For business owners, it can be difficult to choose between lead generation and brand awareness. First, it’s important to know the difference between these strategies, how they can go hand-in-hand, and how you can use them both as a cohesive marketing strategy.

Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is about increasing how familiar potential consumers are with your brand. This includes demand for and visibility of your brand.

This can be difficult to measure since you can’t clearly link it to new clients and customers. But it’s also a great way to lay the groundwork for future lead generation strategies. Potential customers need to know who you are and want to be familiar with your brand before they choose to buy from you.

Lead Generation
Lead generation is just that: Generating leads for your business. That means turning prospects into potential leads. One of the benefits of lead generation is that you can identify who your prospects are and you also have a number of ways to measure and analyse data about these prospects.

However, often the people who land on your website aren’t quite in the middle of the buyer's’ journey and ready to look for a solution to their problem.

Often, businesses would benefit from focusing on attracting interest and attention before they begin their lead generation campaigns.

The best marketing strategy will combine the power of both brand awareness and lead generation. By taking advantage of both options, you can make your content marketing even stronger.

Using Lead Generation and Brand Awareness
Both lead generation and brand awareness work best as a team. For example, if you find that you’re not getting enough new visitors to your website from your blog, you can try increasing your reach with a social media campaign. And if you find that your newsletter isn’t getting enough signups, you could repurpose that content in a social or blog post. Once you begin getting more traffic and awareness, you can shift to a solid lead generation strategy.

If you’re aiming to attract potential leads, it makes sense to generate as many impressions as you can for your different audience segments. This also helps you increase or reinforce your branding. You can then send those people to a landing page that uses logos, images, and messaging to convey your USP.

If you need sales immediately, you may want to focus on middle to bottom-of-the-funnel consumers. That’s because these potential customers are closer to making a decision about whether to buy. But if your product or business is still growing or new, or you could use more leads, it’s a good idea to use brand awareness and lead generation in tandem.

Your brand is more than just your company colours and logo. It’s how you interact with customers, what you’re posting online, and how you’re communicating your values. Customers and clients are much more likely to buy and work with businesses they trust, which is why brand awareness should be the first part of your lead generation strategy.

Get in touch today to learn how we can help with your lead generation this year.