax, or ghost lights for Halloween that they’ll actually make a use of, anything that’ll stand out. Attach a personalized postcard, send to your targeted list, and just you wait–that’s how Shiri and her team book demos with ZERO no-shows. There’s no more cold-calling when you start the conversation with “Hey, regarding that package we sent you…”
Speaking of creative marketing campaigns, instead of going for something useful, you can also go for something crazy. A little bit more risk involved, yes, but if you’re anything like Oren Hacohen, Head of Growth at WINN.AI, you’ll know it’s worth it. What Oren and his team sent to their target audience was a package containing… an old keyboard, safety goggles, a hammer and an instruction what to do with all this. This served to entertain their ICP who’s tiring of endless admin work and typing everything manually to their CRMs. And that’s something that’ll definitely make folks aware of your brand 😉
You can watch Oren's presentation here:
Something that I’d personally add that we’re especially proud of at Envy:
Mellow call-center tune. A drone shot of skyscrapers or some factory. Close-up of the C-level management taking a tour. Everyone’s smiling. Ugh. Give me a break. Case studies DON’T have to be boring, they can actually provide value. Take your customer for a round of pool, go for a water bike around the nearest lake, invite them to an old-school restaurant. They’ll want to talk about it, everyone will remember you for it. That’s what we do 😉
And here are a few things you might want to pay extra attention to when doing brand awareness on a tight budget (or any budget, really):
That’s gonna sound cliche, but there’s a reason it became a cliche in the first place–just have fun in the creative process. Building brand awareness on a budget means narrowly targeting your target audience and ensuring they’ve heard about you. And you don’t need a mega budget to do that. Trying to push leadgen without doing the brand awareness first or in parallel will cost you far more. And if you manage to have fun as you go? That’s a double win.
This blog wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the brilliant Shiri Katalan 🙏