June 9, 2022
To Stop the CMO Revolving Door, Bring Brand and Performance Together
Dedicating time and money to launching a large branding initiative is important not only for building brand awareness and consideration, but also for reinforcing your brand’s identity and culture. However, it’s not always easy to know where to start when putting these initiatives together. You’ll have to think about questions like, “How exactly does our target audience behave on the internet, and how can we find them?” or “How should we best measure the success of this initiative?” While your first reaction might be to turn to a creative agency to help you answer these questions, there are several reasons your digital marketing agency can actually be a better partner for you.
Experts in Messaging and Targeting
Since your digital agency already manages your SEM and/or social advertising, your account managers will be experts in knowing what messaging works best and which audiences to target. The amount of data available when evaluating SEM and social efforts allows them to very confidently identify key demographics, interests, and in-market behaviors that can be used to more effectively target your branding initiatives. It’s important to remember that successful branding efforts don’t come from finding an entirely new audience, but from reaching your existing audience while they are earlier in the purchase funnel. Your digital agency can help you identify and target that audience.
Focus on Measuring Impact
Most digital agencies are performance-focused, which means that they are constantly striving to tie spend back to measurable improvements in performance. When it comes to branding initiatives, this data-driven attitude will benefit you by giving you unique insight into branding’s impact on bottom line revenue. For example, at Metric Theory, we typically take a control vs. experiment approach to branding initiatives. This allows us to measure the performance differences between an exposed group and a non-exposed group to calculate brand lift and impact.
Cross-Channel Learnings
By keeping branding and digital efforts at a single agency, you will get more insight into cross-channel data. These learnings can be leveraged seamlessly across channels. Different teams within a single agency will be able to communicate continuously about what they’re seeing on various channels and shift investment if needed to ensure overall budget is spent as effectively as possible. You will also be able to more effectively evaluate the results from each channel where you run branding campaigns, as well as how all those channels tie together and contribute to overall results.
As you’re planning out budgets and initiatives for the new year, don’t underestimate the benefits of using your existing digital agency to manage larger branding initiatives. The expertise in targeting, focus on measuring impact, and cross-channel learnings that your digital agency can provide will help you have the most successful campaign to-date.
