How do you balance performance marketing with brand awareness and loyalty initiatives?

Balancing performance marketing with brand awareness and loyalty initiatives requires a strategic approach: 1. Define Objectives: Clearly set goals for both performance marketing and brand-building, ensuring they support each other. 2. Segment Audience: Tailor campaigns to different segments, balancing direct response with brand and loyalty efforts. 3. Test and Optimize: Continuously A/B test and refine to find the right balance between performance and brand strategies. 4. Align with Brand: Ensure all efforts, whether performance-driven or brand-focused, align with your brand’s messaging. 5. Balance Portfolio: Allocate budget across performance, brand awareness, and loyalty to drive both short-term and long-term success.

Most leading platforms have moved to 'objective based advertising', including LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. This means: 1. Selecting the objective is the very first step while setting up a marketing campaign. 2. The platform algorithm optimises ad delivery and results for that particular objective. 2. Advertisers need to be clear about their KPIs and evaluate the campaign accordingly. It's an obvious and yet common error among marketers to expect more than one level of marketing performance. For instance, expecting great website traffic from a campaign with 'Brand Awareness' or 'Engagement' objective.

Start with clarity. Establish distinct goals for both performance marketing and brand awareness initiatives. While performance marketing focuses on measurable metrics like conversions and ROI, brand awareness aims to build trust, recognition, and loyalty.

Don't measure results for campaigns aimed at different stages using ROAS or CPA/CPL. This approach is a big misunderstanding of how display or content promotion works, and what are their goals. There are different micro conversions that fit different stages users may be at. If you are trying to push someone who only started discovering a category into a purchase, then you are paying to be a menace to your users. Look up something called Content Awareness Matrix. There are unaware, problem aware, solution aware, and product aware users. It has big implications for paid channels. Many of these people need help, education, and opportunities to develop trust – rather than a "buy now" or "schedule a demo" rushed ad fest.

Customize your approach to audience subsets. Use insights to differentiate strategies for potential customers, existing customers, and loyal advocates. Performance campaigns can target conversions, while loyalty initiatives foster engagement and repeat business.

What message and offer works for what audience and at what time in the lifecycle. Using a lowest common denominator approach will cause your results to be mediocre, when compared to an automated segmentation strategy with bespoke messaging based on the segment.

Adding to the above point, segmenting your audience also helps to identify, fine-tune and optimise for better performing subsets of your audience. In other words, rather than running one campaign with a very large audience, it's better to split the audience into multiple campaigns using one or more targeting parameters, such as geo, seniority, years of experience, industry, job-function, etc. This will make campaign evaluation easier and more scientific. Depending on the results the better performing subsets can be prioritised with more competitive bids, larger share of budgets, etc.

~ Understand that different segments of your audience may have varying needs and preferences. Segment your audience based on factors like demographics, psychographics, purchase behavior, and engagement levels. Tailor your performance marketing efforts to target specific segments with relevant messaging and offers while also considering how to nurture brand awareness and loyalty among each segment.

Continuously test creative elements, messaging, and channels. Use performance marketing metrics to refine ads, while also analyzing engagement and sentiment for brand-building efforts. Optimization ensures both strategies evolve for maximum effectiveness.

~ Continuously test and optimize your marketing campaigns across both performance and brand awareness channels. Experiment with different messaging, creative assets, ad formats, and targeting options to determine what resonates best with your audience. Use A/B testing and data analysis to refine your approach and maximize results.

ABT. Always. Be. Testing. If you’re not constantly trying to beat the champion performance, over time your performance marketing will suffer and you’ll be looking back wondering why your performance dwindled over time.

There are too many variables in marketing for advertisers to not test continuously. A good performing campaign can either suddenly or over time stop delivering great results because of varying factors, such as, audience exhaustion, creative exhaustion, entry of new competitors, change in demand, macro economic forces, change in audience needs and behaviours, etc. "Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving." - David Ogilvy

Test and optimise by strategically allocating funds and resources between performance marketing and company goals. Track key metrics such as ROI, getting customers' costs, and perceptions of the brand. Experiment with various approaches to find the best balance for driving short-term conversions while also increasing long-term brand awareness as well as loyalty. Change strategies based on performance data.

- Targeted messaging: Don't just push sales messages in brand awareness campaigns. - Long-term view: Successful brand building is a marathon, not a sprint. - Know your brand inside-out: Clearly define your brand identity - mission, values, target audience, and brand voice - Content is Key : Create high-quality content that educates, entertains, and aligns with your brand values. - Customer feedback: Actively seek customer feedback on your brand perception.

Be clear with your brand voice and mission what they are looking for this will help you lay down your brand identity and performance goals . Use consistent branding across all channels and monitor the performance . Alligning your action plays a salient role in performance marketing .

Consistency is key. Ensure performance marketing campaigns reflect your brand's tone, values, and visual identity. This alignment strengthens trust and credibility, bridging the gap between immediate sales and long-term loyalty.

~ Ensure that your performance marketing efforts align closely with your brand identity, values, and messaging. ~ While the primary goal may be driving conversions, maintaining brand consistency across all touchpoints is essential for building trust and credibility with your audience. ~ Incorporate brand elements such as logos, colors, tone of voice, and storytelling into your performance marketing campaigns.

Aligning performance marketing with brand awareness and loyalty initiatives while staying true to your brand identity is crucial for long-term success. When your brand messaging and values are consistently reflected across all marketing strategies, you build trust, credibility, and emotional connections with your audience.

Allocate budgets wisely to balance short-term wins and long-term growth. Invest in high-performing channels for immediate results while nurturing brand awareness through storytelling, content, and community engagement to sustain customer loyalty over time.

First make sure you’re investing in paid media channels where you can capture existing demand. Don’t overpay to capture 100% of this demand but test to identify the marginal cost curves. And test to understand the incremental impact of your spend rather than rely on what Google and Meta tell you is the impact of your spend. After you have captured demand, generating new demand will be more expensive, but you have to generate future interest in your category.

It is good to remember that a larger share of your audience is in the awareness or consideration stages, as compared to those in the conversion, loyalty or advocacy stages. Afterall, that's why it's called a funnel. Each member of the audience is at their own stage in the purchase funnel. Everything from strategy and communication to objective and targeting will need to vary accordingly. Furthermore, a certain amount of awareness and recall will need to be built before an audience member wants to take an action, share contact details or make a purchase. A simple frequency analysis from impression to click to conversion will help an advertiser understand this.

You tend to focus on what you can justify via numbers, and here, performance marketing will always beat branding. However, if you do not have a balance between branding and performance, over time, you will see your performance drop. This might not be a big problem in start-up and early-stage companies, where market conditions allow a pure performance approach. However, branding cannot be ignored over time and with growth.

Not only balance but build a portfolio. You can't start with everything at once. Start small and focus on priorities first. Once you get ongoing results, scale and start experimenting with other channels and tactics.

The balance does come down to the stage of growth a brand is at. A startup may want to focus 90% of their budget on performance because they need revenue to stay in business. A brand as old as McDonald's or Nike can afford to spend more on brand building because they have a strong awareness in the market. Each brand needs to really find their own sweet spot and do what makes sense for their long-term growth.

Balancing performance marketing with brand awareness and loyalty initiatives requires a strategic approach. Allocate budget and efforts to performance campaigns targeting immediate conversions. Simultaneously, invest in brand-building activities, incorporating storytelling and engaging content to enhance brand awareness. Implement loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized communication to nurture existing customer relationships. Utilize data analytics to measure the impact of each initiative and adjust the balance based on evolving business goals. The synergy between immediate performance objectives and long-term brand equity ensures a holistic and sustainable marketing strategy.

Monitor industry trends and adapt your strategies accordingly. Stay flexible and ready to shift focus based on market changes and audience behaviour. Engage with your customers regularly to build loyalty, using feedback to improve both performance marketing and brand initiatives.

Imagine a razor brand you love, surprises you with exclusive social media content – shaving hacks, funny memes, maybe even a discount code for their new body scrub. They're not just pushing the next sale, they're rewarding you for being a fan! Suddenly you feel like you're part of a club, and that loyalty translates to future purchases. Performance marketing gets you in the door, but brand awareness and loyalty programs keep you coming back for more – with a smile on your face.

Think of this as a waterfall. Marketers should first run campaigns that will capture existing demand; performance marketing does that well. Creating new demand will always be more expensive than capturing existing demand. Running brand ads is the way to generate new demand and needs to be done very carefully. I recommend running test and control campaigns in different geographic markets to be able to measure the impact of brand campaigns. Ideally, you measure the incremental lift from your performance campaigns and compare that to the lift in your brand campaign geo test. That way you have a sense of your overall return on investment on a blend of performance and brand.