Paid Social
The Strategic Role Of Brand Awareness
Before we get into campaign details, it’s essential to understand the role of awareness in an overall marketing strategy. For “full-funnel” marketers, this might be a bit of review, but it’s critical to understand how to make the most of these campaign types.
First, let’s nail the nomenclature.
These campaigns have different names and terms that I may use interchangeably in this article. Brand awareness, brand, awareness, top-funnel, upper-funnel, and TOFU are just a few ways marketers refer to these campaigns.
In the easiest strategic terms, brand awareness campaigns aim to introduce your target audience to your brand. This is accomplished by running introductory and memorable creative to a broad audience.
Think of the funnel stages the way you would dating. You can run conversion campaigns exclusively.
But it’s the marketing equivalent of walking up to someone and asking them to go out with you – no introduction, no discussion, just right in for the sale. Sure, that can work if you have “high-intent” customers/singles.
But your chances of successfully closing the deal are higher if you introduce yourself and break down some of those initial barriers. Where conversion or lead generation campaigns at the bottom of the funnel aim to get people to take action, brand awareness campaigns are meant to introduce you, familiarize you, and get you to stick in the minds of your customers.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? It is, but the measurement is less definitive than campaigns at the bottom of the funnel.
Measuring Brand Awareness Campaigns The Right Way
Brand awareness success lies in more “squishy” and less concrete KPIs. Here are a few that you should keep an eye on as you’re evaluating success:
Impressions and reach – This one is simple. We want to serve as many impressions and reach as many people as possible.
Frequency (impressions/reach) – We can’t always expect our audience to see or absorb our ad’s content on the first impression. Sometimes it takes two, three, or 10. Frequency refers to the average number of times a person in your audience has seen an ad over a given period. The higher, the better. However, high frequencies could signal over-delivery and potential wear out.
CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) – If the goal of brand awareness is to get in front of your audience and stay there, we’d like to do this for the most efficient cost possible. A low CPM is vital to maintain efficiency and maximize your ad’s “staying power.”
Video engagement – If the creative you’re running in your upper-funnel campaign is video, you’ll have access to a host of specialty metrics that will help you better understand how your message is consumed.
We’ll cover these specifically for Facebook below.
Facebook & Upper Funnel Campaigns: Which Objective To Choose?
Facebook gives advertisers several options when executing awareness or upper-funnel campaigns on the platform. In fact, it can be a little confusing.
Not only are there a few campaign types that apply to what we’re trying to accomplish, but they might appear in a different “Consideration” section.
Without getting into a marketing philosophical debate, there is often some grey between awareness and consideration.
For our purposes, “Video Views” are included as an upper-funnel objective.
Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with selecting either Brand Awareness, Reach, or Video Views as an objective for an upper-funnel campaign.
But there will be subtle differences between the three regarding which KPIs are prioritized.
As Facebook marketers know, the platform is very good at optimizing campaigns to get desired results.
Here are the differences:
Facebook Video Performance Metrics
Regardless of whether you’ve chosen a Video View optimization, all campaigns with video have access to special video metrics. Facebook has a lot of them, but here are a few you should focus on.
ThruPlays
The number of times your video plays to completion, or for at least 15 seconds. This is also the closest comparable metric to those used by other ad platforms like Google.
Cost per ThruPlay
The average cost for each ThruPlay. This metric is calculated as the total amount spent divided by the number of ThruPlays.
Video plays at 100% (completions)
The number of times your video played at 100% of its length, including plays that skipped to this point.
Video Average Play Time
The average amount of time a video was played, including any time spent replaying the video for a single impression.
Retargeting: Adding Value To Brand Awareness Campaigns
By raising your target audience’s awareness of your brand, you should improve their likelihood of converting further down the funnel. That’s why identification of people within your audience influenced by your brand awareness campaign is important.
These potential hand raisers can be retargeted campaigns to move further down the conversion funnel. Thankfully, Facebook’s wealth of behavioral retargeting options gives you plenty of ways to segment potential would-be customers.
You can learn more about these retargeting options in this article by Tim Jensen, but here are a few you should focus on.
Video views
Create an audience of people who have watched a percentage of your campaign’s video. The longer they’ve viewed, the higher their intent could be.
Ad/post engagers
Create an audience of people who have interacted with your ads or posts within a given period. This engagement could signal their interest in learning more and moving down the funnel.
Website visitors (with a twist)
Create an audience of people who have visited your website within a given period.
More specifically, use the exact landing page URL with UTMs to make sure you’re matching 1:1 with the audience you targeted with your brand awareness campaign.
Conclusion
Brand awareness campaigns are critical to familiarizing your brand to your target audience.
Facebook offers many options for executing upper-funnel goals and providing value for full-funnel marketing campaigns.
Reach, brand awareness, and video views are the main campaign objectives you’ll want to use, but they optimize to different things.
Always remember:
- If you want cheap impressions and the ability to control frequency, go for reach.
- If you want to deliver to audiences Facebook believes more likely to remember you, choose brand awareness.
- If you want to maximize the amount and quality of your video engagement, pick video views.
Featured photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
