Brand awareness: hard to track, even harder to justify budget for, and often overlooked. But a good brand awareness and recognition strategy benefits your brand for years to come.
Growing upper-funnel efforts is crucial to getting consumers to know about your brand in the first place, as well as generating new customer acquisition in the long term. Let’s take a look at what this can look like and see how the ROI Revolution team helped major lifestyle water bottle brand Hydro Flask increase overall revenue by 91.5% and return on ad spend (ROAS) by 220% YOY.
When forming your marketing awareness strategy, don’t underestimate the role brand awareness has in driving sales. Simply having the best product doesn’t matter if consumers don’t know about it. The role of advertising has changed fundamentally, and in order to get through the clutter, you need awareness strategies in place as a means of being noticed and remembered.
Hydro Flask and ROI Revolution partnered together with this in mind by utilizing YouTube, restructured campaigns, increased promotions & prospecting, and audience & geo-targeting to fuel increased opportunities to generate new customers.
When leveraged properly, YouTube in particular can be a great medium for remarketing campaigns. With its valuable blend of both sight and sound – which together drive higher brand awareness, recall, and consideration than either one alone – YouTube advertising presents a unique chance to catch consumers when they’re already leaning in to pay attention to content.
YouTube is also great for geo-targeting. For example, Hydro Flask wanted to increase their awareness in the eastern part of the US, so they implemented prospecting campaigns to target East Coast states.
In order to ensure that your YouTube videos & ads meet your brand goals, define an intensive strategy. There are 400 hours of new content uploaded to YouTube every minute. To be sure viewers will see your ads, you need to define your brand territory and establish more in-depth goals than simply growing revenue or hitting a target.
One way to grow long-term brand recognition is to focus on growing both non-branded and branded efforts together by building out extensions and keyword coverage for both.
ROI Revolution helped Hydro Flask do this, allowing the water bottle brand to reach a broader audience for Search and Shopping and manage ad spend by category. ROI Revolution’s in-house automated bid management platform, ORBS, also helped them do this, all the while proficiently managing bids and following trends without error.
Breaking out the shopping campaigns into two main categories – harvesting and awareness – is a great strategy for managing both long-term and short-term branded and non-branded efforts. The ROI Revolution team and Hydro Flask did just that, helping provide better control over what consumers see and a better way to manage ad spend.
But what about measuring brand awareness? Because consumers can stay in the top half of the funnel for so long – sometimes for years at a time – measuring the impact of brand awareness campaigns can be incredibly difficult. Luckily, it’s not impossible.
A key way to measure brand awareness is through studying brand lift. Brand lift is a measurement of the direct impact your YouTube ads have on consumers. Brand lift provides insights into how your ads are impacting metrics, including lifts in brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, favorability, purchase intent, and brand interest, as measured by organic search activity.
Upon completing an ad recall brand lift study for one of their product releases, Hydro Flask saw search volume increase by 210%. The team’s efforts of targeting different audience types were confirmed, and a strong new audience type for the brand was even revealed. After the study, volume continued to pick up for the brand and view rates increased, allowing for better targeting.
What were the other results?
The ROI Revolution team began implementing its brand awareness strategy to Hydro Flask’s account in January of 2017. Within the first seven months, overall revenue increased by 91.5% YOY.
Revenue has continued to exponentially grow ever since. In July of 2019, Hydro Flask’s year-to-date (YTD) average revenue increased 247% YOY, with transactions up by 247%, and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) up 220%. Even outside of peak seasonality, Hydro Flask outperformed the typical goals they would set during their strongest months of the year.
By August 2019, Hydro Flask achieved their brand awareness goal and surpassed Yeti in the water bottle industry.
To dive deeper into this story, check out the full case study here! And if you’re interested in reading more of our case studies, you can find our complete archive here.
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