Balancing awareness and performance: How to get the most out of digital advertising
Digital advertisers have always found it difficult to choose between a branding strategy and a performance led strategy. There has been much debate on which form of marketing or campaign will give advertisers the best returns, but so far it has been inconclusive.
- Branding campaigns focus on spreading awareness about the company and creating a positive recall for the brand. Such campaigns usually do not have a call to action and make use of a more native approach to relay the brand’s message. The metrics measured for such campaigns include impressions, reads or views.
- Performance campaigns are focused on eliciting specific actions from the users like a click or a registration or purchase. These actions made by the users are also considered as the metrics for the campaigns based on which the success or ROI is calculated.
In theory, both forms of campaigns are different with radically separate end goals. But from the perspective of the company, the ultimate goal remains the same – to get the user to make a purchase.
So, does this mean that performance campaigns would be a choice in digital marketing and that branding campaigns would not be able to drive results? The answer is no. In the internet universe, it might seem that branding and performance belong to different worlds and are opposites to each other, but in reality, they support each other to drive the results the company wants. Imagine you come across an advertisement for a diploma course from a university that you have never heard of. Even though the ad might be asking you to click and offering a discount on the fee, you may not be interested in it because you have never heard of that brand. On the other hand, you might log in to the website of a university or college in your city to check what courses they are offering, without guidance from any ad, because you trust that brand.
Consider the traditional funnel model of marketing. It follows a linear approach where brands try to get as many people interested as possible in their offerings and then slowly convert them into loyal customers. Today, however, users access most of the information online across devices and across platforms such as websites, apps, social media, etc. The behavior pattern of how a user now takes a decision to make a purchase has changed. Consider Google’s report on how a prospective car buyer gathers information online. This report tracks the online movements of a car buyer over a span of three months as she conducts research on which car to buy. She goes through almost 140 Google searches, along with countless video views, images, and signing up for information from dealers. It was also interesting to note that 71% of this user’s interactions happened on mobile.
One of the most important conclusions of this report was that compared to times before the internet, buying today has become more fractured. Sometimes, a user may need just one push to get converted into a customer, and in some cases, they might spend three months or even a year just gathering information and not make a single purchase.
What advertisers can take away from this is today the decision to make a purchase is taken by a user on his or her own terms. Advertisers may find performance campaigns a more tempting approach, but what is needed is a balance between branding and performance campaigns. Advertisers can think of such a balanced approach as having the best of both worlds. Brand marketing helps give exposure to their brand whereas performance marketing would give users that extra nudge required to convert them into customers. At MGID we believe that since the lines between the two approaches are being erased, media budgets will be allocated to channels that are able to offer such integrated solutions to advertisers. We term it brandformance.
A performance and branding integrated approach offer a more brand conscious use of performance marketing channels and tools. Through our experience here at MGID, we have found that advertisers chose the balanced branding and performance, or brandformance, approach because it gives them better ROIs by effectively spending the budgeted campaign amount for maximum returns. The second reason we found is that it allows real-time optimization of the campaign. Since all the analytics is available from the moment the campaign goes live, advertisers can make changes to the targeted audience or other KPIs to achieve their campaign targets. KPIs such as views, cost per view, recall lift for awareness, CTR, brand interest lift for consideration, and customer loyalty index, post-click, and post-view for action, can be tracked in real-time and modifications reflect immediately. We believe that in 2021, advertisers would show an even higher inclination towards the brandformance approach for the reasons mentioned above.
AdTech companies, as well as publishers, have found that native content and contextual targeting give the best results when employing an integrated approach. Both focus more on the user experience and put the brand’s message in a contextually relevant web environment which gives it higher reception. Advertisers can achieve the right mix of visibility and awareness without compromising on performance with contextual and native advertising.
About the author:
Pankaj Sharma, Country Head, MGID India