When people learn I’m a Facebook marketing specialist, they always ask about my secrets for boosting sales using social media. They’re always surprised when I give them tips for how to increase brand awareness using Facebook marketing, rather than boosting or another sales-led campaign strategy.
But this is the secret to using Facebook ads successfully—branding. It’s also the reason most people think they aren’t seeing results from their social media marketing when the reality is quite different. I’m here to give you all my secrets on how to do it right so you can grow your business using social media in 2020.
In this guide, you’re going to discover:
- Exactly what brand awareness is.
- Why it’s crucial for your business.
- The exact way I increase brand awareness on Facebook.
- How you can measure the success of brand campaigns.
- Some other ways to help your campaign do well.
Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash
What is brand awareness?
The goal of brand awareness marketing campaigns is to make people aware of who you are and what you do. It’s purpose is not to create immediate sales or leads. “So, what’s the point?” people always ask. Branded marketing activities actually do two things:
1. Brand awareness helps you introduce yourself to people without coming across as spammy.
People are rarely on social media looking for a business to fulfil a need. They’re there seeing what friends and family are up to and getting sucked into the vortex of funny cat videos. The last thing they want is to have their news feed flooded with pushy sales attempts. This is where the magic of branding happens.
A branded campaign says, “Hey, thanks to awesome re-marketing technology, we know you’re interested in the sort of thing we do. If you ever need this sort of thing, we’re here, but no pressure.
If you create branded campaigns properly, you’ll become part of the background noise for people. You haven’t annoyed them with a hard-sell when they’re just trying to see what Mandy from high school did on her trip to Europe. But you have to let them know you’re there to help if they ever need you.
2. Branded marketing builds an emotional bond between products and services, and businesses.
In today’s day and age, people want to feel a connection as to why they buy something. To create this emotional bond, you want to create a positive, feel-good connection with your potential customer/client to your business. Think about it, do you reach for the milk that helps farmers but is a few cents more expensive, or the cheap one?
For small businesses, an easy emotional connection to create is that you’re local. So, for your ads, you’d add photos of your shopfront or branded work vehicles. When people see them, subconsciously they’ll start to notice you when they drive past or see you out on the roads.
However, there is a little more to running brand awareness campaigns on Facebook than simply showing piccies of your ute or shopfront.
5 Tips for Increasing Brand Awareness Using Facebook Marketing
1. Run brand awareness campaigns on Facebook for at least 2 to 3 months at a minimum.
It takes the average person 10 times of seeing a business’s branding for it to become part of their memory bank. Sure, you could do this in a week, even a month, but that’s a lot of times people will see your branding. You’ll become spam, and you don’t want that.
Running your campaigns for 2 to 3 months builds brand identity, while not becoming a pain in the butt. After this time has elapsed, go ahead and start running those Facebook offers.
Allowing the ads to run for this time also allows the platform to create your perfect Facebook audience. This means when you’re ready to run those hard-sell ads, you’re sending them to the right people who are ready and interested in buying.
2. Target your audience and use artificial intelligence to hone into your ideal customer.
Now, I should note, at Localsearch, we have white labelled a fairly high-tech piece of software that does this step for us. It saves us a lot of time, so we can put our attention to other areas of the campaigns we run. But, you can do it manually too.
The Facebook Ads Manager lets you feed in a list of email addresses from your customer database. Facebook then uses this to find the profiles of these people and looks at their gender, age and interests. They then show your ad to people with similar demographics and interests. If you don’t use a customer relationship manager (CRM), you can input what you believe your ideal customer looks like manually using pre-populated interests and habits available within Facebook.
Essentially you want to let Facebook do its thing when it comes to your audience. You can rely on their artificial intelligence (AI) to do what it does best—deliver your brand to your target audience.
3. Use images and language that resonate with your target audience on a personal level.
Like I mentioned above, you want to use images that will either be familiar to people or that capture what it is you do. If you don’t have a shop front or vehicles, try photos of your team at work or images of your products at use.
As for language, Facebook is a social media platform, so you want to be using a more conversational tone. You still want to be professional, but don’t be afraid to show the personality of your business and its people.
4. Split test your ads to find out exactly what your audience prefers.
Whenever you create a Facebook Ad campaign, you want to be split (A/B) testing. A split test is essentially two variations of the same ad. For example, you may try a different photo or text. You only ever want to be split testing one thing at a time so you can see exactly what it was that people preferred.
During the campaign, you can assess which one is doing better, and use this for your next version. Then, you repeat the process with a different part of your ad, each time selecting the one with the best results to use in your next campaign.
5. Encourage people to learn more, but don’t use hard sell tactics.
Every ad you run, you’ll want to ensure you have a call to action button in place. However, instead of the normal ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Call Now’, you’ll want to use something a little more subtle.
I always suggest a simple ‘Learn More’ button that links through to a landing page on your website. If your website has been created correctly, it’ll lead them through the marketing funnel to contact you, if they’re interested.
Again, once your ads have been running for a few months, you can create those product ads with hard-sell call to actions, like ‘Buy Now’, etc.
How to Measure the Success of a Brand Awareness Campaign
What you need to remember is that your goal for brand awareness ads is to reach more people within your target audience, not make sales or leads. As a result, you will not necessarily see a return on investment (ROI) directly from your ad.
I often get asked how a business owner is meant to know whether a campaign is successful, if there is no ROI report. It’s simple. If you see one of these three things (or a combination of), your branded marketing is working:
1. You’re actually reaching your target audience.
Before you create any ad, you have a target audience in mind you want to reach. For a branded Facebook campaign, if your results show your primary receivership matches your target audience, you can consider the activity successful. This is because you’ve put your business in front of people who are most likely to be interested in your brand in the future.
2. Your ad receives clicks.
I consider this the icing on the cake. While your primary goal should be to reach your target audience, if you also receive clicks on your ad to learn more about your business, you’re resonating well with these people. You’re more likely to receive clicks after a few rounds of your campaign, as you’ve used A/B testing to narrow down what your target audience actually wants to see.
3. You’ve noticed other areas of success in your business.
Sometimes you need to put two and two together to see results from your branding campaigns. Have direct searches (people searching by your business name) increased on your website or Google My Business? Did you see sales increase for a particular product in an area you wouldn’t normally? Has your accountant mentioned a positive change in your business?
Of course, if you’re running other digital marketing campaigns, this can be trickier to attribute to. However, if the only thing you’ve changed of late is adding Facebook marketing into the mix, you can definitely attribute some of the success to your branded ads.
More Ways to Increase Brand Awareness in 2020
A Website Built for 2020 Best Practices
As the ads you run will link back to your website, you’ll want to ensure it’s supporting your marketing efforts, helping you turn potential customers into sales or leads. To do this, you’ll want to be following the latest user experience (UX) and search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices.
A few tips for ensuring your website works for you in 2020:
- Develop your website for mobile first, then desktop.
- Write your copy for users, then look at optimising it for search engines.
- Ensure you have enough high-quality, unique content.
- Optimise your images for speed and search engines.
- Utilise good heading structure.
- Minimise backend code where it is not needed.
- Create a HTML and XML sitemap.
Utilise Off-Page SEO
There are two types of SEO — on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is what you work on within your actual website, while off-page is activity carried out externally. This is both good for your website’s organic traffic, but it also helps you in building brand awareness. A few places you’ll want to ensure you’re being found are:
- Social media platforms relevant to your audience.
- High-quality online search sites, such as localsearch.com.au.
- Google My Business.
- Facebook groups relevant to your industry.
- FAQ and advice websites such as Quora (replying to relevant questions with relevant information).
Be Consistent with Your Other Online Marketing
A big part of making brand awareness campaigns successful is ensuring consistency across all your marketing. If you’re running Google Ads, SEO campaigns, TV ads or advertising in other places, you want to make sure you’re using a consistent, but ever-so-slightly different message.
One way to ensure this happens is to use a complete digital marketing agency, like Localsearch. This way, everything you’re running is being done under roof, from your website and search engine activities to your Facebook marketing.