Analytical vs. Emotional

Brand awareness marketing is a “bright idea,” “thinking-outside-the-box” kind of discipline. Brand awareness marketers focus on creating impressions in the prospect’s or customer’s mind and on displaying or broadcasting those impressions in ways calculated to reach as many consumers as possible. For example, in marketing a soft drink, they work on creating ads and TV commercials to convey the impression that the soft drink is “cold,” “tasty,” and “thirst-quenching.”

Brand awareness is a battle of creative ideas, whose goal is to connect emotionally with the customer. Once a brand awareness campaign is sent out into the world, there’s no way to correct it. You can only determine the effectiveness of the ad or commercial after it is released, not before.

Lead-generation marketing focuses more on mathematics and scientific methods. You must constantly perform testing and analysis as part of your lead-generation efforts. This testing and analysis process occurs on multiple levels. On a tactical level, you need to continuously test the results of your lead-generation tactics to find out how well they provide quality leads and how cost-effective they are. On a lead-generation management level, you need to compare the results of different tactics (e.g., direct mail versus trade shows) to find out which tactics are the most efficient and cost-effective.

Within each tactic, you test variables against a constant to determine which combination of variables works best in attracting leads from your customers. For example, in an e-mail marketing campaign, you may have two e-mail creatives with the same offer. You send each creative out with a different subject header, and compare the results to see which subject header gets the better response from your potential customers.

In lead-generation marketing, there is no “correct answer,” or right tactic or variable. One tactic (e.g., direct mail) may be your best performing tactic this year, but five years from now, another tactic (e.g., search engine marketing) may be more efficient and cost-effective in meeting your goals. One type of customer may respond well to one type of offer from you, while another customer in another demographic may respond better to another type of offer. The point is, you are constantly testing and analyzing your results to see which lead-generation tactics and variables work best for you. Your success in lead generation depends on what you learn from testing and analysis and on how you use the results to improve your efforts.