Until recently, everyone in the industry agreed that brand marketing and performance marketing didn’t mix.
Campaigns that aren’t “clickable” are notoriously difficult to track and measure, and they don’t lend themselves well to acquisition campaigns. But faced with particularly tough online and offline competition, in addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, brands are now reassessing their marketing strategy to maximize investments. According to a study conducted by Salesforce in August 2021, 78% of marketers say they have adapted or reprioritized their marketing operations after the pandemic.
All this led to the emergence of “brandformance”. “Brandformance” is a portmanteau combining “brand” (in French, “marque”) and “performance” to designate marketing actions that combine branding and performance. The goal of this comprehensive approach is to increase brand awareness while strengthening acquisition and attribution strategies. In practice, this involves defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for the brand, such as brand awareness, and KPIs for performance, such as cost per new visitor.
All of this allows your business to be nimble and responsive by adapting campaigns and strategies while they are in progress. When you optimize a campaign without waiting for it to be completed, you get the most return on both your investment and your time.
The secret to measuring brandformance KPIs
Data
You might be wondering how to track your brand activities in this way. But with a little creativity and research you will find some very useful tools (some examples below). Plus, by leveraging the data you already have, like customer insights and traffic patterns, you can improve your revenue and overall business growth. According to the latest statistics from consulting firm Invesp, 87% of marketers believe that data is their company’s most underutilized resource. Additionally, 40% of companies plan to increase their data marketing budget. The more your business invests in these data tracking tools, the more fine-tuned you can tailor your marketing strategy to improve your overall performance.
- GeoLift studies: To measure campaigns that are difficult to measure, especially physical campaigns, GeoLift studies are an effective tool. These studies allow you to compare the behavior of your target city to that of other similar cities where you are not running a campaign. They provide you with estimates of how many website visitors you would have had without the campaign and how many you got with the campaign. By comparing these two statistics, you know the number of additional visits that the physical campaign has earned you.
- QR Codes: QR codes are another example of creative engagement tracking. The Covid-19 pandemic has generated a massive adoption of QR codes in France. A physical campaign can incorporate QR codes to direct customers to a business’s landing page. By combining them with UTMs, you will know the impact of the campaign and identify the most effective creative resources and placements.
The more your business invests in these data tracking tools, the more fine-tuned you can tailor your marketing strategy and improve overall performance. Brandformance strategies also enable better decision-making because leaders can leverage data to fill an information gap.
Adapt your strategy by channel and media
Implementing a brandformance strategy does not happen overnight and varies depending on the medium, whether it is online or offline, trackable or non-trackable channels. What’s more, you need to consider your business goals and the stage of the customer journey in the marketing funnel.
The market is increasingly data-driven, with strong demand especially in the areas of SEO, data science, online media acquisition and campaign management. Therefore, the acquisition and distribution channels of brands must necessarily collaborate in complete transparency and without silos.
In any case, a synergy between all the channels is essential if you want to succeed in your brandformance strategy. A well-designed strategy can create engagement, generate effective contact and turn prospects into customers. Add to that a 360° campaign, where strategy, creation and execution must be perfectly aligned, and you’ve reached perfection.
Don’t forget the most important: your customers
Observe the most successful marketing campaigns and you will see that they have successfully integrated different channels by exploiting the strengths of each of them. You will also find that they have managed to create many points of connection that are both varied and coherent with their audience.
Building brand awareness and building trust with customers are gradual processes that require consistency and regularity. Nowadays, with the digitization of marketing campaigns and the constant use of tracking and measurement tools, it is easy to lose sight of what matters most: customers. So yes, all of these metrics are important, but they should also allow you to connect, communicate, and create the relationships that your business is built on.