Performance Branding: How result-driven brand work succeeds

How can marketing benefit from better measurability?

The goal of every company is short- and long-term revenue growth. In previous decades, marketing was naturally seen as one of the levers that can contribute to revenue increases. However, the appreciation for marketing has fallen sharply in recent years. This phenomenon is largely self-inflicted, as the advertising industry has damaged its own reputation through opaque business practices.

But this trend can be reversed. Through digital tools, the results of individual marketing measures and advertising campaigns can be measured better than ever before. An opportunity for marketing departments to make their work more visible! However, it is crucial that the right data is presented. This is particularly important in social media marketing. Here, too many metrics are still used that actually have little or no influence on business success.

Brand work meets performance marketing

On Facebook and Instagram, it is not just about collecting likes: direct-to-consumer brands have long been successfully using social media to offer their goods and to address potential customers directly while cutting out intermediaries.

However, the potential of social media for marketing is far from exhausted by this. Even brands and companies whose products cannot be sold directly benefit from an integrated approach of performance and brand marketing. Under the umbrella term performance branding, we combine the “best of both worlds”.

What does this mean specifically for our campaigns?

• ‍‍Every part of a campaign is made measurable.
• The right KPIs are used: Even without the possibility of measuring sales directly in the online shop, meaningful KPIs can be defined. Simply collecting the number of likes and comments is not enough.
• We work, for example, with advanced metrics such as “weighted engagement”, where a specific value is assigned to different types of engagement. KPIs such as dwell time or view content conversions provide insights into the quality of the website traffic that is generated.
• Tools such as brand lift studies or A/B tests are incorporated as required to better understand the impact that measures on social media had on the entire marketing mix.

Approach and setup for performance branding

Strategy development always focuses on the goal of the campaign in order to be able to align all measures accordingly. Turning potential customers into actual customers does not simply require selecting the right optimization goal in the Facebook Ads Manager. Advertising channels and measures must be tailored to the target audience and the respective funnel stage, as must creatives and messages.

In very few cases do we have enough data before the start of the first campaign to be able to predict which approaches work best. Therefore, we use the widest possible selection of creative and text variants to find out which messages resonate most within the pre-defined target audience segments.

Measurable success through performance branding

However, a good strategy is of little use if the results are not clearly traceable. With the help of a few tools and a few planning steps before each campaign, measuring success is very simple:

• Conversions must be appropriately matched to the campaign goal. Otherwise, the results of good creatives and a well-thought-out strategy are not measurable.
• Setting up a brand lift study from Facebook provides information about the extent to which brand awareness and recall have increased through the campaign. Furthermore, it can be understood which measures worked well and what should be done differently next time.
• Working with post IDs when setting up a campaign offers the advantage that the results are all collected in one post and displayed together.
• To simplify the evaluation of the campaign later, we work with saved filters, custom columns and rules. We create these during the setup of the campaign so that the important KPIs are available at a glance during the campaign duration.

Conclusion

Performance branding combines the advantages of performance and brand marketing. The clearly structured and KPI-driven approach of performance marketing is used to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty.

Addressing and creatives are not aimed directly at a purchase, but are adapted to target audience segments and the funnel stage, as is usual in performance marketing. Through targeted testing, we obtain statistically valid data on which messages are best received. Brand lift studies allow us to make concrete conclusions about the effect of the campaign on brand awareness.