Effective branding and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) marketing are indispensable for the success of any business. Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) branding efforts are crucial for fostering brand awareness and generating interest in your company, while BOFU marketing is pivotal in driving sales and propelling business growth. Ensuring a harmonious synergy between these marketing strategies is essential, despite the potential for them to become disjointed.One contributing factor to this disconnection is the inherent difficulty in measuring the impact of branding campaigns compared to BOFU marketing. To enhance the monitoring of your branding’s impact, ensure alignment between branding and BOFU efforts, and maximize the value of your branding, a fusion of performance-based marketing with traditional branding is recommended, known as performance branding.Performance branding is a cross-functional strategy that merges conversion optimization with brand awareness enhancement. It aims to achieve both macro- and micro-conversions across various funnel stages.This approach to building and promoting your company’s distinct identity integrates elements of performance-based marketing and emphasizes the use of quantitative data and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). It also promotes a more unified approach to business promotion, moving away from the siloed operations of branding and BOFU marketing.Performance-based branding encompasses a holistic perspective of the customer journey, ensuring alignment between branding and other marketing initiatives.To gain a deeper understanding of performance branding, let’s contrast it with traditional branding and performance-based marketing.Branding efforts are focused on establishing and enhancing awareness of a business’s unique identity. These activities are typically TOFU in nature. Individuals who are just discovering a brand are unlikely to make a purchase immediately and may take time to reach the BOFU stage, where they convert into customers.Branding often emphasizes qualitative assessments, such as brand awareness and sentiment. Due to its reliance on qualitative measures, the outcomes of branding campaigns can be more challenging to quantify. Companies often target a broader audience with their branding, although this is gradually shifting.Branding initiatives aim to make as many people as possible aware of their brand, sometimes resorting to traditional outbound advertising channels like billboards and TV ads, which offer broad reach without the need for precise targeting.BOFU marketing, on the other hand, is more performance-oriented than traditional branding.This form of marketing zeroes in on specific metrics, such as leads or sales generated, and targets users who are closer to making a purchase. This proximity to conversion makes it easier to correlate marketing campaigns with achieving goals like increasing sales revenue. Due to these characteristics, businesses tend to closely monitor their BOFU marketing efforts more so than their branding initiatives.Several factors have contributed to the rising interest in performance branding. A significant factor is the expanded accessibility of marketing analytics. Over time, marketing analytics tools have become both more sophisticated and more accessible.Now, anyone can gather, analyze, and interpret marketing data using tools such as Google Analytics, Power BI, and MarketingCloudFX. These tools leverage artificial intelligence and other technologies to provide intuitive data visualizations and aggregate data from multiple channels and campaigns, offering a more comprehensive view of how branding and marketing efforts intertwine.In conjunction with this, marketing has been shifting from traditional channels to digital ones. Digital advertising spending overtook traditional for the first time in 2019, and its popularity has continued to rise. Digital marketing allows for more precise tracking of campaign results and enables the collection of accurate data on leads, customers, and conversions, thanks to advancements in digital technology.This tracking capability is seamlessly integrated with marketing analytics tools. With traditional marketing, these advanced functionalities are not available, and the rise of digital marketing has accelerated the shift towards performance-based marketing and performance branding.The benefits of performance branding further contribute to its growing popularity.Some of the advantages that performance-based branding can offer include:The utilization of analytics provides deeper insights into the effectiveness of your branding efforts, enabling more informed decision-making and continuous campaign optimization. For instance, you can identify which advertising channels yield the best results and allocate your budget accordingly.Performance branding also offers a more cohesive perspective of your marketing and branding efforts, ensuring that all campaign components work in harmony. This alignment can lead to improved results on both ends, such as ensuring that your branding targets potential customers and that your marketing efforts are consistent with your brand identity.Are you interested in incorporating performance branding into your strategy?Here’s how to get started.A critical first step is setting clear branding goals. Knowing your objectives will help you determine the relevant metrics to track and improve. The best brand goals are SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Specific: Craft detailed goals that avoid ambiguity.
Measurable: Ensure your goals are quantifiable with a clear method to measure progress.
Achievable: Set ambitious yet realistic goals.
Relevant: Align your branding goals with your overall business objectives.
Time-bound: Establish a timeline for achieving your goals to maintain focus and momentum.
Some examples of goals you might set include:
Increasing search volume for branded keywords by 25% over the next six months
Enhancing brand recall by 30% by the end of the year
Boosting social media engagement by 15% by the end of the quarter
We will delve into the metrics and tools for tracking these goals in the following sections.Next, select the metrics you will track to measure your progress towards your goals. While tracking branding performance can be challenging, there are several metrics you can employ. Spend time experimenting to find the best metrics for your company.There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but here are some suggestions:
Brand recall: The number of individuals who remember or recognize your brand is a useful indicator of brand awareness.
Website traffic: The volume of traffic to your website can help you gauge the reach and popularity of your brand. Pay attention to the sources of your traffic as well.
Search volume for branded keywords: The number of people searching for your business on Google and other search engines can indicate how many are actively seeking your brand online.
Backlinks: An increase in organic backlinks to your website suggests an expanding online presence.
Social followers: The number of followers your brand has on social media is a great measure of its popularity.
Social mentions: Tracking the frequency of your brand’s mentions on social media can provide insights into its visibility.
Social reach: Social reach measures how many people see your brand on social media. Consider the number of mentions and the potential audience reach.
Social engagement: Engagement through comments, posts, and other interactions can help monitor user interest in your brand.
Another critical step is selecting the tools you will use to measure your branding metrics. Some useful tools include:
Surveys: Consider conducting surveys of your existing customers or a random sample of the general population. You can distribute surveys via email, phone, social media, your website, or in person. Ask existing customers how they discovered you and inquire if random survey participants recognize your brand.
Website analytics tools: Tools like Google Analytics can be used to measure website traffic, interactions, and more.
SEO and keyword research tools: SEO tools like Ahrefs and Google Trends can help research keyword search volume, backlinks, and more.
Social media analytics tools: Social media analytics tools, including those built into the platforms and third-party tools, are powerful brand tracking resources.
Social media monitoring tools: Social media monitoring tools can also be used to track mentions of your brand on social media.
Once you have your branding performance tracking tools in place, continue executing your branding campaign strategies. However, keep a close eye on your results and experiment with new tactics. As you make changes to your campaigns, monitor the outcomes and adjust your strategies as needed.If you try a new approach and it yields positive results, consider allocating more resources to that method. If a campaign does not meet your expectations, tweak various elements until you achieve the desired outcomes. Also, consider running A/B tests to determine which version of an ad, page, or other element performs better, and implement the winning version as the final version.As you accumulate more data and test new strategies, continuously refine your branding strategy. Utilize the data you collect to ensure your branding and marketing efforts remain aligned. Improving the results of your branding and marketing is an ongoing process.Always track data, conduct tests, and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Over time, your campaigns will improve, thanks to the focus on measurable KPIs and the enhanced visibility into your campaigns provided by performance branding.Seeking assistance to kickstart performance branding and enhance the success of your branding and marketing efforts?Consider partnering with WebFX! We offer marketing analytics services and a comprehensive suite of digital marketing services, including social media marketing and SEO. We can help you achieve your branding and marketing objectives – just ask the over 1,100 satisfied clients who have provided testimonials about our work!For more information, request a free quote online or call us at 888-601-5359.
