Performance branding is the way Branding and performance marketing should work together. Your efforts to promote your brand need to help you better understand your audience while, at the same time, the work you put into branding should give you what you need to grow your performance marketing.

The Brandformer considers all marketing efforts as performance marketing because there is always a metric you can measure to gauge the performance of a given marketing campaign or channel. As you may already know, at The Brandformer, we’ve highlighted how to measure brand awareness, and we staunchly advocate that both performance marketing and branding are indispensable to a business and the effectiveness of both can be measured.

Businesses should approach their branding with a performance marketing mindset, measuring the effectiveness of their efforts along the way. We call this Brandformance.

How to establish a performance branding culture

Develop a corporate culture where everyone agrees that all performance marketing and branding initiatives, even brand awareness, can and should be measured. Traditionally, brand awareness has been seen as challenging to measure, but with a Brandformance culture in place, it will become natural to measure it. This culture should also foster a sense of collaboration between branding and performance marketing teams.

Alignment

Performance branding will work only if your branding and marketing efforts are aligned for a seamless customer journey. The top-of-funnel educational campaigns should align with your bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns.

For example, you may have a bunch of how-to videos on your YouTube channel in which you encourage viewers to sign up to your monthly newsletter where you share your other branding efforts. After receiving your newsletter for a few months, a prospect may be put into a targeted email drip campaign to engage them further and entice them into becoming a customer. All of these elements should work together and focus on the brand messaging you’ve developed.

Brand messaging that follows all touchpoints

In addition to the surface level elements like logos and catchphrases, brands need to have clear, compelling narratives and messaging that showcase the brand’s values. Meanwhile, the performance marketing team has to get that brand story in front of the right people.

It’s worth it here to touch on the differences between brand narratives and brand messaging. Brand narratives are the connected events (stories) that your brand is founded on. These can include your company’s actual founding and any other narratives that tell the story of your brand. Meanwhile, brand messaging is how your brand communicates these stories to your audience, portraying its unique value proposition and personality.

Your brand narratives need to be clear and compelling and reflect your brand’s values and your brand messaging needs to convey these narratives in a compelling way. In order to create your brand’s narratives and messaging, you first need to decide what your values are, as these will dictate which stories you want to tell and how you tell them. While there is no limit on how many brand values you can have, choose your brand’s top five values so you can focus your messaging.

For example, let’s say your brand lists these as its top five values:

• Inclusivity
• Sustainability
• Innovation
• Adaptability
• Charitable Giving

You would want all your brand narratives to be crafted to reflect these values and you would create different types of messaging that use these narratives. The performance team can then analyze their results to see how well they’ve been received.

If your brand has a different set of values, you can adjust accordingly. For example, your brand could have these values instead:

• Supporting Local Producers
• Providing the Highest Quality
• Embracing Tradition
• Constant Improvement
• Respect

Your brand messaging would naturally be different in this case. You may opt instead to feature local producers on your blog or make videos discussing the traditions you embrace and how and why you do that.

Audience reaction

When you have crafted your messaging, it’s time to see which narratives resonate with your target audience. (This is assuming you’ve done your due diligence and you know exactly who you are targeting.)

See which messages resonate better with the people you are trying to reach, and gauge the reaction they get on social media. Take note of any questions they pose or any strong reactions they have to your content.

Surveys can also be extremely helpful for discovering what resonates with your audience and to get a sense of the values they identify with. Your customer service and sales team, who are talking to customers and prospects all the time, can also help you discover what is resonating with your audience.

Monitoring & analysis

This is where the process really shines. Monitor all your brand messaging and analyze the results to see what resonates with the people you are trying to reach. This will provide you with the opportunity to do more of what is working and try to experiment with what isn’t working to see if you can change it into something people are interested in (or drop it altogether if it’s not worth the cost/effort to spend more time on it).

You’ll want to monitor all your so-called vanity metrics, such as likes, comments, and subscriptions. Still, you can use The Brandformer’s aforementioned brand awareness measuring framework and the sales and revenue generated from your branding efforts to show you if your brand messaging resonates.

Make a schedule to check in regularly – like weekly, monthly, and quarterly – to see what’s working. Create a reporting system, like a centralized document on your cloud platform, so everyone can access the data and see how well a given marketing piece is performing.

For example, if you run a Facebook campaign showcasing your brand’s charitable activities, but it does not render the results you expected, it could mean that Facebook isn’t as important of a platform for your audience as you thought, or it could mean your brand story involving your charitable activities isn’t as compelling as it needs to be. This will give you the information you need to tweak your campaign and try something new, like a new platform, a new targeting strategy, or a different brand narrative.

Conclusion

With strong brand narratives and messaging that back up your stated brand values, a clearly defined audience that has been analyzed to ensure message delivery, monitoring of how well your brand messaging has been received, and alignment of branding efforts with your sales funnel, you should end up with strong brand awareness that you can easily measure and optimize; otherwise known as Brandformance marketing.