Brand Awareness! Does your target audience know who you are? Does who they ‘know’ you as reflect your true brand? The answers to these questions influence your market share, your revenue and the price you can charge. In other words, brand awareness matters. Building brand awareness takes a plan AND time. It takes up to 7 touches to get your message across. If someone else is pushing on your behalf, it takes up to 10 touches.
Building brand awareness requires consistency, dedication, and training of all your team members. However, it also requires flexibility and adaptation. This is where a mid-year review comes into play. Now is the time to take a look at what you’ve done in the first half of the year, measure the results, and adapt your plan accordingly.
Measuring the First Half:
- List the marketing activities that have been executed.
- Identify the effectiveness of each activity.
- Estimate or calculate your ROI for each for major ad campaigns or events.
- For activities that don’t appear to be working, determine why. For example: Sample: If you received numerous leads from a trade show and are not following up within 2 weeks, fix your process before deciding that the trade show is not beneficial.
- For each activity, determine what to do in the 2nd half of the year:
- Revise and continue: The activity has great potential, but a process needs changed to increase effectiveness or revenue.
- Eliminate: Activities and programs that are not yielding results.
- Retain: Tradeshows, advertising, marketing efforts that produce qualified leads and result in additional revenue.
Tips for the Second Half:
- Create and execute a marketing plan to include social media and email marketing components.
- Tradeshows: If you are planning to participate in fall tradeshows, NOW is the time to start planning – banners, promotional products, special offers, and tie everything to an email marketing campaign to potential clients to maximize attendance.
- Seasonal: Plan ahead if your business is seasonal or cyclical. Benefit from back-to-school or holiday events, by planning for advertising now.
- Coupons: When providing coupons, be sure to include a promotional code that allows for tracking, even if simply tracked on a spreadsheet.
- Consistency: It takes time to build brand awareness. Regardless of the advertising venue, advertise consistently and change-up the ads slightly to retain maximum interest.
Are you struggling with completing your mid-year review? We can help. Email us at [email protected] or call 724.612.0755 to learn about our mid-year review package.
About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group ~ The Edmiston Group provides senior level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long term basis. Core areas of service are business development, marketing, strategic planning and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business growth.