In part 5 of the blog series, we are looking at brand awareness and its part in the online advertising journey.

Online advertising can be used to drive traffic to your site and build brand awareness. Effectively targeted campaigns can create brand influencers and reach complementary audiences.

The online space that gets booked, helps to establish your online presence, and get your potential customers / consumers excited and interested about who you are and what you have to offer. As mentioned in previous blogs, online advertising enables brands to focus on their ideal audience and tailor messages that improve both recall and engagement with the brand.

To be easily recognisable has to be the aim for every brand within their sector, which then builds your brand awareness. Creating brand awareness is one of the key steps in promoting a product. Brand awareness is particularly important when launching new products and services; and for a company to differentiate similar products and services from its competitors.

So using online advertising can be part of building brand awareness and making your target audience more aware of your brand. The more aware your audience are of your brand, the easier it is to convert the awareness into sales.

What options do we have available to create and improve brand awareness?

• Traditional advertising
• Online Advertising
• Sponsoring an event.
• Publicity stunt
• Word of mouth
• Reviews / testimonials
• Content / Blogs

So as you can see when building a brand, we have a number of options to play with but  what is the role of online advertising?

Online advertising plays a critical role in brand management and awareness whether at the corporate, retail or product level. With the help of advertising you can increase your brand's value and then it helps you to gain the new customers that we all look for :)

The end goal of any online advertising is to eventually convert all leads that you gather to actual sales. Whether it be an awareness or educational campaign, all businesses engage in advertising to ultimately generate sales! By creating a strong presence online, with whatever medium you choose, your investment in advertising and marketing will produce results and ultimately bring the extra revenue we all strive for.

So online advertising becomes a major part of building a brand and brand awareness. Online needs to be taken as seriously as the other more traditional mediums in helping to build that ultimate goal we all share of making your brand synonymous with the product or service you offer.

Thanks for reading part 5.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” (Peter Drucker)

On a number of blogs I have written over the last few years, I have mentioned one huge benefit of advertising online and that is accountability and the fact that transparency can be seen as a huge advantage to the marketing team.

Having the ability to track or getting feedback from your ads is critical. Other advertising forms can be hard to track; using display ads means you can receive weekly or even daily updates. This kind of information tells you whether your advertising/marketing effort is succeeding or you need to tweak it. Feedback reports can guide you to better strategies and more successful marketing.

Experienced marketers say that one of the greatest benefits of online advertising is its measurability and the information it provides about your audience. It is a win-win situation, you can learn about your visitors while they are getting to know you. This means you are getting instant input about the effectiveness of your campaigns which can then be quickly modified to increase conversions and sales.

Online marketing is wildly more measurable than offline marketing but it is still marketing, as we are all aware humans are complicated and unpredictable, I just think it appeals to the marketer’s brain and budget constraints that there is a huge benefit to receiving reports and statistics to show for their marketing spend.

We have just returned from the BDIA Dental Showcase, it was great to catch up and chat with a range of people in the Dental family. When it came to the subject of online marketing, they kept coming back to accountability and the fact that since they had embraced digital advertising; they were increasingly getting a better idea of which campaigns worked and which media platforms to use.

It is still too early to make a final judgement but I believe the appeal of greater measurability and accountability in online marketing is beginning to pick up further support from the dental marketing community. What do you think? Is it true that you cant manage what you can't measure? Look forward to hearing your thoughts.