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Awareness Building and Lead Generation, Marketing's
Dynamic Duo: Part 1

Bob PattersonA well rounded marketing communications plan contains programs for awareness building and sales lead generation. To maximize the effectiveness of your programs, they should be coordinated, and based on a strategic plan that comprehends your business goals.
An awareness building program can:
  • Shorten your sales cycle by letting audiences know you exist and offer something they want.
  • Educate prospective customers that your products or services meet their needs.
  • Decrease your prospects’ perception of risk in selecting you as a vendor.
A lead generation program can reduce the amount of time your salespeople spend making cold calls and qualifying likely sales prospects, and help populate your sales funnel.
Awareness building programs are designed to build brand recognition and introduce you to prospective customers. Lead generation activities are designed to enhance general awareness building programs to get your best prospects to identify themselves. The best marketing plans contain a synergistic mix of programs to work on establishing relationships with prospective customers at multiple levels.
Part 1: Awareness Building
In this first article in a series of two, we concentrate specifically on awareness building. For this, we discuss using coordinated advertising and PR tactics.
What do you want to accomplish?
First, take a step back to survey your goals. Prospective clients often come to MKTX asking us to help them with a specific marketing tactic. They want to do an advertisement. They want to get an article published about a new technology they've developed. They need a new tradeshow booth. When we ask what results they expect from that tactic, it becomes clear whether or not a connection between this tactic and other marketing communication activities exists. Often the tactic in question is not drawing on the power of an integrated program. Does the tactic support building awareness? Or does it support lead generation? People are sometimes unclear about the role of public relations versus advertising, and not up to speed on what new marketing tools are available to achieve their goals more quickly than traditional programs.
The key is not to get hung up on thinking of tactics at the early planning stage. Tactical thinking at the start of a project can cause you to lose sight of how you’re going to reach your business objectives.
Profile your target audiences
When setting out to profile your prospective customers, make sure you recognize that there’s a difference between a customer and a market. A market is an aggregate of customers that has needs in common, but it’s a customer that actually pays you for your product or service. At the end of the day, individual customers are whom you must influence.
Questions that you should be able to answer about your prospective customers include:
  • How many of them are there?
  • How easy is it to identify them (company type and point of entry)? Do you have their contact information?
  • What are their hot buttons or pain points and how does your product or service relate to them?
  • How do they make decisions?
  • Where do they get their information?
  • Can you address them as a group?
  • Do they know you?
  • Are competitive solutions entrenched?
  • Where are they currently in their purchasing process and relationship with you?
As you choose the people that you want to reach with your marketing communications programs, also include on the list people who influence prospective customers, such as the press and industry analysts. Once you know your audiences, you can identify what elements of your current marketing/sales process need focus in order to have your marketing programs succeed.
Select your communications media
Sales and marketing can be described as the process of bringing prospects and then customers closer to you. It helps to think of the sales process as involving three stages through which your communications programs must move prospective customers: entice (build awareness), engage (initiated by lead generation activity) and exchange/close, (what finally tips and supports a prospect’s decision to purchase your company’s products or services).
The vehicles you choose to communicate can make a big difference in whether your message gets through. Time spent understanding how customers get their information and the role that information sources play in purchase decision making can have a critical effect on the success of marketing programs.
Programs that contribute to awareness building include public relations, advertising, trade shows and Internet marketing.
Often, PR and advertising can go hand in hand in an effective marketing program. The benefit of press coverage is increased awareness with the credibility of having a third party (i.e. the press) conveying the message. The risk is a lack of control over the words of an editor or reporter. So, much emphasis should be placed on making sure that the editor has his or her story straight and they have the details to back up claims that you might make. This should also include delivering your message to the editor in a manor that addresses their specific needs and interests. Remember, doing effective PR involves far more than issuing press releases (For more information on this subject, see our recent article at http://mktx.com/pr.htm). You need to treat editors like customers in the sense that if you don’t successfully “sell” them on why your information is important to their readers, they won’t give you much mention.
The benefit of advertising as an awareness building tool is that you as the advertiser get to tell your story or communicate your points in your own words. You can also use compelling imagery or claims that attract the attention of the specific audience you’re targeting. And, you select the media. By advertising in print media or on websites that are key to your market, you also convey the message that you’re a player in the market. The first goal of advertising should be to stop the reader, then to communicate a benefit, then to educate them, and finally to tell them what’s for sale.
Similar to advertising is participation in trade shows. You select the show, you buy the space and you can tell your story however you want. Look for opportunities to engage them, such as giving seminars or presenting papers at shows. Such activities can establish you as experts in your industry (For more information on this subject, see our recent article at http://mktx.com/ts-myths.htm).
Internet marketing programs—including optimizing your website, pay-per-click activities and link development programs—are also important vehicles to build awareness for your company in general as well as for your individual products and services (See http://mktx.com/web_optimization.htm for a relevant article on optimizing your site’s interior pages).
Other awareness building activities include participation in targeted networking activities and sponsorships. You should participate in events where your prospective customers congregate. Your competitors may or may not be present. If they’re not, you have an advantage.
Finally, think about where your customers live, work, learn or play to approach them in a “non-marketing” environment, free of your competitors. For instance, do you make or sell trucks? Provide branded menu holders for truck stop restaurants.
A word about messaging
The message you communicate establishes your positioning in the marketplace, what prospective customers and influencers remember about you. If you don’t actively take control of your positioning, it is possible that your competitors’ awareness building tactics will position you where you don’t want to be.
There are three requirements for communicating an effective positioning message: 1) What you say must be compelling to your target customers; 2) What you say must be unique, to differentiate you from competitors and gain market share; and 3) Your claims must be substantiated by your product or service. If your product or service doesn’t live up to your message, then you won’t have repeat business. You might not be able to close even the first sale.
We’ll talk more about messaging in our next article, where we’ll focus on lead generation programs and tactics.