Your 2020 Playbook for Maximizing Ad Effectiveness: Brand Awareness
The new year is a time for resolutions, reflection, and rejuvenation. In this spirit, how are you thinking about revamping your media plan for 2020? What are the best measures to take in order to make your advertising strategy the most effective it can be to keep your brand top-of-mind? If you’re looking for a few ready-made tips to supercharge your marketing strategy, we’ve got you covered.
Our Insights Lab team conducted a robust analysis of 1,500+ campaigns from the past three years, surfacing the most relevant insights to make sure your 2020 starts off with a bang. We synthesized our findings into actions designed to help you achieve your next campaign goals.
Goal: Keeping your brand top-of-mind
for consumers
Melissa Paris, Senior Director of Sales Research at Pandora notes that brand awareness cannot be overlooked in a marketing strategy:
Ultimately, awareness builds the foundation for your entire marketing strategy. Ensuring that your brand is known to your prospective customers and stays top-of-mind increases opportunities to drive downstream monetization. With that in mind, what are the most effective ways to build awareness?
To answer this question, we analyzed our 10 top-performing and 10 bottom-performing campaigns from 2017–2019 Kantar Millward Brown studies across all verticals and products, and found three actionable insights that were present in the top-performing set and absent from the bottom-performing set:
- Mention your brand name within the first few seconds of your ad. 80% of the top performing ads mentioned the brand name within the first 5 seconds of the ad. Our previous research has illustrated how impactful the first few seconds of an ad are. We found that your brain can recognize and recall audio ads that only played for 2 seconds. Maximize the first few seconds of your next audio ad to capture attention and introduce your brand to listeners.
- Make sure your ads are contextually relevant. Sounds obvious, right? Surprisingly, fewer than half of the campaigns we reviewed referenced context, such as a nod to a listener’s commute, mood, or music. A digital streaming network leveraged contextual advertising to promote its new show. They created different creative for different times of day, devices, and genre targeting. This seemingly small adjustment gave them a massive 18.6% lift in brand awareness because it contextualized the experience for the listeners.
- Think about using video to drive awareness. Video can be an excellent driver of awareness and association on our platform. Across all our campaigns, video drove a 16.3% increase in Ad Awareness and a 13.7% increase in Message Association. Given our premium engagement-based video ad serving, we ensure your message is seen and heard. Going even deeper with our video suite, our Video Plus and Sponsored Listening products provide a reward-based experience for listeners, capturing attention and positive association. That reward for engaging with your brand creates a positive association and promotes upper funnel actions.
What this means for marketers
Leveraging these three techniques can help build your brand awareness, which in turn, can translate to more sales down the line. How are you thinking about awareness and maximizing the opportunities in the upper funnel? Don’t underestimate how important it is for the entire marketing strategy.
Take advantage of all of our insights to help guide your media plans as you’re refreshing and reinvigorating your 2020 strategies.