Is your brand suffering an awareness issue?

Introduction

Last week I wrote about five questions to kick start your marketing strategy. This week I continue along the same theme. Here I go into more depth about the marketing obstacles you might face and how to overcome them.

There’s a model I find super useful here and for thinking about marketing strategy. It’s called AIDA and that stands for awareness, interest, desire and action. 

I first came across AIDA way back when at business school when I was studying for a marketing masters. AIDA’s evolved over the years, but I find its simplicity helpful. Today AIDA and other models are often formulated as sales funnels, which is a convenient way to visual the process. AIDA is intuitive to understand and easy to apply to most marketing challenges. Fun fact, AIDA dates back to the 1890s. There’s a decent history in this Wikipedia article.

Let me explain a bit more about AIDA and strategies you can use at each step. But before I do, you might be wondering how to know which of the steps to prioritise. Or in other words, is awareness, interest, desire or action the biggest obstacle your brand or product faces? The simple answer is research. Ask your consumers and non-consumers. They’ll tell you. This will become more evident in the case studies below.

Awareness

Before a consumer can even begin to think about engaging with your brand or product they need to know it exists. It really is that simple.

Strategies for awareness: PR, paid social, outdoor advertising, influencers, sponsorship

Interest

At this stage, consumers begin to understand the benefits of your brand or product and how it might meet their needs. Importantly, it’s the needs from the consumer’s point of view. Think about how your brand or product fits into their lifestyle.

Strategies for interest: owned content, advertorial, events, sampling, email

Desire

Desire is sometimes called “decision”. It’s about creating an intention to purchase in the mind of the consumer. Creating a strong emotional connection can be helpful here. Remember you’re selling the benefits not the features. Marketing theory often says for desire, consumers need to see a message more than once. (There’s loads of schools of thought about exactly how many times.)

Strategies for desire: testimonials, retargeting, CRM, limited time offers, personalisation

Action

The final step is to guide your consumer towards making a purchase or whatever your desired end-goal might be.

Strategies for action: clear call-to-actions, user-friendly purchase path, discounts, sales promotion

How does AIDA work in practice?

I’ll use two case studies to explain.

Museum of London

For the decade or so that I worked at the Museum of London our number one goal was to increase footfall. The museum’s entire business case was predicated on this. This meant it was important to think about what was stopping visitors from coming and what was going to make people more likely to visit.

Throughout my time at the museum market research consistently told us that lack of awareness was the number one barrier to visit. But, importantly, people who were aware of the Museum of London had a higher intention to visit in the next twelve months (aka desire) than almost any other London visitor attraction (massive props to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill that had higher intention to visit ratings than any other London attraction.)

The awareness barrier was so important to achieving the Museum of London’s goals it featured in its five-year strategic plan. I believe it still does and rightly so.

To increase awareness we went hard on PR. We knew the media outlets that our target visitors consumed and we worked hard to generate high profile coverage in them. We milked every PR opportunity we could. Our media budget was modest so we aimed for frequency in high profile out-of-home formats to maximise the number of people who would see our ads. Our marketing creatives were bold and developed in direct response to what we heard from visitors and non-visitors in focus groups. We couldn’t outspend the competition but we presented a brand that was more exciting and more relevant, working with the best in London’s creative talent on our ad concepts. And this drive for awareness influenced our product (or in museum terms, exhibitions and displays) too. We aimed to hit the zeitgeist with PR-able topics like true crime, Grime music, top footballers and even gross-out hits like displaying a chunk of fatberg. Stand-out social content was supported by paid campaigns to increase reach and engagement.

And it worked. Twice yearly brand polling showed our efforts were working. Awareness climbed, intention to visit remained high and we met footfall targets.

St Paul’s Cathedral

In 2023 the team at St Paul’s Cathedral asked me to help them with a marketing strategy to support their post-Covid recovery and increase ticket sales to domestic tourists.

St Paul’s is a globally recognised place (or brand.) Arguably it’s the most famous cathedral in the country, maybe the world. Almost every school child in England learns about St Paul’s at when they study the Great Fire of London. Brand awareness could not be less of a problem. But research commissioned by the St Paul’s team showed the UK market just isn’t fussed about what the attraction has to offer. This very clearly pointed towards interest being the lever St Paul’s needs to pull in order to sell more tickets to people from London and the rest of the UK.

Luckily, for St Paul’s, the research also showed that potential visitors want to know about history and architecture, and seek out experiences like amazing skyline views. St Paul’s has all of this in shedloads.

This suggested a simple solution, or at least that was my advice. More brand advertising with a contemporary design to reposition St Paul’s as a place with fascinating history, astounding architecture and must-see experience, and to deploy this consistently across owned and paid channels. Plus encourage people to share their selfies from the dome. Honestly, the view from St Paul’s is incredible. And trust me when I say you can get the best London skyline selfies there. Better than the Shard. It is absolutely something to add to your bucket list.

Let’s chat marketing

Thinking about this kind of stuff is one of my favourite marketing strategy tasks. If you want to have a chat about how AIDA can help your brand please get in touch. I’d love to have a conversation with you about it.

Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI