Depending on your budget, one of the overarching goals of your advertising strategy is to influence your audience more generally in favor of your brand, rather than to take a particular action.
That requires the most common type of branded entertainment campaigns; the awareness campaign. Awareness campaigns are intended to reach wide audiences in order to make your brand memorable and spread a message that doesn’t necessarily directly tie to your bottom line through sales.
Unfortunately, most people don’t see branded entertainment as a vehicle for consideration and conversion, however, it’s just as good for those too. Subscribe for updates and follow up post covering those too.
Many advertisers fall short on this simple standard in when it comes to branded entertainment.
While you can’t expect immediate results like you would expect from conversion campaign, your goals for an awareness campaign should still involve ways to gauge success and ROI.
It’s important to remember that this type of campaign will take a longer period of time to fully develop its impact, which is why we track campaigns for at least 30 days, and encourage long term relationships with channels to foster longer relationships with that audience.
Luckily, Eleven tells who you’re targeting and how much of that demo you’re reaching, and you can bespoke ad effectiveness studies on campaigns are offered via the Eleven platform.
With the emphasis on a long-term view, goals for awareness campaigns should involve a less intense level of frequency than consideration and conversion campaigns.
In fact, a recent study from Facebook IQ shows that a much higher frequency is required to influence purchase intent (consideration) than to lift elements such as brand recall (awareness)
Brands must be cautious with their branded entertainment placements, understand their audiences and the frequency they’ll tolerate, so that between an awareness campaign and any simultaneous conversion campaigns, you won’t hit a frequency that leaves your audience tuning out.
A great place to start is Ostrows frequency model. We’ll get into how that all plays into your distribution strategy in a later post.
If you want to accomplish the goals below, especially anything influencing brand perception, while reaching the largest number of people, awareness campaigns are exactly what you need.
This type of campaign is also perfect for extending your reach into new markets filled with an otherwise unqualified audience.
That’s because unlike a conversion or consideration campaign, which needs to reach the most qualified audiences in order to have effective impact and reasonable ROI, the awareness campaign strategy is focused on creating those qualified customers.
On Eleven this means you want focus on GRP (Gross Rating Points), rather than TRP (Target Rating Points). .
Well, it’s not called an “Awareness” Campaign for nothing. This is the holy grail for this style of campaign, and it’s the bottom line when it comes to why an awareness campaign is an important part of your marketing mix.
For starters, it helps ensure audiences know about your brand to begin with.
Now, while the latest product and hottest sale are certainly important drivers, who your brand is and what you stand for are just as important as what your brand has to offer.
For this reason, again, we recommend sticking with your publishers for extended periods of time, not just when you have a hot sale. Save those for consideration and conversion campaigns. Awareness campaigns should be a constant line item in your budget.
Traditional media planners are very familiar with this, but it’s a skill influencer strategists like myself and other are utilizing for campaigns.
Reach is cool, but Frequency comes back to build brand awareness into something powerful and influential. Being top of mind and staying there is important as customers draw closer to their final purchase decision, and we suggest this for increasing consideration.
Keep in mind that that the buyer’s journey is now scattered across numerous moments, devices, and channels, awareness campaigns are critical for maintaining the touchpoints that remind customers that your brand is there and ready with what they need.
Luckily, Incorporating branded entertainment into your multi touch marketing funnel is 100% possible, and we encourage it. Our Audience overlap score and frequency gauge allows brands to estimate how many times the average user will come in contact with their brand message.
Taking a long term approach without the pressure to push sales in the marketing message leaves a lot of room to do more than simply lift awareness.
Awareness campaigns can become a platform to inform your audience about what makes your brand unique.
When planning an awareness campaign for branded entertainment, keep your briefs almost “evergreen” in nature. This will ensure that you’re able to get content that’s true to your values, and can articulate that to them in their own voice, but it’s a consistent overarching theme or message.
This is the style of campaign that can differentiate you from your competitors in a way that’s more meaningful than just a better price. For instance, in a 2015 report, Xerox determined that 54% of consumers would pay more for better customer service. If your competitor offers better prices but terrible service, making your brand stand out as the business that will treat customers the way they deserve to be treated becomes a unique and winning selling point.
Informing customers about how you’re different from your competitors isn’t always enough. This style of campaign encompasses a lot of long form tactics (e.g., content marketing) that can transform your business from just another store into the brand that knows what it’s talking about and has knowledge it can offer the customer as well.
For instance, JC Penny’s branded entertainment series Sized Up in partnership with Chubstr takes stylist and has them give fashion advice to big and tall men, and of course, show off some cool fits from their stores.
Content like this helps make the brand a go-to choice, even when the customer isn’t necessarily interested in making a purchase.
However, establishing authority and value isn’t enough, and awareness campaigns are excellent tools for solidifying brand authenticity.
The only thing consumers hate more than being sold to is being lied to, and this style of campaign is perfectly geared for developing a message that makes it clear that your brand genuinely stands by its ideals, whether it’s about how your business conducts itself through customer problems or corporate and social responsibility.
A great way to ensure that this goal is realized is to give this same freedom to publishers. Let them be authentic, as opposed to making them read a scripted message.
Sponsoring videos that cater to the demo you’re trying to reach also helps to say "Hey, we care about this community, and we're here to support for the long run"
An awareness campaign relies on building familiarity along with the points we’ve mentioned so far in order to consistently make the brand grow into a top choice in consumer minds. In action oriented campaigns, awareness is merely the top of the funnel. But rather than emphasizing a specific time frame that feature spikes in conversions and sales, awareness campaigns are good at developing those same goals through repeat customers over the long term.
Familiarity also helps to build loyalty, but a campaign that’s focused on building ideas about your brand rather than generating action can do so much more for loyalty. For instance, 37% of consumers in the US are loyal to brands that actively support shared causes, like charities. Awareness campaigns are the perfect platform to educate audiences about which causes your brand stands behind without the risk of sounding like a sales pitch.
A truly balanced and effective marketing plan will take advantage of both action and awareness campaign strategy tactics across channels in order to successfully reach and engage your audience.
Be sure to read our upcoming pieces about consideration and conversion campaigns to ensure your marketing utilizes a steady media mix for the best results based on your audience and your business goals and needs.