Brandformance Marketing: The future is here

No sooner did marketers get used to performance-marketing than branding was mixed with it. A new direction emerged at the junction – brandformance, which became a new logical turn in the development of digital-advertising. Not long ago, branding, image advertising and performance-marketing were different stories. Parallel lines, which, if crossed, are extremely rare.

But the boundaries between them are gradually erased. As a result, performance and branding still crossed at the point with the name of brandformance-marketing. However, this has made it more difficult and has caused even more chaos in the restless minds of marketers.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each approach and find out why brandformance is the only correct option of marketing for business today and why it is worth to adopt it.

Performance – Marketing of indicators

Performance-marketing – a complex of marketing activities aimed at stimulating sales, the result of which can be measured in the important for business KPI (cost of attracting a client, sales volume, ROI).In other words, performance is when we stop spending money on blind promotion and start counting everything.

What kind of tasks does it solve?

Performance marketing allows you to read and predict:

• Coverage and effectiveness of advertising.
• The cost of attracting a client.
• Profitability of ROMI (Return of Marketing Investment) campaign.
• Involvement of subscribers.
• Financial metrics: CPC, CPA, CPL, CPM, CPO, CPS.

Performance marketing doesn’t hurt.

Many people are afraid of performance-marketing and do not rush to use it, because numbers, indicators, metrics, that’s all. The data, though large, though small, are frightening.

Marketers and entrepreneurs are still acting the old-fashioned way, guided by their speculative conclusions and invincible argument: “I think it will work. We lead the great, some potential client will definitely see our selling posts and buy something. We hung up a banner on the site – it seems that there are more calls, let it hang on.

But it so happens that digital is about measurements in the first place. Besides, today there are a million tools that make this process easier. For example, our REC ONE puts on the rails of performance-marketing even such a conservative sphere as advertising on the sites of online stores.

Branding – reputation marketing

Branding is a marketing tool that shapes the image of the company and helps to create a positive reputation both online and offline. In fact, it is a way to make your brand different from the others, to build up from competitors.

Branding formulates the main value of the product, answering three main questions:

• What do you do?
• Who is your product for?
• What are you better than your competitors?

But, unlike performance marketing, the focus here is on creativity and the search for non-standard solutions, rather than on accurate indicators and calculations. Branding works with such invisible substances as image and reputation, which can not be touched, felt or even measured.

Brandformance = Branding + performance

In response to the trends in recent years, brandformance, which is a kind of mix of branding and performance-marketing, is gaining popularity. It absorbed the best features of both approaches and leveled out many of their shortcomings.

This is not just a fashionable word, but a completely new direction that marked the evolution in digital-advertising.

Stages of brandformance marketing

• Audience Analysis
  You find potential buyers on the Internet, make their portrait and map of interests, study their behavior, divide them into segments. For more accurate advertising, use segments that have already picked up Yandex and Google algorithms.
• Development of promotion strategy
  Take your goals and choose the tools and channels of promotion for them. Create a media plan, forecast your budget, and create a KPI system.
• Launching an advertising campaign
  On the basis of the strategy you choose the formats of advertising. Adapt materials and clips to different channels. Already at the time of launch you begin to analyze the indicators.

Why is brandformance beneficial?

• Increases the clickability of ads
  Consumers click on ads from an already familiar company more often than others.
• Reduces the cost of attracting customers
  A novelty from a well-known brand is more interesting to the consumer than a product of an anonymous manufacturer.
• Provides instant transition to the target action
  When a person watches ads on TV, they need to remember the brand or contact information. When you show media ads, you can immediately click on the link and go to your site: the home page or the order form.
• Gives high accuracy
  Since brandformance uses performance marketing tools, it allows you to accurately assess the effect of advertising campaigns.
• Uses unusual formats
  This brandformance borrowed from branding, so advertisements are served here very creatively.

Today, the approach to digital marketing has changed dramatically.
Strategies from a different set of activities, the mutual influence of which is not measured, have disappeared. They are being replaced by comprehensive solutions. Now advertisers monitor the entire path of the consumer and evaluate the effect of all advertising placements on all channels.

And it concerns both small companies and large multi-million dollar corporations with high profitability.Branding and performance can exist together – to be a single whole. Proof of that is brandformance, a new trend in marketing that only penetrates the market.There is no longer a problem of choice – we must use everything.

Digital-marketing is becoming smarter, the solution is more complicated, so success is waiting for those who are constantly developing, not afraid of changes and trying new tools and approaches.