To increase the number of deals coming out of the bottom of your sales funnel, it is critical to begin focusing on filling up the top. You have to increase your brand visibility and awareness with your potential buyers to do that.
Let’s face it, if people don’t know you exist or understand how they would benefit from working with you, it is impossible to draw them into your funnel.
Without awareness and visibility, you are almost certainly missing out on opportunities. Filling the top of your funnel increasingly relies on you developing great content and getting that in front of more prospective buyers.
This approach not only increases the number of leads but also the quality. That’s because delivering helpful, insightful, and even disruptive information creates a funnel full of highly educated sales leads.
What is the Difference Between Visibility and Awareness?
While visibility and awareness are closely related in business and marketing, there are some key differences you should be aware of.
Visibility refers to how often your target audience encounters your brand. The more often they come across your brand the better.
Increasing your visibility leads to awareness, which is the ability for your potential customers to recognize your brand – name, logo, products, etc. – and recall it during a purchasing decision.
Over time, you will be able to create a perception in the mind of your target audience. Meaning, that when they see you they think of reliability, quality, great customer service, low cost, quick shipping, easy installation, or whatever it is you want them to think and feel about you.
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” — Seth Godin
Why is Visibility Important to Increasing Sales Leads?
Visibility is non-negotiable. If potential customers don’t know who you are or can’t recall your brand, then they can’t consider your solutions. That’s why it’s critical to reach as many people as possible. Ideally, your target audience would be reading about you regularly.
However, this is easier said than done. That is because it is a crowded landscape out there with people paying top dollar to try and get their message in front of those same people. Social media, PPC, SEO, email campaigns, paid media advertising… The list goes on.
Chances are if you are trying to grow, you have attempted most, if not all, of these. They may have even been able to slightly increase your inbound leads.
However, because you are reading this blog there is a good chance it did not solve your problems completely.
To get more eyes on your message requires doing two things well.
First, you need to come up with stories that grab people’s attention, hold their interest, and move them to act. This means understanding what problems your target audience is facing and being able to address those without becoming a commercial for your company.
Today, it’s much less important to have a formal call-to-action than it is to simply lay out the benefits that your potential customers will gain by using your solution.
Where are your prospects researching solutions?
Once you have a great story to tell, the next step is to share it with the right people, at the right time, and in the right place.
While content on your website or social media channels is important, they are not the first place B2B buyers report going to research solutions. According to several reports, vendor websites rate fairly low at this stage of the process.
What consistently ranks at the top of the list are trusted third-party sources—such as trade publications.
There is a good reason why this is happening. When a buyer is researching for possible solutions, somewhere between 60-90% of that process is now done before a prospect reaches out to a single vendor.
Instead, today’s buyer likes to drive the process, and why not? All the information in the world is just a click away.
However, the source is the key. Buyers want what they perceive as unbiased information to help them narrow their decision.
Trust Can’t Be Bought, It Has to Be Earned
Think about it like buying a car. Let’s say you are considering a new vehicle and you are not sure whether to go with a traditional gas-powered car or switch to an electric vehicle (EV). You could go to a vendor website, like Tesla, but you know that everything you find there is going to have a positive lean on EVs.
Instead, you are more likely to seek information from an independent source. This way you can see both the pros and cons of EVs and decide whether it would be a good fit for you.
During your research, you’ll likely encounter multiple references to certain brands and, almost subconsciously, begin to form opinions on each of those.
The same is true for any B2B buyer. They are vetting you, and possibly even the entire industry, based on independent reports. So, what are those credible 3rd-party sources saying about you and your competitors?
The Power of Earned Media on Brand Visibility and Awareness
Now for a thought experiment. Imagine you could hire a journalist who worked for all the publications that your ideal buyers were reading. Suppose you could get them to write insightful, educational, and even disruptive articles that highlight the latest news and industry trends. Within those stories, your company always received a positive mention.
Now, when your ideal buyer is looking for answers, they will continually run into your brand, your solutions, and your differentiators—all from trusted sources. This illustrates the power of earned media.
This is exactly what we do for our clients. We write high-level articles that trade publications publish because they are written as informative pieces and not endorsements of any one company or product.
These articles are published consistently, every month across a wide subset of industry publications. By approaching PR this way, our clients are seeing incredible growth.
Take the case of ELSCO Transformers. Faced with the challenge of increasing brand awareness and driving up sales, they came to Rankin PR for a strategic plan to increase their visibility and awareness.
By securing coverage in key trade publications, they didn’t just reach a wider audience—they reached the right audience. The leads that came into their sales funnel were significantly more prepared to buy, leading to a 300% increase in revenue.
This is the kind of impact PR can have: it doesn’t just generate leads; it generates the right leads.
Practical Steps to Boost Visibility and Awareness
- Leverage Trade Publications: Identify the key trade publications in your industry and focus on getting featured. The credibility these publications bring can make a significant difference in how your brand is perceived.
- Develop Thought Leadership: Position your company’s leaders as experts in the field. This can involve writing op-eds, speaking at industry conferences, or being quoted in media commentary or industry news. Thought leadership helps build credibility and keeps your brand top-of-mind for potential customers.
- Content Marketing: While PR should be the cornerstone of your awareness strategy, it’s important to complement it with a robust content marketing plan. This is where Rankin PR’s approach adds value. Because we write the stories ourselves, we retain the copyright to our content and can repurpose it to create valuable, educational messaging that can be utilized to feed your marketing ecosystem.
- Social Proof: Gather and share testimonials, case studies, and success stories. When potential customers see that others in their industry have benefited from your products or services, they’re more likely to trust and engage with you.
- SEO it: What’s truly beneficial is that when you get articles published in trade publications, they tend to rank very high for those key search terms. So, buyers who are just looking for answers online are much more likely to read them.
The Bottom Line
The reality is that is becoming increasingly difficult to reach your target audience. What worked five years ago no longer has the same impact. Therefore, increasing your visibility and brand awareness requires adopting new strategies.
Building a B2B public relations campaign, particularly earned media in trusted trade publications, offers an effective way to cut through the noise and make sure your brand is seen by the right people.
In a business environment where jobs are on the line, the stakes could not be higher. Investing in PR to increase your visibility and awareness isn’t just a smart move—it’s essential for survival and growth.
If your company is struggling to get noticed, it’s time to act. A well-executed PR strategy can and will increase visibility and awareness. However, it will also drive high-quality leads into your sales funnel. With this comes the potential to deliver an ROI of up to 300% in sales.
Don’t let your great products and services go unnoticed—ensure they get the attention they deserve.
Contact our B2B PR agency today.