In the first episode of our “Mistakes Series”, I’m taking a deep dive into the topic of brand awareness and visibility. I can’t stress enough how vital it is to have a strategy for brand awareness. It’s a game-changer, letting businesses show up for their target audience without feeling the need to constantly create content.

Brand awareness and visibility are foundational marketing elements for growing your audience and setting up retargeting efforts for successful lead generation and sales.

During this episode I share some common mistakes I’ve seen business owners make when trying to grow. The first mistake I see is not having a visibility and brand awareness strategy at all, highlighting that many businesses fail to make intentional efforts to grow their audience. I’m also digging into the importance of creating content specifically tailored to your ideal customers and cold traffic. By being intentional with content choices and addressing the pain points and desires of the target audience, businesses can better attract and engage potential customers.

Ready to sidestep these marketing mistakes and see genuine results in your business? Dive into this episode and set yourself up for success. Listen now.

Key Points:

• Not having a brand awareness strategy:

• The importance of being everywhere without feeling burnt out on social media.
• The value of creating retargeting audiences for lead generation and sales.
• The significance of intentional efforts in audience growth.
  

• Not creating specific content for ideal customers and cold traffic:

• The need for intentional selection of content that resonates with the target audience.
• The importance of choosing content aligned with the expertise and problem-solving solutions offered.
• Strategies for attracting ideal customers and establishing credibility.

• Failing to address the pain, frustration, and desire of the target audience:

• The importance of understanding and connecting with the target audience’s pain points.
• How to effectively highlight the solutions or desired outcomes they seek.
• The role of deep understanding and emotional connection in creating impactful brand awareness and visibility strategies.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh

Hello, you guys. Happy Monday. We are gonna do a series this week. So coming at you with a bonus podcast episode. I sat with this for a little while. I actually sat there on my floor in my office and you know, shut my eyes, did my thing and, and took a bunch of notes for a bunch of different ideas and landed on this series. I’m gonna do is top mistakes in all of the different components of our formula of our process that we use with clients. So top mistakes with your brand awareness and your visibility ads that will be today’s episode, then we’ll move into top mistakes everybody makes with their lead gen everybody makes with their sales conversion with the ongoing optimization and then top mistakes marketing in general. So I played with a bunch of different series ideas. I literally sit there and I think about you guys and I think about what are you struggling with right now? What do you need right now? And I just see what kind of comes through and about five different ideas came through for me. And then this one came in, this was the last thing that landed. And I was like, yes, because I’ve done so much about how to do it and the, how to, and the things to have and the three things to implement. And part of me was like, I’m getting sick of talking about all these marketing tactics, maybe I should do something totally different. So I played with that and then I was like, you know, how about we talk about it from the perspective of mistakes and things that people are maybe missing in their marketing versus all the steps. So that’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna release an episode every day this week, Monday through Friday. And today we are focusing on the top mistakes that people make with their brand awareness and their visibility. And so this is following the overall three part kind of process that we follow, which focuses on one building an audience with brand awareness and visibility to lead generation and three sales. And so today we’re gonna talk about brand awareness and visibility. I’m gonna do like a one minute recap on what this is just in case you’re like, I’ve never heard the word brand awareness before. So brand awareness and visibility’s main purpose is to build up your audience. And in short, the strategy that I teach is choosing a couple pieces of content and you know, podcast blog video and its content let that sync. It’s not legion, it’s not sales, it’s content, ok? And actually turning that into ads that you target your ideal customer to and you spend a very small amount of your monthly budget, like 5% of your monthly budget. And you run these ads every single day. And so every single day you’re putting your business and your brand in front of ideal customers and you’re growing your audience. And then we use that audience to retarget when it comes to your legion and your sales. And then therefore, we’re able to go after a quality audience because they’ve seen your content and we also can use it for things like look-alike audiences and other pieces. So that’s what the strategy is at a very high level. 

Here are the top mistakes that people make when implementing a brand awareness and a visibility strategy. Number one, not having it at all. That is the biggest mistake because there are, most people don’t have this in place and here’s why it’s so important. There’s many reasons. But the first one is that it allows you to be everywhere, like to have content constantly put in front of new people without actually having to be everywhere. And most of you guys, most people myself included, get really burnt out from social media and feeling like we have to be on it all the time. We have to be producing all the time. OK? So by having brand awareness and visibility ads, you are on social media and people are seeing your content as if it’s a social post on your Instagram feed, for example, every single day without you actually having to do anything. Once the ads are running. The other reason why it’s so critical to have is it creates a really, really valuable retargeting audiences that you can use for again, your lead generation and your sales. So not having it is basically not making a very intentional effort in growing your audience. And so if you’re not currently running visibility ads, and I’d say this is 95% there are a few clients that we’ve strategically chosen to put budget elsewhere. But for the most part, all of our clients and myself included are running visibility ads. So if you’re not like the first thing you could do is implement this because growing an audience is increasing relationships with your, with your potential customers and nurturing and is an excellent way to lead to marketing success. OK.

The second biggest mistake people make with their brand awareness and their visibility is not creating content for their ideal customer and or cold traffic. So a lot of times when people go to maybe create visibility ads or even content honestly content in general, like I think we could put that in this bucket because it’s essentially content. And so when people go to create content, because there’s so much overwhelm surrounding it, it ends up being a very throw spaghetti at the wall kind of haphazard approach. And it’s like whatever I can come up with whatever I can think of and especially with brand awareness and visibility ads, which are purely to attract people to your brand, who are your ideal customer. And I have never heard of you before. You have to be very intentional with the content. You have to make sure that the content you choose for these ads is the right choice keeping in mind that the person will likely never have seen your face or heard you before. So for example, I have some podcast episodes that are really, really good and have gotten a lot of downloads. But there are also some of them that have gotten a lot of downloads and are good. That wouldn’t be the best choice for cold traffic. So an example could be if I did a podcast episode about the mistake that I think I did one that was like a mistake that cost me millions of dollars or something. And it was actually more geared towards like a leadership mistake. That is a great podcast. It was one of our top downloaded podcasts. I think it was last summer, but that would not be a good podcast for me to go attract cold traffic into my world who wants marketing support doesn’t mean that the podcast and the content is bad. It’s just not the appropriate place to put it and turn it into a brand awareness and visibility ad because I’m trying to attract people who are looking for marketing support, but also who are going to be attracted to me around the problem that we solve, which is marketing strategy, marketing execution, right? So if I chose a podcast that was like three marketing strategies that will make you millions of dollars this year, that would be a good one, right? Because now I am inserting myself as the expert in what I want to be known for. And I’m attracting an ideal customer who would want that marketing support is looking for that marketing support. And so not being intentional that the content you’re choosing is for this ideal customer. But also keeping in mind, they have no idea who you are. They’ve never seen you before, they don’t know you’re an expert in what you do. So keep that in mind when choosing the content, the third biggest mistake people make with brand awareness and visibility and also content in general is they don’t dig into the pain, the frustration and the desire. And so when you’re choosing a piece of content, podcast, blog video, whatever it is, think through and make sure you’re connected to what is the pain, what is the frustration and what are the desires that my ideal customer has like the top top ones? And can I create a piece of content related to this? We oftentimes call these for clients problem and desire videos, you either choose a top problem that your client has or your customer has or a top desire and you create a piece of content around that or you choose a piece of content around that. So one of the top problems that my ideal customer has is what should my marketing strategy be? I don’t know what my strategy is and I want someone to give me this step by step 123. So therefore, if I created a video that was like the three steps to choosing the marketing strategy, right? For your business, that’s a good problem video, right? So thinking through and in order to do this, you have to actually define that pain, frustration and desire and then choose a video based off of it. And once you define it, the video becomes really easy or the blog or the podcast because you just say, OK, how do I answer this? How do I address this? So not connecting that and doing something more random or not from the emotional place is just going to negatively impact the quality and depth of the relationship that you may attract the person. Because if someone sees a more surface level video or podcast or blog that they are interested in, they still might become a follower and engage in the content. But if someone sees something that’s like, oh my gosh, how are you in my head? And you know exactly what I want. And that’s exactly what I’m experiencing now. They’re gonna be even more invested right in future content and engaging with your brand. So if you’re gonna especially spend money on this content, be very intentional with it, which doesn’t take a ton of time, takes a couple of extra minutes to be very intentional with this content. And so when you work with us in the done for you side, we actually oftentimes in onboarding, we’ll write out scripts or will write out suggested video titles and topics just based on what we think is the understanding. And what we think is the best videos because we know your ideal customer, that’s part of our job is to really get in the heads of your ideal customer. And then we’ll actually write these videos out and then in essential, we have best practices on how to record those videos. So that’s the third mistake.

And then the last mistake that most people make with their brand awareness and their visibility is not thinking through the experience after the visibility ads and what will make sense coming from the visibility ads themselves. So one thing to keep in mind is as much as it would be cool to have the marketing experience be OK. Someone sees this video, then they see this exact ad, then they say this ad and like really super control it. The reality is in digital marketing, we can’t really control the exact step that someone takes to becoming a buyer because there should be in a good marketing strategy, a lot of options and touch points. Let me tell you what I mean. So someone might see my visibility ad for my podcast and that might be the first point of contact that they have with my brand. And they’re like, who is she? I’m gonna watch this. I’m gonna click on the podcast. I’m gonna listen to it. Well, from there, they could go one of many routes, right? They could end up on my Instagram page and following me and watching my stories. They could end up now downloading my podcast and listening to binge, listening to 10 episodes, they could end up consuming my social media content and then opting into our newsletter and then getting our emails. So there’s a lot of like pathways that they could go, right? But we have to keep in mind what’s the most ideal pathway that we want them to go? And also what’s our ultimate goal? So if we want, if my number one goal is to get people to fill out an application and work with us, right? That’s my number one goal with our marketing, with everything we do, then I need to think through the content that I want those people to see so that I am finding people who are ready to fill out an application and work with our team. So therefore I can make a video or choose a podcast episode that does everything I said before, it speaks to the pain, the frustration, the desire its content for my ideal customer. But it’s very heavily focused on somebody who’s just, just starting their business and, and it would attract someone who maybe doesn’t even have like a fully fleshed out offer and really isn’t ready to fill out an application and work with our team and it’s, it’s subtle but that could easily happen. So making sure that no matter what the experience would be after your visibility ads, because there will be many different routes and ways that someone can go. But understanding the ultimate goal of your marketing and then making sure the content that you choose to have in your visibility ads is actually going to support that experience and those goals and support that ultimate goal, right? And so this can be very subtle. This is really, it comes down to a messaging thing because it can be easy to provide value and speak to those emotions, but then miss on making sure that you are supporting your ultimate goal with your marketing. And so, for example, like if I did a podcast episode, that was like the three, I don’t know the three things that everyone should do in their marketing or the three, the three things that will fix your marketing strategy, that could be fine and it will address pain, frustration, and desire. But it also could attract someone not ready to work with us. So instead, what if I did and I think we did do this like the podcast episode of like the one thing you need to do to go from 6 to 7 figures. That wasn’t the exact one, but something like that because now I am speaking to pain, frustration, desire. But I’m also talking to the person that I want to come into one of our offers and one of our offers you can come in if you’re not quite at six figures. But I always say go for that higher level person and you’ll naturally attract someone at, at the level below that because they’ll just, it will just naturally happen. So making sure you are clear on the ultimate goal of all of your marketing efforts, which is usually simple. It’s like sell your offer for me. It’s, you know, fill out an application and sell our offer with quality leads and then making sure all of your efforts are, you know, in alignment with that. So those are the biggest mistakes people make with their brand awareness and visibility. And again, probably the biggest one is they don’t have it. And so brand awareness and visibility can be something that you implement this week. It’s not challenging, it’s not a challenging ad to get going. It’s the first ad we usually get up for clients. It’s content, it’s likely content that you’re already creating or you’re going to create and then you tie ad spend to it and you amplify it and you get put in front of people every single day without having to be everywhere It’s very powerful. It’s very simple and it can be something that you start before your funnels even fully ready. So if you’re working on something or you have a live launch coming up, it’s a very strategic ad to be running so that you are building that audience to leverage for the future marketing. All right, you guys. So I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it gave you some ideas. Some things you can implement or tweak if you are running brand awareness and visibility ads and tomorrow, I will be back with the top mistakes everybody makes with their lead generation strategies.