Invisibility is the bane of every brand. If your customers and clients don’t know you exist - and if you aren’t the option that comes to mind when you’re needed - then you’ll never find the success you want. But simply doing the job doesn’t spread awareness. It takes a concentrated effort to intentionally and strategically get the word out. Fortunately, brand awareness campaigns exist. A great campaign can work wonders.
Invisibility is the bane of every brand.
If your customers and clients don’t know you exist - and if you aren’t the option that comes to mind when you’re needed - then you’ll never find the success you want.
But simply doing the job doesn’t spread awareness. It takes a concentrated effort to intentionally and strategically get the word out.
Fortunately, brand awareness campaigns exist. A great campaign can work wonders.
Unfortunately, CFOs often don’t like paying for them because they don’t provide immediate, short-term impact and they can require a lot of resources.
The goal is to put together a compelling pitch that explains the benefits of a brand awareness campaign while translating success into metrics a CFO actually cares about - the metrics that’ll make them sit up and say, “Now you’re speaking my language.”
Electromagnetic pitch pros and brand brainiacs Michael Kline and Jamie Parris put their heads together to help you put together the best pitch ever. Here’s what they had to say.
According to Michael, the two keys to showing the value of your campaign to your CFO are:
To do that, you’ll need data. Data is your credibility currency. Putting together numbers that tell a compelling narrative is the key to making your case.
There are a few major sources for this data. As Jamie points out, “There are a lot of listening tools that monitor online and social activity related to your brand. You can also use Google Trends and Google Search Console to get a very high-level view of how searches related to your brand are changing in different geographies.”
Michael adds, “Both Google Ads, Meta ads, and LinkedIn ads provide great actionable data if set up correctly. Not only do they provide data that is easily presentable to your C-suite, but the data can also be easily used to create audiences.”
Audiences help shape context for the data so it tells a story of how your campaign is influencing relevant consumers. “For instance, with a video brand-awareness campaign on Meta, Google, or LinkedIn, you can create an audience of the people who watch a video, so you can retarget them knowing that they have seen your video and are aware of your brand,” says Michael.
As far as social data is concerned, according to Jamie, take heed: “For this to be relevant to a CFO, it needs to be correlated with data that helps tie this activity to revenue like website traffic and conversions.”
Which brings us to…
The trick to picking any metric is to narrow the choices down to what matters most to your pitch target.
One major metric that reflects how well the brand awareness campaign is working is how many times your brand is mentioned when consumers take to Google or Bing to find you—in other words, what we call branded searches.
These are different from product or service-based searches, or for general information queries, like “best marketing agency” or “How do I set up Google Search Console?”.
“You can look at branded searches in Google Trends and Google Search Console to see how people are associating your brand with what you do,” says Jamie. “But it's essential to set up goals and conversions in Google Analytics to see how that awareness is turning into leads and revenue.”
Michael says, “A CFO’s primary goal is to ensure the company’s resources are being used most efficiently. So one of the most important metrics you can share with a financial decision maker is the customer acquisition cost (CAC).”
This metric calculates the overall cost of a customer when considering the entire marketing budget. “If a brand awareness campaign results in the CAC lowering in the months after launch,” says Michael, “this will give the financial decision-maker a strong justification to keep the campaign running, as it indicates that as a result of the brand awareness campaign, more customers are buying your product for less marketing spend than before.”
You can also use A/B testing to provide more data on how one particular campaign (or message, ad, etc.) performs compared to another. CFOs often appreciate more refined data like this because it’s easy enough to understand and showcases how you’re using a “survival of the fittest” approach to be efficient with resources.
(You’ll always find the word “efficient” on a CFO’s bingo card.)
“Brand awareness campaigns are some of the best places to implement A/B tests, because engagement metrics can help greatly in showing what resonates with your audience, which can inform your lead generation campaigns in everything from the ad creatives to the offer to the messaging,” says Michael.
Finally, there are bottom-line metrics that will really grab your CFO’s attention, especially if they have a sales team helping to drive revenue.
“Brand awareness success should also be evident in the reception your sales team receives as they meet new people and gain referrals,” says Jamie.
One thing to definitely point out to your CFO: regardless of metric, the ROI you receive from branding campaigns—unlike lead generation campaigns— isn’t always directly through the advertising channel you’re running brand awareness campaigns on.
For more guidance on picking the right metrics, check out our blog post on brand awareness targeting options.
What you don’t want to do is bombard your stakeholder with arcane technical gobbledygook that just confuses and obscures.
“When speaking with your C-suite about brand awareness campaigns, it’s especially important to look at the bigger picture of how your overall marketing strategy was impacted, rather than sharing too many vanity metrics of the campaign itself”, according to Michael.
The narrative is the key. Using the data to tell a story, instead of just presenting the data and conclusions by themselves, is one method Jamie highly recommends. Start with the goals, identify the characters (i.e. your target audience), describe what you’re trying to do, and explain how your methods have helped accomplish the goals without dwelling too much on the technical data itself.
At the end of the day, brand awareness campaigns are incredibly important—and that means putting together a killer pitch is also incredibly important. The right story can open up budgets that otherwise would be closed.
Just keep in mind the big picture reality of what these campaigns are designed to do. “Branding campaigns are not ideal for immediate results. You're building awareness that will support future ROI for lead generation campaigns,” counsels Jamie.
“Presenting the value of brand awareness campaigns to a member of your C-suite can be more challenging than it would be for a lead-generation campaign, but it’s still very possible,” says Michael.
With the right pitch, you can turn the possible into a lucrative reality. Ready to take the next step? Let’s talk!
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