The opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Brandformance is, as you may have guessed, a blend of branding and performance that has changed the paradigm of digital marketing. Previous schools of thought relied more on brand building, but that’s only one side of the coin. Brand building tells your story and creates a loyal following, but without the objective-based performance marketing aspect, it’s impossible to effectively measure how well your strategy is working.
It’s 2024, and living in the age of social networking means businesses need a reliable way to measure the return on their marketing investments, or they’ll fall behind. This is where brand performance comes into play. It solves the problems of both staying top of mind with customers and continuing to build your brand based on data-driven results. In fact, a recent eMarketer survey found that 56% of global brands performed better when they dismantled traditional branding and performance silos and instead implemented a blended approach.
So, let’s look at five strategies for increasing your reach with a brand performance approach.
1. Define the best work channels
Before you really dive into brand performance, it’s crucial to do a thorough evaluation of your current performance marketing channels. This includes an honest look at how your existing performance marketing infrastructure works across channels and how your resources are allocated.
This first step prepares you for the following strategy: successfully budgeting.
Related: 10 Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth
2. Develop a performance budget
After evaluating your channel breakdown and seeing where your marketing dollars are going, determine how much you will dedicate from your performance budget or beyond for extended channel testing. Sometimes, it’s best to completely rework your budget to fit your mixed multi-channel brand performance strategy.
If the company is willing to invest in brand performance at the expense of decreasing margins, the team can increase the current budget already spent on performance marketing. Alternatively, it can reduce the performance budget and reallocate some of the budget to brand performance.
3. Dive into metrics
At Flowwow, we consider brand performance marketing tools that, on the one hand, impact brand reach and recognition while, on the other, are measurable in terms of sales. One of our main brand performance channels is influencer marketing.
In 2023 alone, Flowwow earned $2.7 million through social media campaigns with influencers. In fact, social media is one of the best brand performance tools we’ve found. We combine the brand image aspects of our collaborations with quantifiable metrics such as CPM, САС and app installs.
Consider analyzing various geographic locations, such as cities or countries, to evaluate changes in organic traffic patterns, conversion rate improvements, and click-through rate (CTR) within performance channels. It is best to evaluate the overall impact comprehensively at a high level, including both performance and brand performance metrics.
Related: 6 Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track
4. Determine your target audience and key messages
Once you’ve identified your channels and assigned your budget, you can turn your attention to creating a unique value proposition tailored to each channel. Emphasizing competitive advantages is critical to articulating the reasons why potential customers should choose to interact with your brand over others.
In our case, we use TikTok for branding purposes as it is easier to get started and cheaper to achieve reach. The popularity of the platform also encourages more partnership opportunities, ensuring a broader audience. However, the messages we convey on TikTok would not be the same as those we use on Instagram or our landing page. For example, we would create a campaign that talks about both brands and provides links and promo codes for each, or more complex collaborations such as a joint box with items and special offers from both partners, all tailored to the specific audience we want to target get in touch. .
Related: 10 Ways to Know Your Target Audience
5. Constantly update and refine your processes
Leverage popular tools like Google Search Console, SKadNetwork, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and social media platform metrics to keep your process data up to date. For example, where Flowwow uses influencer marketing so heavily, our success depends on meticulously selecting our target audience and brand messages, so we need to stay on top of these campaigns and refine our objectives based on what our customers respond well. .
A great brand performance strategy not only increases brand awareness and improves customer loyalty, but also increases the likelihood of fast, quality conversions and reduces long-term customer acquisition costs. We use metrics such as sales made through tracking links, orders placed through unique coupon codes tied to different channels, organic search numbers, and share of voice.
Brandformance is greater than the sum of its parts. Combining the powerful, people-oriented side of brand identity with the efficiency of reliable data and concrete metrics is the ideal solution for gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s hyper-connected world. Short attention spans and an abundance of information mean you need to know how to quickly and reliably stand out from the competition.
Brandformance is the way forward and taking this approach now will help you succeed and see consistent, measurable growth in the long term.