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With great data powers come great measurabilities
Since the digitalization transformation has taken over the trades, companies have been mostly interested in the acquisition factor it brought with data. Because…
With great data powers come great measurabilities.
And that translated into CPV/CAC/CPC/CTR/CLV and other sexy acquisition metrics. With digital measurability, it became much easier to calculate ROI and visualize where the customer was in their customer journey.
Brand awareness took the back seat for a while, and it became really hard to convince the senior management team of its benefits. Indeed, why would a company agree and justify allocating a budget to efforts that could not be measured nor provide immediate results? An effort that might need constant effort over the course of at least a year before understanding if it is working. Might as well invest in performance marketing, which might give immediate conversion, and revenue?
Wrong
Nothing replaces brand awareness when truly understanding its benefits: a long-term relationship… with your customers. The more your nurture them, the more customer retention happens. Brand awareness is what creates that emotional bond between the brand, its value, its mission, and its customers. In fact, when it’s done well, after the prospect is converted, it acts as an amplifier in the flywheel model.
Happy customers drive new customers by word of mouth, which is not only the best way to promote a business (third-party trust) but also the cheapest (decrease CPA) as it is organic growth.
Yet, it is interesting to note that despite how much today’s companies are data-centric, a quick search on Google Trends shows how much “the internet” has grown to care about brand awareness in just 10 years.
Brands now understand more and more the power of brand awareness and that customers must come first.
Ok, great, but can’t let go of the powers of the performance gods. We need to be agile, we need to be able to analyze results and adapt quickly, and optimize… how do we do it? Enter…
Brandformance
What is it?
Serenpiditious that Grammarly is trying to autocorrect brandformance into brand romance here. It is indeed a beautiful love story where two opposites can make it work.
Brandformance is a term combining the concepts of “branding” and “performance”. It defines a campaign that combines objectives that are both branding- and performance-oriented. The objective is to raise brand awareness while at the same time promoting acquisition efforts. Simply put, it means optimizing brand marketing spend by tying it to core business KPIs. But…
Why is it cool?
Live long and prosper
It allows to discover new opportunities: by identifying niches or personas higher up in the funnel, you can already trim down the acquisition efforts and define quality lead profiles early on.
Brand awareness metrics
Often, the main KPIs of brand awareness are viewed as impressions, or “just to show we’re out there” (although I disagree with it, and this is very reductive, I’ve heard it).
Now with brandformance you can claim new discoveries that can translate into conversion. This is usually extremely hard with traditional advertising such as TV or outdoor advertising, or radio… No more!
For example, in the last OOH subway campaign we produced for the French market, we embedded QR codes into the final creatives so that people could scan and signup for the platform. This gave direct insight into where that soft signup came from, which creative was the best performer, and attributed that acquisition to a brand effort.
This is very important as before, these efforts were absolutely not connected to the internet, and now we can link it to the digital world.
Another example is also true with geo-lift studies. Looking into the timeline allows for establishing a baseline pre-campaign of visits and signups. Doing so, it is easy to see during and after the campaign that incremental new visits and signups can be attributed to the effort based on what happens in “normal times”.
Are you a data-holistic?
Brandformance allows to break up marketing siloes and having a more holistic and transparent marketing approach across the funnel while optimizing spend and strategy. There is no reason you should not try it. And it is not just for big corporate. It also works at startup scale. You just need to choose a few relevant channels and get started.