What is an awareness campaign?
An awareness campaign is an ad campaign that aims to educate customers on the existence of a brand or product. It is a strategic approach used to raise visibility and attention for a cause or brand. Awareness campaigns can be used to:
- Reach people who share the organization’s beliefs and values
- Educate potential customers
- Generate new contacts and support
What are the goals of an awareness campaign?
The main goal of an awareness campaign is to increase brand awareness. This allows ideal audience groups to be familiar with the brand and stay up to date on the latest work and products. Consumers are more likely to recall awareness campaigns and advertisements through an increase in exposure frequency. Exposure frequency refers to how often a consumer is exposed to an ad or brand. Multiple positive associations through increased exposure can build invaluable bonds and experiences between a brand and its desired audience. This relationship will allow the brand or cause to stand out among competitors.
How to run an awareness campaign
Utilizing awareness is important to generate desired traffic and engagement across all social platforms. As a user is exposed multiple times to a brand, they become more likely to have positive engagements with the brand. The following strategies can be utilized in an awareness campaign to produce ideal results.
Extensive research on preferred audiences
Determine the awareness campaign’s focus. Awareness campaigns are either standalone projects or hosted as part of national awareness days, months, or weeks. Gather insights on what would motivate loyal consumers or donors. Create the right questions to gather insights to shape the strategies and goals of an awareness campaign.
Set a clear time frame tor the campaign
Enough time should be permitted for the team to implement the chosen strategies for the campaign. The campaign’s timeframe should allow momentum to build throughout the entire process. If a campaign coincides with an existing national awareness day, week, or month, it is important to build the timeline around that date. Consider the chosen audience and scale of the desired goals for standalone campaigns when planning the timeframe. Starting or concluding the timeframe with an impactful event will help capitalize on the chosen audience’s energy and help keep consumers engaged through the entirety of the campaign.
Craft a campaign message
To design the most effective campaign, aim to create excitement and awareness with the chosen audience. Choose one aspect of the mission to focus on to give the campaign a more engaging level of specificity. This gives consumers a specific issue or topic to focus on, which reduces the confusion that is often accompanied when using the entire mission. Eventually, as the relationship with consumers grows, the broader mission can be connected to the initial focus.
Utilize multiple channels and platforms
Multichannel reach is essential for promotion and marketing plans during awareness campaigns. Utilizing multiple channels to reach all chosen audiences helps drive more engagement to the core campaign web page. The research will allow the campaign team to know where and how chosen audiences want to engage with the campaign content. Specific audiences may prefer text messages, calls, or direct social media messages. Regardless of the best reach method, it is important to redirect the audience back to the central location website.
Mistakes to avoid when launching an awareness campaign
When crafting the message for the chosen audience, the overall message must be clear and defined. A mistake that can be made is giving the audience vague directions, as that quickly loses their focus and attention. While awareness campaigns are useful for reaching broader audiences and growing contact lists, it is easy to overload the audience with too many directions. This type of campaign should focus on encouraging customers to learn more, not advertising for donations or purchases. Those goals can be achieved later once the relationship between the business and potential customers has grown.
Another common mistake is forgetting to actively measure the campaign progress during the campaign. By the end, it becomes difficult to accurately measure the success of the campaign without concrete benchmarks and key performance indicators determined in advance and measured from the beginning. If the benchmark goal for a set date is not met, this will allow for an adjustment to occur before the campaign is finished, which will help the overall success of the project.
How are awareness campaigns measured?
A few tactics to measure campaign awareness include website traffic, search volume data, and social listening. These metrics can be measured through impressions, reach, engagement, and frequency. Two other important methods of measurement for brand advertising are brand lift studies and incrementality testing.
Shares and likes on posts can also be helpful in spotting trends and give important insights into consumers. When analyzing a brand awareness campaign, it is important to count the people reached and what blog posts, videos, and social media content contributed to the rise in brand awareness. Almost every social media platform has data analytics tools that give detailed reports on how each post performs. These tools report views and impressions but also include engagement, such as comments, shares, and saves. Analyzing current and previous awareness campaigns can help to improve future campaigns and increase brand awareness and reputation.
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