Lead nurturing b2c for non-profit organizations

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- In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about the two seemingly different campaign objectives, of brand awareness and lead generation. What they are, how they're different, and which one is gonna be best for your business. Let's get to it. (upbeat music) Hey there, my name is Adam Erhart. Modern Marketing Strategist and welcome to The Modern Marketing Show, where we help you grow your business by making way better marketing. So if you're interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks and tactics, well, you may wanna consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell. All right, let's talk marketing objectives, specifically two of my absolute favorite campaign objectives, one of which being brand awareness and the other being lead generation. Now here's the thing when it comes to these marketing objectives. Most marketers tend to fall squarely in one camp or the other. The brand awareness people, for example, say that lead gen is too salesy and destroys the brand image and reputation. And the lead gen people say that brand awareness ads are useless, and don't provide a real and concrete tangible return on investment, that's accountable and trackable. So, which is the better option? And more specifically, which one's gonna be right for you? Well, I'm gonna tell you exactly what I believe at the end of this video. But first, let's go over some of the key differences between brand awareness campaigns and lead generation campaigns. Alright, so the very first thing we need to cover here is what exactly is brand awareness. You see, when we're gonna be running a brand awareness campaign, it's important to kind of understand what exactly our objectives are, what our goals are, what we're seeking to achieve, and probably most importantly, how we're gonna measure this. So at the end of the day, we can deem whether the campaign was successful, or whether it wasn't. So in a nutshell, and really, in its most basic sense, a brand awareness campaign is really just how well people know your brand. Or to put it literally, how aware people are of your brand, hence, brand awareness. Not very original, but at least it explains it pretty clearly. Now, the reason brand awareness is important is kind of self evident, right? After all, if people don't know about you, they don't know about your brand, well, how are they ever gonna do business with you. But where brand awareness can campaigns tend to fall short, is because there's a big gap between someone simply knowing about you, and then actually going and doing business with you. All that said, people and consumers and the customers that we're trying to reach in this case, well, they only have a limited mental inventory for brand names or names in general, which means that you really want your brand and your business to occupy that incredibly valuable real estate in their minds. Now, one of the cliched sayings is essentially, "You wanna become the Coca Cola of your industry." Now, the reason we use Coca Cola as an example in this case is just because it's such a well known brand, that people actually ask for it by name. This is the same reason that some brands have become synonymous with the products that they actually are. Good examples here are Kleenex or Band-Aid, not really products, they're actually the brands behind them. But it's rare that somebody asks for tissue paper or a plaster, or I don't even know what the generic name for a Band-Aid is, let's say a plaster, yeah, just sounds wrong. This is the reason that you really want your brand to be really well known, so that it becomes another synonymous and interchangeable with whatever product, or service or whatever essentially that you're selling to your market. And the reason that they're deployed all the time, and even by some of the more hardcore kind of lead gen advocates, well, they still recognize the importance of this aspect of a brand awareness campaign. And that is, that people, customers and prospects, those that you're seeking to essentially sell to, well, they need a lot of touch points in order to build that know, like, and trust factor that is gonna be required to do business with you. Now the number of touch points that are gonna be required to build that know, like and trust factor, and in order to kind of create a sale, well, it's gonna vary depending on your business and your market, and your industry. But depending what statistic you read, it's somewhere between six and 12, maybe 13, or 14, if you've got a higher price point thing for sale, or if it's sort of a higher trust value industry and things of that nature. Basically, if you're selling a pack of gum, you probably only really need one touch point. But if you're selling something like insurance, or a home, or business to business services, well, you're gonna require a lot more touch points. Regardless, this is where brand awareness comes into play, because the more well known you are and the more touch points that you make, the more trust that you're gonna be able to establish with your market. Also, as consumers, we've been kind of subconsciously trained to associate frequency with trust, meaning that if you can show up more times in front of your target market, well, they're naturally more likely to trust you, and therefore to do business with you. Now fortunately, when it comes to touch points, these can happen rapid fire. Sure, of course, we've heard about how we need to nurture relationships, and it can take time to build that trust aspect, but for some people, this can happen very fast. Really, what you wanna do is you want to facilitate the journey so that it's up to your consumer to decide how quickly they want the relationship to progress. As an example, here, you could run a brand awareness ad, they could maybe take some kind of action on that ad on the very first try, they might then download a guide, or watch a video, that might then get re-targeted with another ad and receive an email and then maybe watch another video. And all of this could happen in the span of maybe even just a few minutes. Others on the other hand, this could happen over a period of hours, of days, of weeks, of months, and in some cases, even years, which is why it's important to continually drip or continually deliver more and more valuable content and brand awareness type materials to your market. Now a really important note here when it comes to brand awareness, is you need to make sure that the content that you're putting in front of your prospects is entertaining, or educational or informative in some way, And more specifically, that it's on brand. Because you wanna make sure that these touch points that you're making, well, they all line up with your brand. So if you're sending all sorts of different and divergent and confusing messages, none of that brand awareness is gonna carry over 'cause you're going to end up confusing and possibly losing potential customers. Alright, so now that we've got that established, let's cover some brand awareness advertising metrics. Because at the end of the day, one of the biggest arguments against brand awareness is that it's not really trackable, and you can't really tell if it's working or not. So here's some metrics that we like to use in order to judge the effectiveness, or at least how many people are getting exposed to our potential message. The very first metric is reach. Reach covers how many different people saw your message, it's a really good indicator of sort of how wide, or how broad, or how narrow, if that's the method you're choosing to use. Well, it's essentially just a measure of how many different people are getting exposed or have the potential to become more aware of your business. The next metric is frequency. And this is how many times someone saw something. Now this one's important because again as we covered, we do need to increase those touch points. So by keeping an eye on frequency, we're gonna be able to tell how many times someone has potentially seen your ad, or your content, or your message. And the last one is impressions. And this is simply just reach times frequency. So how many different people saw your message, how many different times and that gives you impressions. And this is kind of the main metric that people use when they're looking at brand awareness campaigns. How many different impressions did we get? And if we wanna get more granular, and look at the budget side, what's our cost per impression? So basically, how much is it gonna cost us to get in front of our target market? Alright, so now that we've covered reach, and frequency and impressions, well, let's take it a step further and really dial in how we're gonna measure brand awareness. Because if you've got an agency, or someone on your team, and they're advocating just running brand awareness campaigns, but all they're doing is really spending a lot of money, and you don't have a lot of sales in return for that, ah, not a great strategy. On the other hand, if you can actually track that yes this is working, more people are talking about us, more people are trusting us, they're hearing about us, they're liking us. Well, eventually this is going to correlate to more sales, provided you're making good offers and have a good product market fit all the usual stuff. Alright, so the first one we need to look at is brand recall. This is essentially how well people are gonna remember your name. Now really hard to go out there and survey all of the potential people and say, "What's the first brand you think of when it comes to cars, "or drinks, or services or whatever it is." On the other hand, what you can do is simply take a look at your Google Analytics data for your website and see how many people are coming to your website direct. This is a good indicator because it means that somebody is actually putting your name or your brand name, in order to get to your website. And how are they gonna put it in, if they've never heard of you, right? That's why brand recall is one of my favorite ways to look, of overall brand awareness campaigns and making sure that this is increasing over time. Another good way to do this is with another Google tool, using Google Trends and tracking the mentions or basically how many times your brand is mentioned on social media, or across the web. And again, what we're looking for here is an upward trend in those number of mentions made. Again, clearly indicating that more people are talking about you, and therefore more people know about you. This next one's a little more advanced, but it involves search volume. And essentially, if your brand starts becoming a targetable keyword, meaning that people can bid against it on Google ads, or it's showing some kind of search volume on the search engines, well, this is a good sign that again, more people are searching for you, and your brand is actually becoming so valuable that people are willing to bid against it, in order to rank above you for your own brand. It sounds frustrating actually, if someone's willing to bet against your own brand. But it's actually kind of cool, because it shows that you've really solidified a position in your consumers minds. Plus, for what it's worth, it's gonna be really hard for someone else to rank against your name. So as long as you do proper optimization and make sure that you're continuing to market your business, well, you should be okay. Lastly, we have things like vanity metrics. Now vanity metrics are easily my least favorite metrics of all. These are things like likes, comments, and shares, basically things that make you feel good and make you look really good, but don't really relate to more sales, or more customers or more leads or more revenue for your business. That's it as a brand awareness thing, now they're not too bad because more likes, more comments, more shares, means more engagement and more engagement typically means that more people know about you and are talking about your business. All right, so why do the brand awareness camp and the lead generation camp, why don't they get along? And what is it about brand awareness that the lead geners just don't like? Well, for starters, attribution with a brand awareness campaign is a little trickier. After all, it's really hard to figure out where exactly that sale came from, where it originated, and what factors were in place in order to deliver the sale. And if you can't figure out where the sale came from, or what's working and what's not, well then, how do you know what part of your marketing you should do more of, and what part's completely useless and you should just stop doing all together? The other problem that lead gen has with brand awareness is that brand, well, they do recognize that it is a valuable asset, does take a long time to build, which means that you're gonna have to put in potentially a ton of time, a ton of money and a ton of energy into creating content, running brand awareness campaigns, and all of these things that are gonna help to build trust and people be more aware of your business, but don't necessarily equate to short-term sales, which a lot of businesses are governed by. Alright, so now that we've gotten all that covered, let's dive into lead generation as a campaign objective. Alright, so for starters, what is lead generation or lead gen as it's more commonly known? Well, essentially lead gen is just attracting and converting people who have no idea who you are, or may not have heard about your business and converting them into prospects and people likely to do business with you. Basically, if brand awareness is generating more awareness for your brand, well, lead generation is generating more leads for your company. Basically, again, the name kind of implies and says exactly what it is. Now, lead gen is typically done by providing something of value to your prospect or potential customer, in exchange for their contact information, which allows them to become a lead. Now the first thing you need to understand when it comes to running an effective lead generation campaign, is that nothing happens without a good offer. All the touch points in the world simply don't matter if the touch points that you're making aren't irresistible enough, or they don't incentivize your prospect to take action and hand over their contact details. At the end of the day, whether people buy or not isn't simply because they're aware of you, it's because they liked the solution that you're proposing. They like the offer, they like your product or your service or your business. Basically, they like what you can do for them, not just the fact that they know you. We all know somebody that we really like, but we're not exactly gonna hire them to do important tasks if we don't feel they're up for the job. Now, just like with a brand awareness campaign, the touch points required in the funnel, as we call it with lead generation. Well, the funnel or the steps that someone walks through, these can happen rapid fire as well. For example, they could see the ad, they could hand over their contact information, they could be re-targeted, moving them further down the funnel, and basically move them closer and closer to a sale, and all of this can happen very quickly. Alright, so if lead generation is all about generating leads by essentially providing something of value to your potential customer, in exchange for their contact details, well, what are some of the metrics you wanna take a look at to make sure you're on the right track? Well, one of the first things you wanna look at is CTR, or click through rate. This is basically showing how many people saw your ad and then clicked on it in order to take action, basically indicating that it was interesting and relevant to them. The next metric is CPC or cost per click. This basically tells you how much it's gonna cost you every single time someone clicks on your ad. The next metric is conversion rate. And what this shows is of the people that clicked, how many people actually went all the way through with the action by handing over their contact details, in exchange for whatever you were promising. Finally, we have CPA or cost per acquisition. And this is probably the most important metric of all, when it comes to lead generation, because it's the cost that you're gonna end up paying in order to acquire a lead. Now how much you can afford to pay to acquire lead is gonna depend on a number of different factors. But most importantly, is gonna be the lifetime value of your customer. For example, if you've got a customer that's worth 10 bucks over their entire lifetime, well, you're obviously not gonna wanna pay more than 10 bucks to acquire a lead. And that's assuming you have 100% conversion rate by turning that lead into a customer. On the other hand, if you're selling a product or service for 10,000, 20,000 or $50,000. well, paying 10 bucks a lead sounds cheap, might even be willing to pay 20 bucks or 50 bucks or maybe even 100, depending on how fluid and how greased up your funnel really is at converting them from lead to paying customer. All right, so how can you measure the effectiveness of a lead generation campaign? Well fortunately, when it comes to measuring lead gen compared to brand awareness, it's actually really easy. Essentially, all you need to know is, are you acquiring leads for an acceptable cost, meaning that you're profitable, or are you not and you're paying too much, meaning that you're losing money. Being profitable is good, and losing money is bad. It's that's simple. With lead generation by tracking things like click through rates and conversion rates and cost per acquisition, well all of the data is easily accessible and really easy to read, meaning that making decisions is a lot more strategic, and therefore a lot easier to make the right ones for you and your business. Alright, so what is it about lead generation that the brand awareness people just don't like? After all, we've just painted a pretty clear and compelling picture of why lead gen sounds like a pretty good strategy. Well, the biggest problem with lead gen from the brand awareness perspective, is that lead gen is really focused on the short-term and the short-term alone. Where brand awareness is seeking to build a brand and really create an asset around your business, lead generation tends to just be focused on the short win. Acquiring leads, getting as many as you can for as cheap as you can, and converting them into customers, with little appreciation for building that longer-term and more sustainable brand in business. Okay, so now that you know the key differences between a brand awareness campaign and a lead generation campaign, which one is going to be best for you and your business? Well, the answer there really depends on what type of business you're in. And whether you're in a business to business or B2B type industry, or whether you're doing a business to consumer or B2C business, meaning you're selling direct to the consumer. First up, we have the business to consumer or B2C type business. Now typically, brand awareness campaigns are gonna be a lot more prevalent in this type of industry, because it's going to tend to apply with more mass market appeal. Basically, the goal here with a B2C and with a brand awareness type approach, is to reach as many of your ideal target market as possible, with a fun and memorable and on-brand piece of content. Your focus here is gonna be less on collecting the names and emails and contact details of your specific customers, and more essentially, on carving your name and your brand and your business into their minds, so that you become the most relevant and the most memorable brand that's gonna be associated with your industry. A key thing to remember is that repetition is key here, so you really wanna focus on those touch points by ensuring that you're constantly showing up in front of them in as many relevant and strategic ways as possible. And on the flip side of that, well, repetition is important, so is novelty. So you wanna keep things fun, and fresh and exciting. And make sure that the content you're producing is relevant and memorable. Because the only thing worse than showing up a million times, is showing up a million times with a completely bland or boring or vanilla message. That's a great way to waste money. Alright, so now let's talk about B2B or business to business where lead gen tends to be the method of choice. The reason lead generation is the preferred method for business to business markets is that you're dealing with a significantly more limited and more targeted, and more narrow-focused part of the market. Basically, we're not trying to go for mass market appeal here, because it simply wouldn't make sense because we just don't have that many of our targeted buyers out there in the real world. On the other hand, we have a few very carefully selected business to business leads that we wanna acquire and bring into our funnel. B2B also typically involves a more relational style marketing approach, rather than a transactional style approach. Again, we're not selling a pack of gum here, or a T-shirt or anything like that. We're involved in complicated and often long-term and very expensive purchases that are gonna be long-term in ongoing relationships. For this reason, it pays to acquire a lead, so that you can continue to nurture them again and again and again over time with relevant and valuable and helpful information. Also, brand awareness is much less of a consideration here because again, we don't need everyone to know about us. So we don't necessarily want awareness, we want consideration. And moreso we want conversion. And ideally, you want it fast, which means providing some kind of irresistible offer or valuable content, in exchange for your prospect's contact information. So which one is best? Well, inside our marketing agency, we use both brand awareness and lead generation campaigns on a daily basis for both our B2B and B2C clients. Also, I just touched on there, if it's a B2B client, we tend to air more on the side of lead generation, and if it's a B2C client, we tend to air more on the side of brand awareness. That said, if I had to pick an absolute winner of which one I prefer, nine times out of 10, well, it would have to be the lead generation side, because I really like trackable, accountable and measurable marketing campaigns. The reality is whether your B2B or B2C, investing your time, energy and resources in a measurable, trackable and accountable marketing strategy is gonna be well worth it, and will provide a significant return on investment. Alright, the next thing you're gonna wanna do is check out the video I have linked up right here which is going to be released next week. It's part of this B2B versus B2C series. And it's gonna give you even more actionable and practical tips, that you can use to immediately deploy in your business. So make sure to check back next week for that video. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll catch you next time on The Modern Marketing Show. (upbeat music)