February 15, 2017
In the second blog of the brand awareness series, we will explore ROI and its relationship to brand awareness.
In the previous blog, we answered the question: What is brand awareness? This week, we will go a step further and look and brand awareness in relationship to ROI (Return on Investment). With marketing, knowing ROI is the best way to know what’s working. Businesses can put dollar amounts on their advertising efforts. For a technical look at how to calculate ROI on your marketing, check out this video.
For the sake of this blog, however, we’ll keep it simple. We’ll discuss ways that small businesses and individuals, such as real estate agents, can measure ROI on their brand awareness marketing efforts.
Tracking Sales
Brand awareness marketing can be difficult to trace to individual sales. With other forms of marketing, such as coupon and discount marketing, it’s easier to trace a sale back.
Billboard advertising is less straightforward. A well-designed advertisement may have brought a customer to your particular store on its own, or perhaps it was a combination of the billboard and another marketing piece.
Large corporations conduct extensive surveys to gauge levels of brand awareness in real time, but small businesses don’t often have these resources.
In many cases, such techniques may not even be necessary to measure ROI. Small businesses often develop more personal relationships with their customers. Over the course of their business relationships, many will learn what originally attracted the customer.
Through personal relationships and conversations, small businesses can usually get a pretty good grasp over their marketing’s ROI.
What are a few ways I can track ROI on my brand awareness marketing?
Simple Surveys: A few marketing questions at the point of sale can help your business track the success of its marketing efforts. For example, I once worked at a small nonprofit historical museum, and we started a customer marketing survey.
A simple piece of paper with a few check boxes helped us grasp how our visitors heard about the museum. We learned that most of our visitors were responding to a billboard they saw on the highway, giving us a better sense of the billboard’s worth to our museum while justifying it as an ongoing marketing expense.
Include an Offer: While most brand awareness marketing solutions won’t include an offer, when appropriate to a specific industry, an offer on a billboard can help track response to your ads. The classic “mention this sign to receive *blank* discount” can help you measure your ROI.
Anecdotal Evidence – While certainly not scientific, anecdotal evidence can give you a better idea of your return on investment. Our Adcart clients often tell us how people associate specific realtors and service providers to their grocery store. Because advertisements are displayed on the child seat of shopping carts, people are putting their purses, small groceries, children, etc. in front of an ad. They’re looking at the ad for the duration of their shopping trip (usually about an hour).
When you can’t track ROI, what are the best Brand Awareness campaigns?
Local Campaigns – Small businesses that can’t track ROI should make sure that all brand awareness campaigns are local. Knowing who is seeing your ad is extremely important. It is a waste of advertising to build awareness with people who will never actually use your business.
Direct Mail – Direct mail is a great option for small businesses to build awareness in their community. Mail campaigns, especially targeted campaigns to demographic, locations, and New Movers can help build brand awareness where it counts. If you’re interested in a direct mail campaign, check out Adcart’s partner company Near Direct.
Partner with Other Retailers – Partnering with other retailers is a great way to build brand awareness with consumers who have the highest likelihood of visiting your business. Supermarket advertising is a great way to build brand awareness within your neighborhood because, in addition to your brand awareness marketing, supermarkets also have extensive brand awareness marketing campaigns.
Your business gets an awareness boost by association.
Adcart Can Help Grow Your Business
Shopping cart advertising builds brand recognition through sustained and repeated ad exposure in the central part of a community.
Being seen is central to the success of any business, but it’s not about being seen just anywhere. Shopping cart ads are great for local business because they target your advertising to the people most likely to use your services.
If you’re considering a shopping cart advertising campaign to build brand recognition and would like to talk to our representatives for a free consultation, please click here.