Branding, in isolation, focuses primarily on building the brand story, bringing the brand closer to the customer through an emotional connection. It is a long-term strategy, which relies on the consistency of the message and tone of the ads, as well as the brand's ability to anticipate the needs of its customers. Aiming primarily at awareness, it is a top-of-funnel strategy.
Here are some examples:
Offer innovative and original packaging
Highlight the specific features of the services offered
Create creative ads
Using brand storytelling
Performance marketing, on the other hand, is a qualitative approach. Performance-based strategies rely on achieving certain goals based on KPIs. Although performance marketing is a very general term, it is mainly associated with paid advertising, or PPC. Brands that run paid ads on digital platforms typically only pay for specific actions or measurable results, such as impressions, clicks, or conversions. This gives it a key strength: measurability. This is why performance marketing strategies are effective for conversion goals, which represent the “lower funnel.”
Here are some examples of marketing performance:
A targeted campaign, based for example on PPC (pay-per-click).
Prioritize actions taken by the customer, such as views, clicks or conversions.
Using third-party advertising platforms or networks to run campaigns.
In the past, branding and performance marketing were considered separate activities that were rarely complementary.
The Super Bowl is a classic example of branding strategy. These expensive commercials are designed to increase brand awareness and get people talking about the brand. There is no way to measure the actual performance of the ad, such as how many people watched it, decided to visit the brand’s store, or made a purchase after watching it. This example illustrates how far apart branding and performance marketing can be.
However, with the rise of new advertising approaches on social networks like TikTok or native advertising platforms like Outbrain, companies can now combine their branding strategies with their conversion goals. This is called brandformance marketing.
As versatile as it is, marketing brandformance finds its place in facebook database the consideration phase, known as the mid-funnel. The fusion of emotional storytelling and precise marketing performance indicators creates an effective combination, which finds its place at the border between the consideration and conversion stages.
The fundamentals of brandformance marketing
In isolation, branding and performance marketing remain effective strategies. In fact, performance marketing has been the preferred strategy of most digital marketers for the past 20 years.
However, it seems that brandformance is emerging as an alternative in the near future. At Cannes Lions 2022, marketers were asked what their most pressing issues are. Twice as many chose “ managing the tensions between branding and marketing performance ” than any other question.
Brandformance marketing aims to bridge the gap between the more granular and rigorous approach of performance marketing and the more flexible and creative priorities of branding. Today, it is better to think of these two approaches as an effective duo rather than as adversaries.
A unified approach to brand building and performance marketing offers many advantages:
Creativity enriched by data
One of the reasons for the popularity of brandformance is the ability to execute creative branding campaigns and measure their effectiveness using accurate and relevant signals. Robust analytics data allows brands to better understand how consumers interact with their ads, what engagement behaviors are observed, and how these campaigns can be optimized in the future.
This allows them to adapt their strategies based on engagement peaks and understand which stories resonate best with their audience.
A priority on brand identity and experience
Every brandformance campaign benefits from a defined and consistent brand identity, such as logos, colors, and tone of voice. But it doesn’t stop there. Brandformance marketing allows advertisers to prioritize the customer’s experience with the brand and make it much more effective. What are the scenarios and emotions you want to evoke? What creative trends are performing best based on your data? What types of brand experiences and interactions are most effective with your target audience? This is where brandperformance really shines.
Real-time optimization thanks to precise KPIs
Branding is a notoriously imprecise activity. It relies on long-term trends and results rather than short-term optimizations. But by combining branding with performance marketing, you can use real-time metrics to optimize certain aspects of a campaign to improve its performance immediately.
Here are some brandformance indicators that you can use as reference KPIs:
Brand lift/recall: Measures the degree to which consumers remember a brand after a campaign is broadcast.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): An essential element of “performance marketing”, it can also be used to measure the impact of branding campaigns on the acquisition of new customers.
Cost per action (CPA): It allows you to accurately measure the cost of a click, a conversion or the completion of an action by a customer.
Share of Voice (SoV): A broader branding-related metric that helps brands understand the extent of their market presence relative to their competitors.
Click-through rate (CTR): A widely used performance metric that is useful at all stages of the funnel and helps brands measure interest and engagement.
Emotional engagement to generate revenue
The power of brandformance marketing is that it offers both short- and long-term benefits. In the short term, brands can create targeted campaigns with defined storylines that focus their message while encouraging a specific action. In the long term, brands can use the learnings from campaigns to refine their message and improve the consumer experience. In both cases, it’s about prioritizing stories that really resonate with the audience.
The Harvard Business Review recently identified four aspects that should be included in measuring brandformance : brand recognition, brand likeability, brand relevance, and brand uniqueness from competitors.
Brandformance is an evolving concept; it is up to each marketer to use relevant data signals and create a single composite metric to measure their company's brand value.
