The 3 Tests for Awareness Tactics

Here’s another marketing triple for you: three tests you can apply to your awareness tactic options to help you choose which is right.

If you know me at all, you’ve heard me talk about strategy has to come before tactics, and the more you can know about what you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to accomplish it with and what success looks like, the easier it will be for you to choose the right tools for the job. But there are thousands of different marketing tactics that you can use. So I want to offer some additional help to filter down your options to choose the one that’s just right for what you’re trying to accomplish.

One test is focus. How laser targeted is this tactic? Can it help you reach a very, very finely defined group of companies or people?

The second filter is how spammy is this tool. How sensitive will your prospects or clients be to over-communicating with that particular tool?

And then third, cost-effectiveness. How much does this cost per impression per target, per, uh, even lead?

Those three, if you apply them to the tactics you’re considering, you’ll get some additional quantification of how useful they are to you. I’m going to use one example to kind of play that out for you. And that’s LinkedIn advertising. I’m picking that because for B2B businesses, that tends to be one that hits well on all three of these filters. For focus, LinkedIn allows you to filter down and target your ads at particular titles or even companies, industries, and regions. So you’re able to get very, very finely parsed on who’s getting your ads.

Spamminess: Unlike email, people are pretty comfortable with getting different messages in their LinkedIn feed because it’s really in their control and it’s not as kind of mandatory for them to see as email is. So, LinkedIn has a much lower spam risk than email, for example. And then finally, cost-effectiveness. By itself, LinkedIn is not cheap, but because of the filtering mechanism and the fact that it’s a pay-per-click style of tactic, you can end up having a pretty low cost-per-value when you use that in your awareness campaigns.

I hope you are able to use these three, uh, filters to help you make a more confident choice about the different tactics that you’re going to choose for your awareness campaigns.