Uniting Brand and Performance in Marketing Strategies

Read more about Uniting Brand and Performance in Marketing Strategies

Uniting Brand and Performance in Marketing Strategies

Brand Brand, Culture, Omni-channel Marketing, Performance Media 4 min read

We are currently in the midst of a unique moment in our history and, consequently, in our marketing practices. Never before have marketers had such a wide array of options for launching campaigns and expanding their businesses. There is an abundance of channels and formats to choose from when it comes to communicating the brand, along with a wealth of data waiting to be analyzed and understood. It sounds like a dream come true, but the reality is, this era of abundance also presents its fair share of challenges.

With so many options at hand, brands are spending significant time, money and effort on creating content that sometimes fails to resonate with their target audience and build relevance in the long run. Crafting and sustaining iconic and culturally significant brands has never been a simple undertaking, but the rise of AI and the proliferation of content have further compounded this challenge—especially in a post-pandemic world where consumer attention is increasingly saturated and apathetic towards brand messaging.

If this sounds all too familiar, rest assured that you are not alone. As someone who has experienced these challenges firsthand, I understand the frustration. However, the key lies in recognizing your unique value and identifying the specific opportunities and tools to capitalize on.

The challenge: navigating a million touchpoints.

In the current landscape, brands encounter two primary challenges when it comes to their marketing efforts. The first one stems from the fact that consumers now place a growing emphasis on authenticity and genuine connections. As a result, their scrutiny of brand content and positioning has escalated. The second challenge has to do with their structure. More often than not, brands’ marketing teams have become more divided and hyper-focused, often operating in isolation with their metrics and objectives, neglecting the broader organizational and long-term strategies.

These teams often operate with a narrow perspective of their responsibilities. Brand teams focus on placing advertisements during prime-time TV slots, while performance teams prioritize generating ROI and revenue. Unfortunately, they often lack awareness of how the other team’s efforts impact their own. On top of that, there are thousands of touchpoints between the TV commercial and the static conversion piece—and it’s very dangerous to ignore them.

Google calls these thousands of mini-steps the messy middle, that place where people are constantly exploring and evaluating different brands and communications, feeding their decision-making biases and buying behavior. According to the 2020 report, the messy middle is a space of abundant information and unlimited choice, where consumers have learned to use cognitive shortcuts to navigate. In the traditional conversion funnel, we usually call this stage consideration, but a lot of potential is lost in considering it a single phase, without the nuances of people’s real consideration behavior.

Within the messy middle, there is an additional layer to consider when devising a marketing strategy. The consumption of content and media, in general, has changed a lot in the last two decades. What was once a futuristic notion, omnichannel has now become a tangible reality. Consumers now anticipate greater coherence and consistency between their digital and offline experiences. The democratization of content creation, largely propelled by platforms like TikTok, has resulted in audiences transitioning from mere consumers to content producers themselves (today, 41% of Gen Z identify as content creators). Lastly, the range of possibilities for content consumption has expanded exponentially, encompassing various screen sizes and often simultaneous use of multiple screens.

The solution: creativity and personalization take center stage.

Despite the challenges, brands and marketing professionals now have an abundance of resources at their disposal to navigate them and establish a strong strategic position. In a world gradually influenced by artificial intelligence and highly personalized media solutions such as Performance Max, creativity and diversity have become the main characters in a compelling brand narrative.

Embracing fresh perspectives and harnessing them to fuel creative innovation can transform your brand into a powerhouse. Brands and professionals who skillfully tap into this potential will gain a competitive edge in the years to come. How? To begin with, they must develop a comprehensive content production strategy that aligns with the brand’s mission and values while resonating with the fundamental emotions of the target audience.

It may seem necessary for a brand to be present in every conversation at all times. However, this approach is not only untrue, but can also harm consistency and relationships with loyal consumers. The role of a seasoned and strategic marketing professional is to thoroughly comprehend the core pillars that distinguish the brand and determine where and how its voice will be effectively heard by consumers.

To be relevant today is not about being on every channel, using every format and taking a stance on every issue, but rather about being meaningful wherever you are. With viewers becoming more discerning, capable of deciding within milliseconds whether to engage with content or not, mere presence is insufficient. Brands must strive to be an integral part of the culture, and engage with matters that align with their purpose and target audience.

Cultural listening, a relatively new concept, involves the skill of extracting and reinterpreting behaviors observed in a variety of media, such as TikToks, tweets, Instagram posts, songs, series, and other online or offline content, from a specific community. The objective is to navigate and thrive within a dynamic and ever-changing culture influenced by diverse factors—just look at how quickly TikTok’s viral trends come and go—without losing the brand essence.

In digital, social networks and content creators serve as powerful tools. They not only allow brands to gauge the cultural zeitgeist but also enable active collaboration with creators to evoke emotional connections and diverse perspectives, thus nurturing creativity. Offline, it is equally crucial to align with culturally relevant events like concerts and gatherings, since this sphere presents additional opportunities for brands to engage with the audience in a sensory and memorable way, fostering deeper communication and connection.

Every channel and touchpoint presents an opportunity to build a brand. At the end of the day, users don’t know the difference between brand and performance, they just know it’s brand communication and will judge it as such. The recipe for success lies in brand and performance teams working more and more closely together, exploring and learning together what the “messy middle” of the business is and how to guide consumers in their decision-making process.

In the face of apathy, it is culture that brings the solutions that marketing teams seek, while creativity has the power to transform channels and formats into communication powerhouses. It is our responsibility to cultivate sensitivity and incorporate both culture and creativity into our short-, medium-, and long-term marketing planning.

Our Head of Marketing Planning emphasizes the challenges and opportunities in using creativity, personalization and cultural listening for an omnichannel strategy. branded content always-on content brand authenticity campaign performance omni-channel marketing content personalization advertising and culture branding personalized creativity Brand Omni-channel Marketing Performance Media Culture

Revising the Personalization Approach to Raise Resonance, Relevance and Reach

Read more about Revising the Personalization Approach to Raise Resonance, Relevance and Reach

Revising the Personalization Approach to Raise Resonance, Relevance and Reach

5 min read

You might want to sit down for this: Gartner recently released its report looking ahead at 2020, and in it, they offer some surprising findings. Most notably, the firm predicts that “80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both” by 2025.

Yet consumers love personalization. According to Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, 67% of respondents think brands should automatically adjust content based on context, and 42% are annoyed by content that isn’t personalized. Personalization isn’t something that gives a brand an edge over competition; it’s an expectation from consumers who crave relevance among an abundance of content. But when personalization seems tough for many marketers, what can be done?

These challenges identified by Gartner exemplify how important it is that marketers set themselves up for success when investing in personalization. Because personalization isn’t the problem—it’s whether marketers have built an attribution model, have enabled it to surface up insights or drive action, and are revising that approach based on the results they receive. Those who don’t will ultimately fail, leading to the frustrations raised by Gartner. While brands shouldn’t abandon personalization, they could do without unwieldy investments and initiatives that take years before their value can be adequately measured, perhaps even locking them into a setup that doesn’t actually work. Here’s what to do instead.

Strategic Planning is Key to Effective Personalization

In light of recent privacy concerns, some brands are completely rethinking the way they target audiences. Google and UK newspaper The Guardian, for example, teamed up to offer Google Home ads that are relevant to the types of recipes next to which they were placed. To achieve this, they taught a machine learning model to identify qualities about each recipe (like sweet versus savory or ingredients), which was then used to dynamically build relevant ads—basically, targeting data about the actual recipes rather than the readers that are interested in them.

Monk Thoughts 67% of consumers think brands should automatically adjust content based on context.

Adobe

2018 Customer Content Survey

There are two takeaways when it comes to initiatives like this. First, it signals the growing importance of contextual triggers and how they relate to the consumer’s mindset—consider, for example, programmatically delivering a piece of content in response to a playlist based on mood (“Songs for Relaxing”) or activity (“Background Music for Cooking”). Second, the strategy demonstrates the importance of having a backend taxonomy of content that can plug into the systems needed to deliver such a personalized experience—and that’s precisely where many are having trouble.

Data isn’t really the primary inhibitor to personalization, nor is it technology; it’s often people, and this can range from digital literacy to operational structure. According to data from eMarketer, only about a third of US marketers are confident in their ability to create or deliver personalized advertising to customers. A whopping 44% say that they have no real CX strategy or tech capability.

“Even digital professionals who have customer data often say that their teams are disconnected from other groups and lack the resources to find insights in the data to improve CX,” writes Forrester Senior Analyst Nick Barber and VP Principal Analyst Brendan Witcher in their report, “There’s No Personalization Without Content Intelligence.” “Failure to find the right size and structure for the organization is a common problem; in fact, digital execs cite it as the top barrier to the successful delivery of digital experiences.”

Monk Thoughts Look at other investments across the journey, across functions, that are going to have immediate payoffs and that are actually smaller in their efforts.

Brian Solis

Digital Analyst

Brands need confidence in their data and ownership in orchestrating the digital experience, though the size and scale of digital transformation required have made this cumbersome for many. To avoid becoming stuck in lengthy implementation phases, brands should seek out agile partners that can help them build momentum and quickly and achieve faster results.

In an interview with LinkedIn, Digital Analyst Brian Solis describes the process thus: “While you’re migrating things to the cloud, while you’re doing bigger, more infrastructure-focused investments, we can also look at other investments across the journey, across functions, that are going to have immediate payoffs and that are actually smaller in their efforts.”

We call this zero-to-one: rather than boil the ocean by going immediately to a level-ten experience, we prioritize initiatives with the smallest investment but highest return. An example of this is when we developed a quiz for supermarket brand Jumbo, which helps customers find a wine or beer that best fits their tastes.

The first step was to build a basic questionnaire that could provide value to any customer; after the simple iteration went live, we expanded it to include a more advanced and diverse line of questioning to accommodate those with more nuanced preferences and taste. This shows how brands can iteratively implement more personalized solutions that drive meaningful value to consumers through an agile process.

It’s time to adapt to agile.

Learn more about our accountable agile approach

Personalization Fails When It Doesn’t Add Value

“Today’s landscape has an amazing amount of engineering, but it’s used with little to no empathy: this idea that just because the technology’s there, we need to relentlessly retarget and stalk them across the web,” says MediaMonks Founder and Board Member Wesley ter Haar. “When you start thinking about the user, you start thinking about what we call personal inflection points. Where is the value for the user in how we communicate? How can we be assistive?”

Experimentation is key to adopting a more customer-driven approach to data—in a way, it’s about thinking of data as a two-way street, through which user feedback can be applied to further the relevance and reach of your message. This again ties back to the need for an agile production process, in which teams can implement this feedback with speed and iterate from there.

For skincare brand Gladskin, we continually tested elements--like while models or copy were used per asset--in an agile approach to content optimization.

For example, we took an interests-based approach to raise awareness of the research behind skincare brand Gladskin’s award-winning formula. The campaign centered on boosting reach while targeting its most relevant audiences based on interests, driving down CPM (cost per impression) to stretch budgets further and increase ROI in the process.

Through weekly split testing and reportage, we could determine which combination of assets made the most impact at both awareness, consideration and purchase stages across the funnel, per channel. Instead of being followed by the same ad throughout the social media experience, users ultimately found content tailored more toward their needs at each stage of the funnel.

Data can be powerful, but hoarding it away without building in the channels or workflows needed to activate it does little to help you build meaningful relationships with your audience. As consumer demand for relevant content grows, brands must be strategic in their investment with data and the architecture that powers their ability to derive insights.

Brands face many challenges in delivering relevant content to users, though personalization itself isn't to blame--it's unwieldy transformation initiatives whose true value results in too little, too late. Revising the Personalization Approach to Raise Resonance, Relevance and Reach Move past your personalization fears with agile experimentation.
Personalization accountable agile digital transformation data personal data data silos personalized creative personalized creativity

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