How to generate awareness for your small business
You won’t generate a single lead, or net a bean in profit if people don’t know who you are and what you do. Generating awareness is step one in your sales funnel, and it’s all about grabbing someone’s attention and lodging your message in their mind. To do this, you’ll need to master the awareness equation. It really does work like an equation, you need both elements to have any effect at all, and the more you have of both, the higher your output.
Mastering the awareness equation
Don’t worry, you don’t need a maths or a marketing degree for this one. It’s also not one of my making. It was drummed into us incessantly when I worked at technology marketing agency, Mason Zimbler. So, in absence of knowing whether they got it from someone else, I shall credit them with bringing it to my attention. And, it is…
FREQUENCY X IMPACT = AWARENESS
Let’s bring this to life. Basically, there are two ways for me to lodge something in your brain. Either, it’s so earth shatteringly impactful that it sticks immediately. Or, I ram it down your throat until you can’t help but remember it. The former is like hearing that you’ve won the lottery, the latter is like learning your times tables.
In marketing, it’s likely that you’ll need to balance the two. It’s unlikely that you’ll be delivering a message that fundamentally changes someone’s life, and you probably don’t want to wear people down by force of attrition. So, balance is the name of the game.
High impact, lower frequency….
There are two examples of awareness marketing that you’ve probably seen in recent years that fall into this category. The first is the Sony Bravia Ad with thousands of bouncing balls rolling own the street to the haunting sounds of Paulo Nutini. It’s a long ad and it has huge visual impact, and the melancholy soundtrack tugs at the heart strings. The other, that plays exactly the same game, is John Lewis’ 2010 Christmas campaign featuring ‘Always a Woman’.
When I first saw both of these ads, I was practically transfixed. They are both long ads and would have been very expensive to produce, and though at a reasonable frequency – neither was on every channel nor every ad break. Because, they didn’t need to be. The high impact reduced the need to high frequency.
Lower impact, high frequency…
At the other end of the scale, you have ads that really have very little to say that’s genuinely moving. So, they use irritation and catchy tunes, and drill these into your mind by upping the frequency. For those of you in the UK, current archetypes for this approach are Go Compare opera man, and AutoGlass with their little jingle. These brands have had to seriously up their frequency to get their message to stick – they are on every channel, every ad break, every radio station… there is no escape!
You need both
Both these examples also demonstrate that you need both for it to have any effect. If you have the best ad or best one-line tweet in the World, but it goes out once when nobody is looking – you won’t get anybody’s attention. And, if you no visual appeal, no stand-out message of any kind, you can put it everywhere and people still won’t notice it – it will blend into the background. So, you need both.
For small businesses, without the budgets of the brands detailed above, you still need to apply these principles if you want to get noticed. Human beings are the same beasts whoever you are and whatever you’re selling… and you will only get their attention by having both enough impact and frequency to get into their brains. So, take a look at those things that people first encounter about you… Does it grab them? And, is it frequent enough to get on their radar?
By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | @bryonythomas | www.clear-thought.co.uk
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Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this by planning and delivering 12-month marketing transformation programmes – supporting a small business through a step-by-step process to making marketing pay. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.
Published on 20 July 2011
