As a marketing or sales professional, you've probably heard of competing priorities such as brand awareness and lead generation. But there's good news: it doesn't have to be that way.

As part of your brand's marketing and sales strategies, brand awareness and lead generation can and should coexist. You are not required to strictly separate your resources into one of two buckets. In fact, brand awareness is an important foundation for consistently generating quality leads over time.

What is brand awareness and how does it relate to lead generation?

Brand awareness

The extent to which consumers remember and recognize a brand is referred to as brand awareness. It all comes down to association — when you have high brand awareness, yours is the brand that people think of when they have a need that falls under your product or service category.

For example, when most people think of fast food, they think of McDonald's. 

What about soft drinks? 

Coca-Cola. 

Bandages for a minor abrasion? 

Band-Aids. 

What about search engines? 

Google. 

You get the idea. Brands with the highest levels of brand awareness have nearly become synonymous with their niche — "google" is now even a verb in the dictionary meaning to search for information about something.

As shown below, the first stage of the customer journey is awareness. This means that if you don't have brand awareness, you won't be able to grow your customer base or earn sales because people are unaware that your brand exists.

Casting the widest net possible is the goal of brand awareness efforts. When you're concentrating on brand awareness, you're not concerned with getting consumers to act or converting potential customers into leads or sales right away. Instead, you're establishing critical recognizability, which lays the groundwork for more tangible results later on.

Lead generation

Lead generation is the process of generating genuine interest in your brand by obtaining people's contact information. It's part of the process of moving them to the next stage of the customer funnel, which is depicted above: consideration. When you generate a lead, you've earned the right to take more targeted action, such as sending emails or making phone calls.

Consistent and effective lead generation tactics keep your pipeline full and provide plenty of prospects for your sales team to potentially convert into actual sales. Lead numbers indicate how well your overall marketing efforts are performing and whether your brand is resonating with consumers once they learn about you.

Lead Generation and Brand Awareness Together 

For marketing and sales teams, brand awareness and lead generation are frequently positioned as competing priorities. Is it better to run a brand awareness campaign or a lead generation campaign? Where should you focus your efforts? Which is more important to the success of your brand?

In reality, these two concepts do not exist in an either-or situation. In order to succeed, brands must focus on both brand awareness and lead generation at the same time.

True, depending on your brand's specific situation, you may need to emphasize one more than the other at different times. Long-term, however, brands require both high awareness and strong lead generation strategies to maintain healthy pipelines and meet sales targets.

We like to think of brand awareness and lead generation as part of a virtuous cycle, or a recurring series of events in which one reinforces the positive effects of the other.

In this case, high brand awareness increases the likelihood that a consumer will recognize and trust your company enough to share their contact information. As a result, you can share more information about your brand and communicate with that consumer more frequently, increasing their awareness of your offerings.

4 ways brand awareness boosts your lead generation efforts

1. People know your brand-People who are familiar with your brand are more likely to share their information with you when the time comes. The problem is that you don't know when that time will be. This is why brand awareness campaigns are so important on their own.
2. You earn automatic association- When potential customers have a related need, they will go straight to your website, ready to share their content information to learn more about how you can help them.
3. You’re considered the expert- Long-standing, widespread brand awareness aids in the establishment of perhaps the most important factor in growing your customer base: brand trust. When consumers have faith in the integrity of your brand and the quality of what you deliver, this is referred to as brand trust.
4. You attract partnerships- Brand awareness attracts new opportunities in potential partnerships with other brands — one of the best ways to broaden your audience and increase brand awareness in new markets, potentially generating a large number of new leads. Brand partnerships also provide advantages such as unique added value to your offerings and an increase in excitement about your offerings.

If you own a carpet cleaning company and need help generating leads, give Free Carpet Cleaning Leads a call today!