Practical Strategies for Integrating Performance Marketing and Brand Building
Our approach to a cohesive marketing strategy, what we call Transactional Brand Building, involves aligning performance marketing and your branding efforts – ultimately driving sales while simultaneously growing your brand. This can be achieved by setting clear goals that coincide with desired business outcomes, establishing consistent messaging and positioning, and ensuring that every marketing initiative contributes to both short-term performance and long-term brand equity.
To successfully integrate performance marketing with brand building, a well-thought-out brand strategy is essential. Here are some practical approaches to achieve your goals:
Understand Your Brand’s Unique Value Proposition
It’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your brand’s unique value proposition. What makes your brand stand out? What are your core values and messages? Knowing this will help you create content and campaigns that resonate with your target audience. Undergoing a Planning Framework Session can help identify these aspects of your brand.
Consistent Creative
Your brand identity should be consistent across all marketing channels, whether it’s digital video, social media, email marketing, content marketing, or paid search. If a potential customer interacts with your brand through a blog post, a Facebook ad, and/or an email newsletter, they should be receiving the same messaging and visuals that drive your value proposition.
Creative that Builds Brand Awareness
Create content that catches the attention of your target audience by educating, entertaining, and/or informing your audience. This content should subtly lead to your product or service offerings, creating an opportunity to smoothly transition from brand awareness to eventual conversion.
Test and Learn Plans
Test and learn plans can help fine-tune targeting, brand messaging, creativity, and media strategy. This data-driven approach enables you to identify variations that resonate most with your target audience and drive conversions, and allocate budget wisely.
Leverage Retargeting
Retargeting is a powerful tool to keep your brand top-of-mind to potential customers. It marries short-term performance focus with long-term brand building by re-engaging users who have previously seen or interacted with your brand.
Unified Data Analytics
Establish a unified and transparent flow of data between your performance marketing and brand-building efforts through a dashboard. Insights derived from performance marketing campaigns should inform brand-building strategies, and vice versa.
Best Practices for Measurement and Tracking
Identify the right KPIs for your integrated campaigns. Measuring integrated campaigns requires defining new KPIs that account for both performance and branding objectives. These may include metrics like brand momentum, customer lifetime value (LTV), and a combination of performance and brand-focused KPIs.
Utilize the appropriate tools for measuring success. There are a number of tools and technologies available for tracking and measuring integrated marketing campaigns. These include data sets from channel-specific platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, and marketing mix models (MMM).
Understand the role of attribution modeling in assessing performance. Attribution modeling helps businesses understand how various marketing touchpoints contribute to conversions. In an integrated approach, understanding the role of each touchpoint in building the brand and driving performance is crucial.
Have Your Performance Marketing KPIs Plateaued?
It’s not uncommon for businesses to experience a plateau in their marketing KPIs at certain growth stages. While it can be frustrating, it’s also an opportunity to expand audiences and explore new ways to reach your core consumers. Here are a few things you can do if your KPIs have leveled off:
Reevaluate Your Target Audience
Sometimes, a plateau in KPIs can be a sign that you need to reevaluate, or broaden, your target audience. Consumer preferences and demographics can change over time, so make sure your marketing efforts are resonating with the right consumers. Consider conducting market research to gain insights into your audience’s current needs and behaviors or see if there are opportunities to address an expanded customer base.
Update Your Creative Strategy
If your KPIs have plateaued, it may be time to refresh your content strategy and messaging. Create high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that speaks to your audience’s pain points and interests. A fresh new set of bespoke assets developed for specific marketing channels may help your brand get some new eyes and conversions.
Optimize Your Paid Search Strategy
Paid search, or search engine marketing (SEM), is yet another critical component of digital marketing. If your website’s traffic or visibility has plateaued, it might be time to reassess your paid search strategy. Conduct research to identify relevant keywords and develop or refine website content to align with the keywords you’re pursuing. By enhancing your website’s visibility in search engine results, you can attract more inbound traffic by making your products and services easier to find online.
Broaden Reach with Different Marketing Channels
If you’ve been primarily using one or two marketing channels, it’s worth exploring other options. Consider diversifying your marketing strategy to reach a broader audience with channels like Connected TV, OTT or linear TV. This may involve exploring social media, email marketing, influencer partnerships, or paid advertising on different platforms. Experimentation can help you discover new channels that allow your brand to get in front of new customers.
A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization
A/B testing is a powerful tool for identifying what works best for your audience. Experiment with different elements of your marketing campaigns, such as ad copy, images, calls-to-action and landing pages. Monitor the performance of these variations and optimize for the best results. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques can also help you make the most of your existing traffic by improving the user experience and encouraging more conversions.
Use Data to Optimize Results
Your KPIs may have plateaued due to a lack of data-driven decision-making. Utilize analytics tools to gather insights and make informed decisions. Regularly review your marketing data, track the performance of different campaigns, and use this information to refine your marketing strategies, even while campaigns are in-market.
When your marketing results have plateaued, it can be frustrating but should be seen as an opportunity to refresh and optimize efforts. Partnering with an agency that specializes in growth for brands whether in the early stages of growth or even legacy brands, can help your brand reach next-level business objectives. Ready to learn more? Contact us today.
