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If you ever needed proof that you can put two words together in marketing and they become a thing, performance branding is it!
So, you’ve heard of performance marketing and brand marketing? Put simply, performance branding is a marketing strategy that combines both of those principles to drive brand awareness and performance simultaneously.
It’s a technique that focuses on measuring the effectiveness of branding activities in real-time and optimising them for better results.
Why it’s more than just hype
Performance marketing and brand marketing are regularly pitted against each other, when a combination of the two often offers the best of both worlds.
After all, they’re operating at two different ends of the sales funnel. Performance marketing is the focus on short-term conversions at the bottom of the sales funnel, while brand marketing is more long-term, focusing on feeding the top-of-the-sales funnel with brand-awareness and growth-marketing activities.
Enter performance branding which encompasses the entire customer journey and yields a multi-layered strategy based on common goals to both connect and convert customers. It instils the brand identity and fosters engagement while prompting sales and leads.
How does it work?
In essence, performance branding is about leveraging the power of branding to drive business results and using data to optimise brand campaigns for maximum impact.
By combining the strengths of branding and performance marketing, performance branding enables you to build strong, lasting relationships with your audiences while delivering measurable results.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know we’re big advocates of brand marketing. But it’s not always an easy sell as marketers often perceive it to be tricky to measure. However, performance branding shows that it is possible to take a performance-minded approach when targeting consumers across the funnel.
How do you implement performance branding?
As you might’ve guessed, good data is key to successful performance branding. It will guide where your customers are in their journey, the channels they trust and the messaging that will resonate with them.
To implement any new marketing strategy, it’s good idea to follow the SMART goals framework:
- Specific: Set out your detailed goals and avoid ambiguity
- Measurable: You should have quantifiable goals and KPIs, and there should be a way to assess your progress
- Achievable: While ambitious goals are always good, they should also be realistic, be that a realistic time frame or a realistic sales goal
- Relevant: Your branding should be relevant to your business and your performance activities should relate to the branding, giving a cohesive feel throughout the journey
- Time-bound: Set a realistic time limit on achieving your goals to help keep you on track. New strategies can be difficult to implement, so adjusting timescales throughout is sensible
With the majority of marketers looking to continue their spend or increase their investment in digital marketing - and the majority of that increase going to content marketing and social media marketing - branded content should be part of any future strategy.
Facebook research indicates that brands leveraging both upper- and lower-funnel media have two to three times the marketing efficiency of lower-funnel media compared with brands focused on just the lower funnel.
Traditionally, branded content has been considered more upper-funnel media, but performance marketers are increasingly using data generated from branded content campaigns to shorten customer journeys and convert leads quicker with strategies like retargeting those who’ve engaged with long-form content.
A full-funnel approach
In short, branded content can do it all.
Long-form branded content allows for flexibility when it comes to the performance aspect, depending on the metrics you want to measure and the actions you want your audience to make. Videos can be included to increase views, while CTAs can be placed throughout the article to boost website clicks, form-fills, survey completions, and other signals of purchase intent.
Looking to try out a campaign? Get in touch today! With quick turnaround times, you can get your performance branding campaign up and running in days.
