In the fast-paced world of business growth, there’s a tendency among CEOs, especially those leading successful small businesses, to focus exclusively on immediate sales. The mantra becomes “sell, sell, sell” at all costs, often at the expense of brand awareness initiatives that could yield far greater returns in the long run.
At Amy Matthews Integrated, we’ve seen this scenario play out time and again: ambitious business leaders, eager for quick results, bypass the critical foundation of brand awareness in favor of aggressive sales tactics. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: this approach is likely costing you more than you realize.
The Dating Game of Marketing
When you market, you’re, in essence, dating. You’re putting your best foot forward, telling them who you are and about yourself. You’re not jumping right in and asking to get married right off.
Think about it: Would you ask someone to marry you on the first date? Probably not. So why would you expect potential customers to make a purchase the first time they encounter your brand?
Just as relationships need time to develop trust and familiarity, your potential customers need time to:
- See who you are as a brand
- Trust your expertise
- Like your approach
- Feel confident doing business with you
When you focus exclusively on sales messages, you’re essentially proposing marriage before you’ve even introduced yourself properly. It’s not just ineffective—it’s off-putting.
Lost in the Sea of Sameness
“But everyone else is focusing on direct sales messaging,” you might argue. And that’s precisely the problem.
CEOs think that’s the right way to do it, but they don’t realize they’re getting lost in the sea of sameness by doing what everyone else is doing.
When your marketing approach mirrors what everyone else is doing, you become indistinguishable—just another voice shouting “Buy now!” in an already noisy marketplace. Brand awareness isn’t about vanity metrics; it’s about positioning yourself distinctly in your industry so that when a potential customer is ready to make a purchasing decision, yours is the name that comes to mind.
Customer-Centricity: The Missing Link
The reluctance to invest in brand awareness often stems from a fundamental misunderstanding: believing that brand messaging is all about you. In reality, effective brand awareness is deeply customer-centric.
At Amy Matthews Integrated, we spend a lot of time talking about our customers’ ideal customer. Who is that person, and why do they buy? What’s driving their behavior? When they’re the central point to your message, it becomes a magnet attracting them to the company.
True brand awareness positions your brand as the solution to your customers’ pain points and needs. It’s about showing potential customers you understand what drives their purchase behavior and that your company aligns perfectly with those motivations.
At Amy Matthews Integrated, our primary focus and framework is thinking of the ideal customer as the nucleus for everything we do, and we build around that. Brand awareness is just one way that we do that.
The Long Game That Pays Off
We won’t sugarcoat it: brand awareness is a long game. It’s not a quick-win strategy that delivers overnight results. It requires consistency, patience, and yes—financial investment.
Brand awareness is a long game. It is not a short strategy. It can take months or years to build brand awareness. It’s why you need to do it consistently.
But the metrics tell a compelling story for those willing to look beyond immediate sales. One great way to measure the ROI is to see your email list, your followers, all of those things start to grow.
Other key indicators include:
- Higher engagement rates
- Expanded media coverage
- Increasing website traffic
These are all signs that more people are becoming aware of who you are and what you stand for—critical precursors to the sales conversion.
Finding the Right Balance
The most successful marketing strategies aren’t exclusively focused on brand awareness OR direct sales. They find the sweet spot in between.
In no way are we saying that it needs to be the only focus of your marketing. Brand awareness needs to be a component, a piece of your marketing, ongoing over a long period of time—for the life of your company.
Depending on your content cadence and the maturity of your brand, you might dedicate a portion of your marketing efforts toward brand awareness initiatives like:
- Thought leadership content
- Educational blogs that establish industry expertise
- Social media posts that highlight your company values
- PR opportunities that showcase your unique perspective.
The key insight? If all you’re doing is selling, you’re going to become white noise to them. You want to show who you are and put some money and effort behind that, so more people see you before you jump right to asking them to buy.
The Hard Truth
The biggest misconception for CEOs is that brand awareness campaigns are a waste of money. The second one is that brand awareness campaigns are what you do when you don’t have something immediate to sell or an immediate promotion or sale.
This thinking couldn’t be further from the truth.
Brand awareness IS selling. It’s just not direct selling with an offer at the end. It’s selling them on your ability to understand them. To identify with them, to see them.
The resistance that brand awareness is not directly tied to an ROI in dollars is naive. A powerful marketing mix includes lots of different kinds of content and offers, and has different goals in mind. Brand awareness is a contributing factor that can lead to a purchase down the road. And repeat purchases.
Making the Shift
If you’re ready to stop leaving money on the table and start building a brand that resonates with your ideal customers, the first step is simple: put your ideal customer at the center of everything.
Prioritize your ideal customer’s needs and pain points, and how you provide the perfect solution to those. What if we did that but didn’t put a pitch at the end? We left the pitch understood. We just showed them how this solution directly meets that need.
- Who are they?
- What drives their behavior?
- Why do they buy?
When you truly understand the answers to these questions, you can create brand awareness initiatives that position your company as the natural solution to their needs.
Remember, people don’t just buy products or services—they buy from brands they know, like, and trust. And those qualities don’t develop overnight or through aggressive sales tactics alone.
They’re cultivated through strategic, consistent brand awareness efforts that demonstrate your understanding of your customers’ world and your unique ability to improve it.
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