Lead Generation vs Brand Awareness – Where To Invest Your Time?

Do you know that 61% of marketers consider lead generation to be their biggest challenge (Source: HubSpot, 2021)? And the Content Marketing Institute reports that 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers view brand awareness as an important goal (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2021). So which one should you focus on to maximize your ROI? If lead generation vs brand awareness is on your mind, you are at the right place.

In this blog post, we’ll delve deep into lead generation and brand awareness and explore where you should invest your time and resources to achieve the best results.

Stay tuned as we dissect lead generation and brand awareness, and provide you with the insights needed to make informed decisions.

What Is Lead Generation?

The process of garnering the interest of potential clients in order to improve future sales is known as lead generation. This is usually accomplished by developing a lead generation funnel, which entails developing a lead magnet, constructing a landing page for it, and then driving visitors to that landing page. This way, leads who have already communicated or expressed interest in the firm in some way can be more responsive to cold calls or emails from a sales representative.

You can use SalesBlink for outreaching your targeting prospects and closing the deals.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to how well people are aware of your brand, as well as the feelings and visuals they connect with it. In a nutshell, brand awareness is a measurement of how memorable and also identifiable a brand is to its target market.

Because brand awareness is a bit of an abstract concept, it can be difficult to measure, but it is a crucial part of differentiating your business and ultimately convincing someone to choose your brand over another. Whether you’re a startup or a well-established company, this is critical since there will always be people who meet your buyer personas who haven’t heard of you or haven’t needed your services.

You can utilize your website, messaging, press release, social media presence, and other things to affect how people think about your brand when you’re trying to raise awareness for it.

Why Lead Generation Is Crucial To Your Business?

Bringing clients to the doorstep of your business is the very reason why you established your business in the first place. But regardless of how good your products are or how good you are at performing your services, nobody would come to you if people don’t know the way that leads to you.

Regardless of the tools for generating leads that you prefer or what strategy you plan on using, it is very crucial that you can create an avenue where people can gather so you can bring them to your website, so they can start buying your products. This is the importance of lead generation – it is the means by which you can lure clients, so they can give the profit your business aims for. 

Why Brand Awareness Must Never Be Ignored?

If people are starting to check you out, then you have to try the best methods possible of making them browse through your products so they will become your clients. This will not happen if you have no product or brand that they find to be very attractive and useful.

Since it’s a fact that can’t be disputed, you have to acknowledge that brand awareness is also an equally important undertaking that every business should execute. The best brands are often presented with an eye-catching logo, head-turning packaging, and a witty tagline or catchphrase.

Not all commercially successful commodities are presented that way, though. The point is that you need to let people be aware of the distinctive traits of your brand because only then can you have an edge over your competitors.

Benefits Of A Good Lead Generation Campaign

Let’s take a look at the benefits of having a good lead generation campaign to better compare Lead Generation vs. Brand Awareness

1. Generate high-quality leads

Every business relies on high-quality leads to succeed. You can get all the attention you need, but earning profit is going to be tough unless you can attract prospects who are ready to buy what you’re selling.

The Ability to target certain consumers is one of the most essential benefits of lead generation. Only consumers who you think are valuable to you can be targeted. When these consumers respond to your campaign and choose to interact with your brand, you’ll receive highly qualified leads. 

2. Boost Your Profits

Lead generation can help you boost your brand’s ability to reach target prospects. To generate interest from these specific segments, you’ll need to use the right language, offer, and content.

You’ll be able to attract the attention of qualified leads easier this way, making it easier for sales to convert them. The potential for revenue growth is enormous, especially when you focus on the interests and main areas that your audience cares about.

3. Create new business opportunities

B2B Lead Generation isn’t just about discovering new customers. It has the potential to create new business opportunities. Perhaps a non-competing brand in your sector contacts you about organizing a webinar with them. By cooperating, you have access to their audience as well. It’s also a major boon that could result in greater leads.

4. Increase your brand’s visibility

Lead generation always requires teaching your leads about your organization and its product, whether they learn about you on their own or you contact them with information about the features of your product. Leads can then spread word of mouth about your brand, giving you even more customers.

5. Obtain useful information

In most cases, creating leads entails gathering data about potential consumers, their wants and needs, and your rivals. This aids you in improving your product or service to provide it a competitive edge in the market.

Benefits Of An Effective Brand Awareness Campaign

Let’s take a look at the benefits of having a good brand awareness campaign to better compare Lead Generation vs. Brand Awareness

1. Increases sales

When we compare Lead Generation vs Brand Awareness, People like to make a purchase from brands they know or recognise. The larger a brand’s market share, the more customers are aware of it.

Companies having larger market shares make more sales on average than their less fortunate counterparts.

2. Developing emotional connections

Brand awareness is crucial for retaining clients and getting them to buy from you again and again. A well-known brand inspires confidence and optimism. Customers are thus more inclined to return to a brand they’ve heard of or purchased from previously.

Even better, brand awareness fosters a deep emotional connection between the company and the customer. Most consumers have a strong emotional attachment to a particular brand. Customers are more likely to buy from a brand again and pay more because of this emotional connection.

3. Increased Customer loyalty

Strong brands can not only produce more robust market edges, higher revenue, and emotional relationships with customers, but they can also develop more robust market edges, higher revenue, and emotional ties with customers. They also get another perk: the ability to make blunders on occasion.

Customers are even forgiving mistakes made by their favorite brands. According To PWC  after a single misstep, only 17% of clients refuse to work with their favourite brand. Customers’ tolerance levels decline when they don’t have an emotional connection to a brand. After a bad first impression, 39% of buyers say they will not return to a company.

4. Acquisition via word-of-mouth

You’re more likely to get referrals if your brand is well-known. 94 percent of people who are emotionally invested in a brand would tell their friends, coworkers, and family about it. This leads to a rise in revenue, as 20-50 percent of purchasing decisions are based on referrals from friends.

Better yet, recommendations increase your brand exposure beyond what it was before. Friendship referrals are the most trusted source of information, according to 84 percent of adults.

Because of these advantages, firms are continuously attempting to raise brand awareness. It raises the question of how to accurately assess this parameter.

When Should You Do Lead Generation?

To answer the question, the most common scenario for it would be if you want people to visit your website or online store. It can be done through cold email campaigns, email subscriptions, social media outreach, sales outreach or word of mouth. 

There’s another clever way of doing this by hiring a company that specializes in outbound lead generation service. For B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, they typically send cold emails to their potential clients to generate their first leads. Even if your business doesn’t fall in such a category, you should consider doing the same.  

Typically, lead generation happens after you’ve attracted a good enough number of potential clients. Once you have a hold of them already through their email or social media page membership, you can start converting them into real clients by offering them to buy your products. 

When Should You Focus On Brand Awareness?

This is best done after finalizing your product. You have to bear in mind that people wouldn’t bother checking out your business if you have no presentable items to show.

If you’ve already finalized your product’s packaging, or if you’ve already laid out how your services should be availed by the clients, then it’s the right time to spread the word that your business exists. Though brand awareness can be totally done for free, spending for advertising wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

How To Evaluate The Success Of Brand Awareness?

As your company expands, you may track brand awareness by direct visitors, social interaction, and brand awareness surveys sent directly to customers.

Although some components of your branding won’t be measurable at first, as your audience grows naturally, you’ll be able to understand how to interact with them directly to continue your business’s growth.

How To Evaluate The Success Of Lead Generation?

The usual metrics characterized as Click-Through Rates (CTR), Conversion Rates, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Time to Customer Conversion, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), Website Traffic, Social Media Engagement and Cost per Customer will all play a role in determining the effectiveness of your lead generation campaign. These metrics will provide you an excellent idea of where you stand with your campaigns. This will allow you to make adjustments and enhancements as needed. You can also track and analyze other lead creation indicators, such as the ones listed below, if you want a more comprehensive and in-depth examination of your lead generating success.

– The percentage of leads created as a direct result of your lead generation efforts in your sales funnel.

– The percentage of closed sales directly attributed to your lead generating efforts.

– The number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) you have.

– The percentage of closed sales directly attributed to your lead generating efforts.

– The percentage of SQLs are converted into sales.

– The Cost Per Lead (CPL) which is calculated as a ratio of your Total Campaign Cost to the Total Number of Leads generated by your lead generation campaign.

Lead Generation vs Brand Awareness -A Varying Mixture Of The Two Is Important, Here’s Why…

Now let’s get back to the main question, where should you focus your efforts? Lead generation vs. brand awareness? After knowing the facts stated above, it is difficult to disagree that both endeavors must be dealt with. 

To settle this issue much better, it would be wise to understand that how you conduct lead generation. Also, brand awareness should have varying degrees, depending on the status of your business. 

For instance, if you’ve presented your brand in a wide-enough spectrum, there’s a great likelihood that people are spreading the word already among their friends and social circle. In that case, enough time for lead generation should be given. Since, there is already a huge number of clients that are checking out your business.

But if you’ve just started out, and people haven’t heard of your business yet, then brand awareness should be the main task you should be focusing on. As your business continues to grow, you should just adjust how much time and effort you should pour out for either of them.

If you’re a wise businessman, you should carefully balance the two and should not get in the fight of Lead Generation vs Brand Awareness. It is how business should be done, especially in these times when there is stiff competition in the business world.

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