The Fundamentals of Brandformance Marketing
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 6:50 am
On their own, branding and performance marketing are both effective strategies. In fact, over the past twenty years, performance marketing has taken the top spot as the most popular strategy for most marketers.
However, all signs point to brandformance becoming the preferred strategy of the future. At Cannes Lions 2022, marketing executives were surveyed about the issues that concerned them most. Respondents voted for ‘managing the tension between branding and performance marketing’ twice as often as any other issue .
Brandformance marketing promises to bridge the gap between the more granular and rigorous approach of performance marketing and the more flexible and creative priorities of branding. A unified approach to the two strategies can lend itself to several powerful benefits:
Building creativity with data
One of the big reasons behind the popularity of brandformance is the ability it provides to execute creative branding campaigns and then understand their effectiveness with data and insights. Data analytics helps brands gain deeper insights into how consumers interact with their ads, engagement patterns, and how to properly optimize future branding campaigns.
From there, they can modify their strategies to accommodate moments of high engagement, as well as understand which messages work best for their audience.
Prioritize brand identity and experience
Campaigns that use brandformance tactics benefit from a well-defined and consistent brand identity, such as logos, color schemes, and tone of voice. But it goes much further. Brandformance marketing allows advertisers to put the customer’s experience with the brand front and center and make it much more effective. What stories and emotional tones do you want to highlight? What creative directions are performing best according to your data? What types of brand experiences and interactions work best according to your target audience?
An optimization based on real-time metrics
Brand building is a notoriously messy activity. It relies on long-term patterns and results rather than short-term optimizations. But by combining branding with performance marketing, you can leverage real-time metrics to optimize aspects of a campaign and improve its performance at any time.
Some brandformance metrics you can use as KPIs include:
Brand lift/recall: to measure how much consumers remember a brand after s media directors email database eeing an advertisement.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): A staple of performance marketing, it can also be used to measure the impact of branding campaigns on acquiring new customers.
Cost per action (CPA): An effective metric to help marketers understand how much it costs for a customer to click, convert, or complete a specific action.
Share of voice (SoV): A broader metric tied to brand building, it helps brands understand the reach of their market presence compared to their competitors.
Click-through rate (CTR): A popular performance metric that can be used anywhere in the funnel, helping brands measure interest and engagement.
However, all signs point to brandformance becoming the preferred strategy of the future. At Cannes Lions 2022, marketing executives were surveyed about the issues that concerned them most. Respondents voted for ‘managing the tension between branding and performance marketing’ twice as often as any other issue .
Brandformance marketing promises to bridge the gap between the more granular and rigorous approach of performance marketing and the more flexible and creative priorities of branding. A unified approach to the two strategies can lend itself to several powerful benefits:
Building creativity with data
One of the big reasons behind the popularity of brandformance is the ability it provides to execute creative branding campaigns and then understand their effectiveness with data and insights. Data analytics helps brands gain deeper insights into how consumers interact with their ads, engagement patterns, and how to properly optimize future branding campaigns.
From there, they can modify their strategies to accommodate moments of high engagement, as well as understand which messages work best for their audience.
Prioritize brand identity and experience
Campaigns that use brandformance tactics benefit from a well-defined and consistent brand identity, such as logos, color schemes, and tone of voice. But it goes much further. Brandformance marketing allows advertisers to put the customer’s experience with the brand front and center and make it much more effective. What stories and emotional tones do you want to highlight? What creative directions are performing best according to your data? What types of brand experiences and interactions work best according to your target audience?
An optimization based on real-time metrics
Brand building is a notoriously messy activity. It relies on long-term patterns and results rather than short-term optimizations. But by combining branding with performance marketing, you can leverage real-time metrics to optimize aspects of a campaign and improve its performance at any time.
Some brandformance metrics you can use as KPIs include:
Brand lift/recall: to measure how much consumers remember a brand after s media directors email database eeing an advertisement.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): A staple of performance marketing, it can also be used to measure the impact of branding campaigns on acquiring new customers.
Cost per action (CPA): An effective metric to help marketers understand how much it costs for a customer to click, convert, or complete a specific action.
Share of voice (SoV): A broader metric tied to brand building, it helps brands understand the reach of their market presence compared to their competitors.
Click-through rate (CTR): A popular performance metric that can be used anywhere in the funnel, helping brands measure interest and engagement.