‘Performance Marketing’ without articulating your brand means you’re throwing away money.

Can we do performance marketing first and invest in building our brand after that? If I had a dollar for each time a business owner asked us this question – I’d be bidding for a Gulfstream G700 right now. While the easy answer here, one that would help us earn faster and easier money, would be “Sure, why not?”, the hard truth is, there would no ‘performance’ in marketing if you started running campaigns without articulating your brand first. But isn’t branding expensive and wouldn’t you have to spend precious dollars on building a brand instead of on campaigns that could actually drive sales? Branding is not the gargantuan expense you imagine it to be – it can be done in phases and your initial articulation could be the result of a short, focused, 4-hour introspective all-hands session. And by advertising for sales without investing in brand, you are hurting your business’ ability to build marketing economies of scale.

What’s branding actually all about?

Simply put, your brand is an articulation of what you stand for, how do you solve your customer’s problems in a way your competition cannot do, the combination of attributes that make you unique and why should a customer choose to buy your product/service over others? By defining it and conveying it effectively to your target audience, you are creating differentiation and salience – availability for your brand in their minds, making it easier for them to buy from you instinctively when the need arises.

So that’s it? It’s this simple? Yes and no. Your brand’s articulation and your annual branding strategy should be pithy enough to fit in a single A4 sheet of paper and it should be simple enough that an intelligent teenager can understand it. However, achieving that level of clarity and simplicity takes a lot of complex thinking, hard work and experience. So why am I saying it can be done in a 4-hour session? It’s a good start. The outcome of this session can be validated through research, the positioning refined, and the strategy sharpened – but it’s a great start and in our experience it’s nearly 60% of the work done.

What happens to a Go-to-market campaign without articulating your brand first?

Two things.

One, since you do not know what your brand stands for and why exactly should someone buy your offerings, your ability to generate interest, leads and convert them into anything actionable would depend on the salability of the campaign each time or dependent on the platform you’re advertising on. So, if the art director has a bad hair day, it’s doomsday for your campaign. This will lead to a downward spiral where your marketing and sales teams start uttering inanities like inbound marketing, content strategy, social media marketing, SEO, CX, UX and a lot of other such tactical words aimed at making you contribute to the noise and become yet another faceless blob in the clutter.

Two, each time you run a campaign, you start from scratch without reaping the success of your previous campaign. Why does it happen? You don’t define your brand, you have no codes, you have no cohesiveness of messaging across campaigns, you have no discernable identifiers, you don’t gain incremental mindshare, and therefore you start from scratch each time.

On the other hand, strong brands create a brand equity that offers them economies of scale by carrying forward associations and perceptions from every campaign.

So what should you do?

Articulate your brand positioning and validate it in the market. Differentiation is key. Write down the strategy and objectives for your brand. Use design to create distinctiveness for your brand (This is the logo, website, social media pages, etc. – the comms aspect of branding that is often confused for branding itself). This is where the expense line of your P&L can range from ‘bootstrapped’ to ‘gargantuan white elephant’ – be smart, spend wisely and funnel money from here to your performance marketing. Hire a good creative team to meet your objectives by creating disruptive campaigns while establishing your brand codes.

A good marketing strategy would, for B2B companies, allocate 40-45% resources in long-term brand building and 55-60% in short-term sales activation. Marketing thought leaders Les Binet and Peter Fields have published a book on this subject, read it here.  Track your brand, seek constant feedback from the market and pivot your strategy to adjust for efficiency. Reap the benefits of building a brand.

How do we do ‘Performance Marketing’ at Perception Essentials?

• We start with a one-day workshop to articulate your brand positioning.
• Our research partners validate this in the market.
• We outline your branding and marketing strategies in-line with your business objectives.
• We define the metrics to help measure the efficacy of your campaigns.
• We work with your agencies to arrive at the ‘right sizing’ of your media spends. We are good at it – in one of our recent outings (read here) we saved the client nearly US$ 5 million (almost 40% of the original bid) in media spends without compromising on business outcomes.
• We then help you set a brand tracking mechanism and offer periodic interventions to interpret your marketing data and define the way forward.

So be smart, articulate your brand and put ‘performance’ in your performance marketing.

Author : Rohit Lingineni. October 15, 2021