Table of Contents
Show notes
Episode description
In today’s digital age, the traditional approach to marketing is no longer enough. Consumers are bombarded with messages from brands all day long, so it’s more important than ever to create a holistic marketing approach that combines branding and performance.
This is where brandformance comes in. Brandformance is a term combining the concepts of branding and performance. It defines a campaign that combines objectives, both branding and performance-oriented.
In this episode of the Brand Runner Podcast, we discuss the future of marketing and how brandformance is the key to success. We’ll explore what brandformance is, how it works, and how you can use it to create a more effective marketing strategy.
Reference links
MailChimp //Marketing acronyms you should know
How to increase brand awareness guide by Qualtrics
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Disclaimer
This episode only represents Fabien’s own opinion and personal thoughts.
Transcript
00:02
Welcome to the Brand Runner Podcast where we discuss marketing trends and tech. I’m your host Fabien. Check out the links in the show notes for some of the things I mentioned here. Let’s get started. Today’s episode is based on a blog post I wrote about brandformance. The blog post generated a lot of traffic organically, which means the topic was of interest to many people. So I figured it’d be worth sharing the info on this podcast. Today I would like to talk about the secret to holistic marketing, brandformance.
00:31
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 powers come great measurabilities.
00:46
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. Brain awareness took the backseat for a while, and it became really hard to convince senior management teams of its benefits.
01:10
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 may need constant effort over the course of at least a year before understanding if it’s working. Might as well invest in performance marketing which might give immediate conversion and revenue, right? Wrong. Nothing replaces brand awareness when truly understanding its benefits. It’s a long-term relationship with your customers.
01:40
The more you 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. Let’s talk about the flywheel model and check out the link in the show note. The flywheel concept was coined by Jim Collins in his classic 2001 business book, Good to Great.
02:10
but was brought back to fashion in 2018 by HubSpot. This revolutionary marketing approach focuses on momentum, growth, and customer satisfaction. It draws inspiration from the principles of physics, where a flywheel represents a massive wheel that stores and releases energy over time.
02:31
In the world of marketing, the flywheel metaphor captures the essence of building enduring customer relationships, harnessing the power of delighted customers to drive business success. So let’s take a closer look at this captivating concept. At the heart of the flywheel model lies the belief that customers are not just one-time buyers, but the driving force behind sustainable growth.
02:57
Just as a flywheel gathers momentum with each turn, the model emphasizes the continuous cycle of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. The journey begins with the first stage, attract. Think of this as a casting spell, drawing potential customers towards your business. This involves creating compelling content, implementing effective SEO strategies, and engaging in captivating social media campaigns.
03:24
By generating awareness and picking interest, you entice customers to take their first step towards the flywheel. Now the wheel is spinning faster. Moving into the second stage, engage. Once you’ve attracted the customers, it’s time to captivate them further. This phase revolves around personalized experience, tailored messaging and meaningful interaction.
03:47
By building strong connections and providing exceptional value, you solidify their loyalty and commitment to your brand. But here’s where the magic truly happens. Where the flywheel gains unstoppable momentum as delighted customers become your advocates, they enter the final stage. Delight.
04:07
These happy customers, now filled with enthusiasm, spread the word about your products or services, creating a powerful ripple effect. Positive reviews, referrals, and word of mouth recommendations fuel the flywheel, attracting even more customers and propelling your business to new heights.
04:24
The flywheel model thrives on the idea that happy customers generate more customers, feeding the wheels perpetual motion. It’s like a positive energy loop where growth becomes self-sustaining. Your flywheel spins faster and faster, your business gains a competitive edge, leaving your competition breathless in its wake.
04:42
So why is the flywheel model so captivating? Well, it’s a departure from traditional marketing where the focus often lies solely on acquiring new customers. The flywheel model recognizes the immense value of existing customers and prioritizes their satisfaction, which ultimately leads to exponential growth. Happy customers drive new customers by word of mouth, which is not only the best way to promote a business, but also the cheapest as it declares the CPA and as it is organic growth.
05:12
Despite how much today’s companies are data-centric, a quick search on Google Trends with the keyword Brand Awareness shows how much the internet has grown to care about it 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. So how do we do it?
05:40
Well, enter Brandformance. What is it? Serent, pititiously. When I wrote the blog article on which this episode is based on, Grammarly tried to autocorrect Brandformance into Brandwomance. 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, both branding and performance oriented.
06:08
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? Well, 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. Let’s talk about brand awareness metrics.
06:38
Often, the main KPS of brand awareness are viewed as impressions or quote-unquote just to show we are there. Although I don’t agree with it, in a way it’s very reductive of defining what brand awareness is, I’ve heard it described this way. Now with brand performance, 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. But no more!
07:06
For example, at monday.com for the first out of home campaign we produced for the French market, my team and I, we embedded QR codes into the final creatives, so that people could scan and sign up to the platform. This gave direct insight into where that soft signup came from, which creatives was the best performer, and attributed that acquisition to a brand effort. Extract of the campaign in the show notes.
07:29
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 geolift studies. Looking into the timeline allows for establishing a baseline pre-campaign of visits and signups. During 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 happened in normal times. So, are you data holistic?
07:59
Brand formats allow to break up marketing silos and have 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’s not just for big corporate, it also works at startup scale. You just need to choose a few relevant channels and get started.
08:20
That brings us to the end of this episode. We hope this episode on brain performance was beneficial to you, and that you will start experimenting in your marketing efforts. Thanks for listening to Brain Runner.