TL;DR: Brandformance is a marketing growth strategy in which the brand is the scaling focus, by developing an optimization methodology to achieve greater brand awareness and measuring each marketing channel using performance metrics.
While brand awareness is defined as the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions, and performance-based marketing (or direct marketing) is a very pragmatic approach that measures the effectiveness of each digital media channel. Brandformance is a methodology developed to optimize your brand awareness while targeting the most effective media channels.
Brandfromance, Brand Awarness Reciprocity with Performance
Over the years, different types of methods have been developed to measure the effectiveness of brand awareness such as test recall surveys, site traffic, brand search volume, overall increase and more. Most of the time when a company decides to take the time to understand what the impact of their brand awareness is , their KPI and methodology aren’t always clear and no action items can be taken. That is why in many cases brand awareness is considered a vague concept and trying to measure it stays on the drawing board.
On the other side of the equation, there is the performance marketing approach that has become the main section of today’s marketing budgets, thanks to the ability to see immediate results and measure a direct ROI.
The challenge for this kind of marketing is that at some point the reach for the audience with the best chance of conversion on any marketing platform will reach its limit, whether it’s the number of people who search for the company’s product solution or the size of the target audience on the native/social media platforms. Digital marketers try to overcome this by expanding the target audience across more demographics, broadening their keyword research or expanding their audience size. But most of the time it’s not enough to achieve the expected growth.
Brandformance methodology organizes everything together to reveal how each target channel contributes to increasing the business’s market share.
The important thing to consider is that it is a methodology, a methodology that has to be tailored to each organization’s needs. The beauty is that it doesn’t have to start as a big restructuring project, you can start with baby steps and once the methodology is clear, it can be scaled.
How does Brandformance deliver growth?
These days, as growth is the main focus for much of the companies, marketers use various tactics to bring as many leads as possible (or MQLs in B2B, or more traffic to eCommerce site) as possible into the pipeline, thinking that although the quality of the new leads won’t be as high, using the law of large numbers the number of closed deals will increase as well.
If we’re being honest, this approach has many disadvantages and creates a lot of conflicts, that’s why quality traffic should be your main concern.
Any marketer can tell that the highest quality channel is traffic that comes from people who are searching for the brand, and any salesperson will tell you to bring them more leads like that.
We used to think that we didn’t have much control over our brand search volume. Brandformance came to revise this idea using KPIs to increase the audience prospects coming from the brand (search or direct approach). Setting it as a compass, the traffic coming to your site is much more engaged and the quality of leads is better, increasing the chance of conversion to sales.
The Brandformance strategy can be applied to what type of companies?
As a concept, Brandformance suits any company that is looking to scale, essentially any organization that is open to the idea when all of the conventional advertising ways have been exhausted.
If we robustly categorize companies by the 4-model product lifecycle – Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline – the growth phase is usually the right time to develop a Brandformace strategy. That’s when the product is relatively new but starts to become more popular. Leveraging it in that time is great to drive even more attention to the product, and the scale will then be more quality-oriented.
Nevertheless, startups at their beginning (Introduction phase) and established companies (Maturity phase) should seriously consider developing a brandformance strategy as well. Here’s why:
In the introduction phase, companies are looking to sense the market and find their own product-market fit by asking different kinds of questions, such as what problems do the potential customer have? Does my product solve them? Is my product mature enough? And so on. By using the brandformance methodology, companies can obtain answers to these questions and gain a better sense of direction, and find what values and messages drive more prospects to search their brand and category and establish their brand market position faster.
In the maturity phase, product sales level off or even start to drop. As we all know increasing sales is always the main goal, that’s why when product and marketing managers are struggling, brainstorming meetings are conducted, price changes are implemented and everyone desperately looks for ways to change the approach to save this situation. Taking the assumptions, implementing and measuring them is how brandformance is so successful. Although above we’ve mainly talked about driving success, brandformance is a wonderful tool to discover what drives your potential customers.
So how can you start and develop it?
“The Brandformer” theme is to explore the brandformace theory and develop it into a practical concept. We understand that not all use cases are the same, and the method for one company doesn’t work for another. We aim to establish a framework that anyone can use to develop a brandformance methodology tailored to their business needs.
In the “Brandformance Guide” section, you can find ways to discover how to start developing and measuring your brandformance strategy. And in the case study section, you can get inspired by companies’ unconventional ways of growing their brand.
Those two sections will be constantly updated as the global situation fluctuates, marketing approaches to change, and many companies excel using the Brandformance strategy. If you want to keep up-to-date with our updates, please sign up for our newsletter, we promise not to be intrusive.
One last thing, we’re open to new ideas and ways to develop our framework and methods. If you want to be part of Thebrandformer, don’t hesitate to reach out to us about anything (though we won’t reply to spam or persistent sales emails).
