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Brandformance is, as you may have guessed, a blend of branding and performance that has shifted the digital marketing paradigm. Previous schools of thought relied more on brand building, but this is only one side of the coin. The brand building tells your story and creates a loyal following, but without the goal-based performance marketing aspect, it is impossible to effectively measure how well your strategy works.
It’s 2024, and living in the era of social networks means that companies need a reliable way to measure the return on their marketing investments, otherwise, they’ll be left behind. This is where brandformance comes in. It solves the problems of both remaining topmost in customers’ minds and continuing to build your brand according to data-oriented results. In fact, a recent eMarketer survey found that 56% of global brands saw better results when they dismantled the traditional siloes of branding and performance and implemented a blended approach instead.
So, let’s look at five strategies for growing your reach with a brandformance approach.
1. Define the best working channels
Before you can really dive into brandformance, it’s crucial to make a comprehensive evaluation of your current performance marketing channels. This includes taking an honest look at how well your existing performance marketing infrastructure is working across channels and how your resources are being allocated.
This first step prepares you for the following strategy: budgeting successfully.
Related: 10 Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth
2. Develop a performance budget
Once you evaluate your channel split and see where your marketing money is going, determine how much you will dedicate from the performance budget or beyond for tests on expansive channels. Sometimes, it’s best to completely rework your budget to accommodate your blended omnichannel brandformance 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 brandformance marketing tools that, on the one hand, impact brand reach and recognition while, on the other hand, are measurable in terms of sales. One of our primary brandformance 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 brandformance tools we have found. We combine the brand image aspects of our collaborations with quantifiable metrics like CPM, САС and app installations.
Consider analyzing various geographical locations, such as cities or countries, to assess shifts in organic traffic patterns, conversion rate enhancements and clickthrough rate (CTR) within performance channels. It is advisable to evaluate the overall impact comprehensively at a high level, encompassing both performance and brand performance metrics.
Related: 6 Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track
4. Determine your target audience and key messages
Once the channels have been identified and the budget allocated, you can turn your attention to crafting a unique value proposition tailored to each channel. Emphasizing competitive advantages is crucial in articulating the reasons why potential customers should opt to engage with your brand over others.
In our case, we use TikTok for branding purposes since it’s easier to get started and it’s cheaper to gain reach. The platform’s popularity also fosters more partnership opportunities, granting a wider audience. However, the messages we convey on TikTok would not be the same as the ones we use on Instagram or our landing page. For instance, we would create a campaign that talks about both brands and provides links and promo codes for each, or more complex collaborations like a joint box with items and special offers from both partners, all tailored to the specific audience we want to connect with.
Related: 10 Ways to Learn About 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. As an example, where Flowwow utilizes influencer marketing so heavily, our success is dependent on the meticulous selection of our target audience and brand messages, so we must stay on top of these campaigns and refine our goals in accordance with what our customers respond well to.
A great brandformance strategy not only raises brand awareness and improves customer loyalty, but it also boosts the likelihood of fast, quality conversions and lowers long-term customer acquisition costs. We use metrics like sales made through tracking links, orders made through unique coupon codes tied to different channels, organic search numbers and share-of-voice.
Brandformance is greater than the sum of its parts. Blending the powerful, people-oriented side of brand identity with the seamless efficiency of reliable data and concrete metrics is the ideal solution to gaining and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s hyper-connected world. Short attention spans and an abundance of information mean you need to know how to stand out quickly and reliably from your competitors.
Brandformance is the way forward, and adopting this approach now will help you succeed and see consistent, measurable growth over the long term.