Is site promotion just an aspect of Brand Awareness? Or is it taking over completely?
Brand awareness has been the big-ticket item among marketing professionals for a number of years. The logic behind it is unarguable: people won’t buy your product if they don’t know you exist.
Because of this, huge corporations, startups and even government departments have together spent billions on advertising, splashing their logo on billboards, in newspapers, on your TV screen. They even spend an unguessable amount every year sponsoring big-name sports stars just so to get their logo on that sports star’s baseball cap.
These days, brand awareness has found its way into websites. Marketers are slowly becoming aware of the impact the web is having (not to mention the reach!), so they’re trying to make use of it in the best way possible.
Unfortunately, many of these marketers seem stuck in the mind-set of twenty years ago. Even now, many of them are still trying to treat the web as just another advertising medium. They’re implementing brand awareness campaigns in much the same way they do in the real world. They’re:
- outsourcing their web marketing to advertising agencies
- buying banner advertisements
- paying whatever they need to pay to get their Google ads to the top of the first page of results
- creating advertisements and hosting them on You-Tube, and paying online newspapers to display them.
For them, the cost of Brand Awareness has gone up. They always had to pay for the billboards, the newspaper ads, the direct mailouts, the radio and TV ads. Now they have to pay for the equivalent of all that to do the same in the online world. They’re doing this out of a sense of having to, just to keep up. For them, brand awareness is still essential to get that sale.
At the same time, there are new companies exploding onto the marketplace with little or no marketing budget at all.
How are they doing it?
They might be doing it with a brand awareness strategy that makes proper use of the web. They might not even have a brand awareness strategy. They might just have a site promotion plan.
The fundamental difference is that they understand how Web is different from other media. The difference is this:
In all other media, whether it’s radio, TV, print or whatever, your audience is a passive observer. They look at what other people have created (the advertisement), and either take it in or don’t.
With web, your audience has the ability to engage. They can choose to pay attention or not. They can choose to take part. They can choose to show your promotion attempt to a thousand of their friends – or write a post on how incredibly bad it is on their blog.
It’s the difference between looking at a picture of a lake – and going for a swim in it.
In real-world terms, that means it’s possible to promote a billion-dollar company without spending a dime (anyone ever heard of Google?), if you know what you’re doing.
In New Zealand (which is where I’m from), one of the most popular websites is an online auction site called Trademe.co.nz. The Chief Executive recently gave a talk, in which he was quite open about their marketing policy. They intentionally keep their spend budget as low as possible, relying on web promotion techniques to get the word out.
Obviously, they’re doing quite well. But here’s the rub: one of their revenue streams includes selling banner ads on their site – targeting the marketing people who just haven’t quite figured out that banner advertising is like placing a billboard where no-one cares to look.
What am I saying? By all means, have a brand awareness campaign going if you can afford it. If you can’t, or choose not to, stick with site promotion. But don’t pay a big advertising agency to manage it for you. Instead, hire someone who knows what they’re doing, and let them go for it.
