Marketers often face a dilemma: how to split the available budget between conversion-focused campaigns and the brand-building ones? Here are the top three tips on how to make the balance work.
With increasing pressure on marketers to deliver more results with less budget, creating a perfect balance between investing in short- and long-term focused activities seems like a real enigma. Placing a bunch of ads everywhere might bring immediate results in sales and revenue, but will not necessarily help you in building a brand. To understand how to create a functional plan, first let’s take a look at the main differences between the two.
In simple terms, brand is all about how people feel about a company or a product. It’s really about emotions and perceptions of your organization or the products you sell, and it takes years, even decades, to build it. The problem is that you don’t have years, let alone decades, because your business and revenue targets for this quarter and fiscal year are clear. That’s where performance marketing comes in.
In a recent webinar, Adverity’s Holly Thomson and Madalina Teodorescu looked at the key differences between brand and performance campaigns, the potential ways on how to achieve the right balance, and measure the results of both types of campaigns. Here are the 3 key tips from this interesting session.
If you think about the future success of your business, quick, short-term performance marketing wins can only get you so far. But if an organization is new to the market, allocating some of your budget to the brand side of your marketing strategy would also be necessary in order to secure long-term growth. By investing into brand building you are investing in the future of your business, and improving the quality of the conversions that will come.
When deciding how budgets should be split, don’t forget to consider the complete customer journey and the full sales funnel, from the awareness to consideration and purchase phases. But also think about what you want to achieve in the next month, or even years, going forward, and try to collect the right information that will help you set the right path. Only when you have the data that draws the complete picture of both brand and performance campaigns, can you make the right decisions.
Setting the right KPIs for brand and performance marketing defines what success looks like for each of these two activities separately, and for your marketing as a whole. From share of voice, brand lift, reach and NPS on the brand side, to CPC, cost per conversion, CLTV and many others on the performance side, it is only when you combine all of these from the multiple channels you are using, that will you get a complete picture on your marketing performance and ROI.
If you want to hear more details on how to use data to understand both the art and the science of brand and performance marketing, watch the complete webinar.