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LATEST NEWS / 08 - 03 - 2021
How Does Performance Marketing and Branding Work Together?
Whether you’re a big business, a small business, or a business that is just starting out, brand awareness is vital for your overall success. Why? Because people buy brands.
How Does Performance Marketing and Branding Work Together?

Making Brand Marketing Better for Your Business 

Your brand is the sum of everything you represent as a business. It’s what differentiates you from your competitors. 

However, when it comes to brand performance, how do you track how well your brand is doing? This is where performance marketing comes in. Branding and marketing go hand-in-hand because they need each other to be individually effective. 


Brand marketing and performance marketing have different goals, so how can they possibly work together? In fact, marketing teams have been at war over which area they should spend the bulk of their budget on. And, most of the time, performance marketing wins. However, it doesn’t have to be either-or.


Let's dive into the details of how performance marketing and branding work together.

 

Brand Marketing Versus Performance Marketing -
Understanding the Difference

In order to understand how performance marketing can help brand performance, we need to understand each one on its own. What are their goals and how are they achieved?

 

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing is predominantly concerned with increasing brand awareness and reliability. The goal of brand marketing is to grow brand equity through communications, sales, and brand impressions. Think of it like a schoolyard. Everyone favours the kids that are popular because they have established a level of respect amongst their peers. The same goes for your brand. By establishing a strong brand equity,  you’re considered to be more reliable and, thus, worth more to customers. This is why larger companies favour this type of marketing. Thankfully, small to medium-sized enterprises can benefit from it too.

Establishing a powerful brand equity increased the value of the business as a whole. Therefore, it requires a bit of investment to achieve. Brand marketing focuses on an emotional or psychological response from viewers. It’s a rather nuanced area of marketing, which makes it difficult to measure in terms of value. How do we do this?

There are a few simple brand marketing tricks you can use to build your brand. They include:

1. Memorable Brand Slogans

Slogans are a fantastic way to get into the head of your customers. Think of big brands and one of the first things that come to mind is their slogan, and I’ll bet you’re lovin’ it.

Now, a slogan isn’t just for big brands and it doesn’t have to be used all the time. Having this calling card will help your audience to remember you in a fun way, which establishes an emotional connection. 

Your slogan should be easy to remember and immediately linkable with your business. It should showcase the values of your business so that customers who hold the same values align themselves with your brand.

2. Identifiable Brand Images

Images trigger emotional responses. Whether they bring excitement, fear, love, or happiness, the power of an image can be harnessed for marketing and branding purposes. 


Much like how the slogan rings in your head when you think of a brand, their image pops up almost immediately, like two golden arches in the distance. Choosing the right image for your brand is important. You want it to evoke an emotional response but also showcase what your business is all about. 

Where you place your brand images is also important. If you’re taking a digital approach to brand marketing, you’ll need to choose the right platform for your brand. You need to carefully consider where your image ends up, because customers will associate your brand with where they find it. 


3. Proper Consumer Engagement


Customers like to feel that they are important to you. This psychological need for recognition opens a valuable marketing window. If you make sure to engage with your customers and make them feel as though their opinions matter to you, you’ll build a strong and loyal customer base. These customers will be more likely to recommend you in the future, or even become brand ambassadors. 

While these methods are valuable, it’s difficult to track whether or not your efforts have been effective, or know where you need to make changes. This is where performance based advertising can help.

Performance Marketing

Unlike brand marketing, performance marketing is much easier to quantify in terms of success. It uses specific goals and metrics to establish which marketing campaigns are performing well and which need to be changed. Because the metrics are easy to measure, revising your campaign to get better results is relatively quick and painless.


When creating a campaign, you decide which metric is most important. The bidding method you choose for your campaign will depend more upon this metric and less on emotional response (like brand marketing). So, for example, if you are paying cost per click (CPC) for your campaign, you’ll pay for the number of clicks you get on your ad. This is regardless of whether those clicks were triggered by an emotional response. Where brand marketing is concerned with an emotional connection, performance marketing is concerned with specific action. 


When you run your campaigns, usually after a minimum of three weeks, you’re able to see which ads work better and adapt your whole advertising effort accordingly. If you use AdWords, you’ll be able to see which ads have a higher click-through rate (CTR) or better conversion rates. These factors will help to gauge the general success of your campaign. 


With specific key performance indicators (KPI), you’re able to streamline your entire advertising effort to bring in results. Hitting KPI targets with little to no concern for the brand itself offers only a short term win for the business. This is where a combination of the two types of marketing works well.

 

Using Performance Based Advertising to Strengthen Your Brand

You don’t just need to choose one marketing route and hope for the best. Your campaign can be tailored to fit your specific goals. And, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, performance marketing may be able to help you. By building brand awareness, you ultimately end up with higher brand equity.


To get performance marketing to increase brand awareness, you need to run campaigns informed by the brand but optimised within strict parameters. You’ll use performance marketing methods that heavily feature your brand. 


For example, if your business is a pub, you may want to feature an image of people sitting at a bar with an inclusive slogan. You can take this brand identity and use it in a campaign to create brand awareness through impressions. Impressions may not be the best to use in terms of performance rating, however, they do increase brand awareness.


However, you’re not limited to impressions, here are some of the ways you can build your brand with performance marketing tactics:

 

1. Use your performance results to gather audience data

One of the draw cards for performance marketing is the fact that it provides measurable data. Included in this data is information about your audience. It can give you a technical view inside the mind of your target market by looking at the factors which drive decisions. What needs or wants to drive sales? You can use the data you collect to establish clear demographics and audience behaviour statistics. This makes it easier to establish brand campaigns that cater specifically to what appeals to your target audience.


If we look back at what needs to be recognised, you can launch campaigns that make your target audience feel like you truly ‘get’ them. By triggering an emotional response based on audience data, your brand awareness and reliability will increase.

    

2. Track which ad formats perform better and use it for your brand


Another great metric to look at is which ad formats work best with your audience. Do they respond better to videos or blogs? What about static images versus GIFs? You can use what you learn to create ads that tell your brand story in a way that appeals to your audience. 


For example, testing may show that your audience responds better to short, animated videos over live videos. It would be better, then, to invest more in animated videos of a set length - determined by your testing. However, live videos can be a great way to add a ‘human element’ to your marketing, especially when you consider the impact that influencers have on brand awareness. Sponsoring live influencer videos could help to grow your brand. Include what you learned from above and you could have a winning combination for brand performance. 


3. Use KPIs to choose your platform

By looking at performance marketing KPIs, you get a greater understanding of how your audience’s preferences change over time. This is particularly useful when deciding on which platform to run a campaign. For example, if your target audience spends most of their time on YouTube, you should be looking at that platform for the majority of your ads.


If results show that your audience has moved from desktop to mobile, you’ll need to make sure that the platforms you use, your landing pages, and your actual ads are mobile-friendly. Statistics show that 47% of U.S. internet users switch between devices throughout the day, therefore you should cater to their needs. If you know that the majority of your audience uses mobile, you can specify in AdWords that you want to increase your bids for mobile clicks.  With the option to run mobile-only, tablet-only, or desktop-only campaigns, you can adapt them to meet the precise needs of your audience. 


Keeping your campaigns adaptable ensures that your brand will remain relevant for longer. 

 

4. Optimise interactions for your brand


Once you’ve established and launched your brand campaigns based on what you learned from performance marketing, you’ll want to keep track of how well they do. By making sure to change those campaigns that underperform, you’ll be able to optimise the interactions that work well. 


For example, if you find that certain banner sizes perform better on Google Display than others, you can pause those sizes that aren’t doing as well and continue with the high-performance banners. The same can be said for the placement of your ads and for keywords.  


Not only will this keep track of how well your ads are running, but it will also help you to take advantage of the areas in which your brand will be viewed most. Essentially, by optimising your interactions, you’ll optimise brand awareness. This is useful for small to medium-sized businesses with a modest budget. 


5. Use what you learn to get new customers


Sometimes, for unknown reasons, loyal customers stop engaging with your brand. While this may seem like a loss, it’s actually an opportunity to gain new customers. By using what you’ve learned about your old customers, you can find new audience members within the same group. Especially when you know what they respond well to and how they engage with your campaigns.


This is why Wizard takes a holistic approach to building a brand identity. We don’t focus solely on brand marketing, but rather combine brand awareness and increase of sales. Your business will show measurable brand growth, greater product awareness, and countable sales results. As a performance based advertising agency, we know how to get results for your business and for your brand. You no longer have to ask “how does performance marketing and brand work together”. With us, you’ll see the clear outcome.

 

Alexandros Kokolis Avatar
WRITTEN BY
Alexandros Kokolis
DATE POSTED
08 - 03 - 2021.
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