Written by
Charlotte Norman
A siloed mentality has no place in today’s digital world. Silos block lines of communication, preventing cohesion and coordination. This leads to redundancy at work, inconsistent customer experiences, and wasted resources. When performance and branding come together and work towards a common goal, there’s a better experience for the consumer, and most importantly, business grows.
Performance Branding, the melding of performance and brand, is an approach that aligns a business from top-down and drives a more holistic marketing strategy. In our Performance Branding: The New Paradigm In Digital Marketing webinar, our panel of experts Joe Yakuel, CEO, WITHIN, Katie Reed, VP of Performance Media at Casper, Maya May, CMO at EO Products, and Ryan Babenzien, founder of GREATS had a chance to dig deeper into this strategy and explore its benefits.
At its core, Performance Branding aligns marketing goals back to business objectives. If the rest of your company is working to maximize returns, shouldn’t your marketing program do the same? Performance Branding marries the functional, highly measurable aspects of performance marketing (like Google and Facebook ads) with high-impact branded content. The result is a unified strategy that maximizes long term profitability for the business.
The panel discussed at length the importance of a cohesive strategy and how marketers have to be more flexible and open to adapting strategies that better align with evolving consumer behaviors. This is especially important when external factors, such as ongoing COVID-19 issues or political situations, all play a role in influencing those spend and brand loyalty.
Performance Branding’s fusion of brand and performance also elevates creative. The sheer volume of digital content in 2021 is staggering and at a time when people are spoiled for choice, it’s essential that your creative stands out from the crowd. When brand and performance work together, companies can build emotional connections with customers and drive awareness. Maya May (EO Products) stresses the importance of “expressing your brand in a digital way that gets attention and draws emotion,” as this puts people on the path to conversion and ties the brand back to value proposition and product.
When it comes to figuring out what metrics to use to measure the performance, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all methodology.
It’s critical to remember that every attribution tool has its blind spots, no matter how sophisticated. Ryan Babenzian explains, “at best you can be directionally confident in what you’re doing, but you are not going to get [accountability for every dollar].” If you’re aware of the weakness of your attribution tool, you can work around it and still make smart decisions.
An option for companies is to use different methodologies to measure varying audiences or channels and then tying those findings into one metric. Casper uses insights from a mixture of media mix models, MTA, incrementality testing, or “How did you hear about us” surveys to stitch together a fuller picture of customer touchpoints.
When integrating teams, collaboration and communication are critical. If brand and performance are working together, but are not integrated, they’ll face the same challenges as a siloed team. Being rigorous about active and regular communication ensures the team works together towards the same goal.
When asked for advice on how to promote a unified objective, one of May’s tried and true tips is asking her team to think about what they will be proud to talk about in six months’ time. She says this helps the team think as a unit and get excited about a goal they’ve all been working towards.
A key theme of the conversation circled around working with Chief Financial Officers to align business activities and highlighted a few roadblocks in implementing the Performance Branding framework. May believes that “education and being patient” is of the utmost importance. Be transparent and view any questions that come your way as an opportunity to educate and to learn.
For the most effective outcome, leverage data. Data is a cornerstone to Performance Branding, and using it to drive discussions and decisions will mend any broken communication and unite people in forging forward toward a common goal.
Missed last week’s webinar? Watch it on demand here.
Charlotte Norman is a content writer passionate about all things marketing. She received an MFA from NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Literary Reportage program and is currently based in New York City.
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