‘Brand’ or ‘performance’ marketing? It’s a trick question

By Louise Temperley, General manager, Wavemaker Select

Every single marketer is thinking about effectiveness. Whether expansive, mature blue chip or nascent brand. Yet, while you can’t move for best practice guides in advertising effectiveness, few insights have been written for scaleup companies specifically.

This seems a little strange, considering that optimising marketing effectiveness is much more difficult for a rapidly growing company. Continuing to scale is challenging without a shift in strategy. The tactics that facilitated the initial growth cycles can only take them so far, and more of the same is rarely going to cut it.

The consequences of not getting it right are also more severe. Not only do you not have the stores of baseline brand equity to rely on, but for a young brand, every penny’s impact is immediately felt. There is no room for wasted budget.

As a scaleup, effectiveness must be achieved over the short term and it has to generate a multiplier effect rather than a steady cumulative impact on business performance. In other words, brand investment has to work hard from day one.

For this reason, many scaleups are drawn to short-term, ‘performance’ media channels where it’s much easier to measure the direct linear impact. While wider marketing channels, such as TV or Out of Home (OOH), can be deemed as a ‘nice to have’.

This is a mistake. One that even ‘power brands’ can fall prey to. And at the heart of it is a common misconception that media channels fall into two camps: brand-building and sales-driving. In reality, all media channels are capable of both.

It’s time to rewrite the scaleup playbook by stepping out from easy-to-track ad platforms and into layered media plans.

This siloed way of thinking often leads to scaleups overlooking the media channels that can drive growth in the short term. Take TV; it’s often considered a long-term – and very costly – brand-building medium. But it’s also the second most effective channel for driving sales within a two-week payback. Equally, generic Pay Per Click (PPC), often associated purely with short-term acquisition, has a long-term multiplier effect higher than channels such as print and OOH.

Developing a more nuanced understanding of media channel role and mix will deliver exceptional results. Particularly as they often positively impact each other as well. To return to the example of TV, the channel can also – on average – boost the impact of your paid social by +31%, direct mail by 20% and your generic search by +8%.

The key advice would be to avoid all pre-emptive siloes. And that applies to internal structures too. It’s common to see ‘performance’ media channels such as social and PPC controlled in-house at scaleups. With newly recruited teams looking to grow awareness and attract new customers by investing in demand-generating channels. But as businesses scale, these teams start to operate more independently.

Siloed teams make it difficult to track the impact of marketing investment on sales or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) targets, which means leaders begin to miss important signals or red flags. They are also more likely to underestimate the impact of wider marketing channels on short-term performance, leading businesses into the trap of ‘brand marketing’ as a nice bolt-on where possible and ‘performance media’ considered the core driver of sales.

Let’s be honest. A customer doesn’t see ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ channels. They see adverts from the brand. A TV ad can persuade a potential customer to purchase right now, just as a Facebook ad might change someone’s perception of the brand.

All media channels can create an immediate sales effect. It’s just a case of working out which combination of them is the most effective for a business objective. In that vein, being clear about the role marketing will play in ultimately delivering the wider goals of the business is vital.

Take a step back. What do you want your advertising to achieve? Do you want to generate revenue? Improve margin? Acquire more customers? New customers? Repeat customers? More orders? More subscriptions? Establishing the basics first provides a clear focus on determining the drivers of growth and, therefore, the channels you need to explore to influence that growth.

The clearer the objective, the easier it is to measure. And arguably, how a scaleup measures success is the most important step in their media investment evolution. Otherwise, to put it simply, why are we advertising in the first place?

It’s time to rewrite the scaleup playbook. It will mean stepping out from easy-to-track ad platforms and dashboards and into layered media plans that are harder to attribute line by line. As your business scales, so indeed must your efforts toward measurement.

An approach that combines the power of both brand building and performance marketing through linked teams, measurement systems, and KPI framework that will help you scale without screwing up.

Article originally published in TechBlast.