How to find Branding/Performance balance? – Webrazzi

We intend to bring an approach to how to determine the budget balance in communications focused on awareness and performance marketing, which is one of the difficult equations to solve in digital marketing. Because we have been witnessing for a long time how these two communication methods, which have different goals, are separated from each other and these two communication methods are seen as two mutual fronts.

It is important to point out from the beginning that there is neither a single truth nor a formula for this matter. Each brand needs to address this issue on its own and decide on the right balance. What we want to emphasize in the article is to offer you a new perspective when deciding on these issues. We believe that if you can reduce the topics we have highlighted below to a discussion ground specific to your brand, you can take a healthy path forward.

Every brand should design its own marketing cycle and customer journey

• What needs to be known from the consumer’s perspective, new product or technology?
• Are there any stops in the consumer journey that need to be moved to communication?

When we separate awareness and performance communications, we make things even more complicated. Both of them serve a single brand and a common target audience, their point is essentially the same, only the paths they follow are different. While we sometimes go through more circuitous routes and different stops in brand communications, we aim to reach the same stop in the shortest and fastest way in performance communications. That’s why let’s leave aside classic marketing cycles and funnels and start by designing brand-specific journeys.

The missing aspects of brand positioning in performance communications should be identified.

• What are the contents used for performance that we cannot highlight in terms of brand awareness?

When we break this down, if there is a problem with the brand name, that is, if the main promises that the brand wants to highlight are left behind or not emphasized at all, we need to focus on whether we can solve this in the content created for performance. The most important task of the marketer is to solve problems, and while doing this, he must solve the current situation in the smartest and least costly way without creating new problems.

We must bring the communications divided into awareness and performance closer together.

We will benefit greatly from this title when creating a budget or using the existing budget. Instead of taking awareness only as access, we can position the traffic provided to the website and communications regarding application downloads as awareness communications. When we approach it this way, we will converge on two different goals that feed each other more. We should focus on zooming in on outcomes while parsing out goals.

“Impulsive access” goes against the nature of digital

If we take access as our sole focus in awareness broadcasts, we can say that we have thrown away a few million. The extent to which the advertisement reaches the consumer, under what conditions and environments the consumer is exposed to the advertisement, and if the advertising content used is a video, how much time it is watched must be measured and monitored very dynamically. Of course, the brand must have a reach target; ultimately, it needs to reach its potential consumers in the market and increase the number of customers. If we consider this access only in terms of views and frequency, we would be unfair to the capabilities of digital. Media-specific metrics such as views, clicks, sharing and liking, which we call consumer response, should always be in our lives.

Have we decided what we want to achieve for brand awareness?

• A 3 percent increase in market share, a 5 percent increase in spontaneous awareness, and the brand coming to the fore in terms of sustainability and trust in consumer research?
• Do we have these long-term goals?

If the answer is yes, then before distributing the budget we have, let’s clarify what kind of investment and strategy we need to achieve these goals. While clarifying this, gather your creative agency, media agency, consultants you work with, and your research company at the same table. Create a strategy committee and enable this team to work democratically. Their goal is not to make you happy, but to tell you the truth.

Brand-focused investments can be analyzed with the help of econometric modeling

With this analysis, you can take the guesswork out of your brand budgets and truly understand what is driving results and what you should stop investing in. For this, we must act without moving away from the integrated approach.

Can awareness and performance criteria be considered together when creating a creative content strategy?

The consumer we are trying to reach is the same, let’s not think that we have divided this with very clear boundaries and separated the masses in the marketing journey. Let’s know that this will be even more difficult than it is now, especially in a world without cookies. At this point, creative agencies have a lot of work to do and it will continue to decrease. Are the performance contents prepared with components that will serve the brand’s awareness? Mastering the dynamics of the medium and facing some realities will eliminate the habits we should avoid when producing content.

Let’s accept the realities of digital!

We have problems that are not easy to solve, such as advertising crowds, intense competition, distractibility of the target audience, low video views, low viewability, trying to reach the target audience in separate media, impressions created by bots, clicks and sites created for advertising. This environment is chaotic and costly in terms of brand awareness. We must address these problems for your brand and design the creative strategy and content strategy according to this environment.

Let’s make sure that awareness communications serve specific needs

Apart from basic brand communications such as new brand positioning, renewing the brand’s image and logo change, if there are elements that are desired to be incorporated into the brand’s DNA such as sustainability, employer brand communication and innovation, these should be separated from the campaign communications and a long-term planning should be carried out.

Each of these headings has been determined not to create a new problem for you, but to highlight problems that actually exist but that we often ignore.

When we focus on the above topics and now have more specific goals, the simplest question to answer is how should I determine my awareness and performance budget? Because in media mathematics, creating the right formula will eliminate assumptions and introduce us to the facts. This will then evolve into a decision at the senior management level within this reality. Therefore, the road to the right answer we are looking for is arduous, but promises a smooth future for the brand in the long run.