How To Break Through The Marketing Performance Plateau

Most marketers are performance-driven and therefore rely on measurable activities to assess what is working and what isn’t. This is fine when you are on the initial upward trajectory of your business growth, where performance marketing is essential. During this phase, marketers are laser-focused on converting clients at the point of sale, and achieving an optimum ROI is key. This is important because you will eventually get to a point where all your performance-based activities are optimised, and this is where you will hit the plateau.

So what do you do? The answer is invest in brand marketing!

There’s a reason why big brands do so much brand marketing: they are communicating with the 95%. That’s 95% of their potential customers who are inactive. These are the people who are top of the funnel; they are future customers who are not ready to buy from you right now. They are your growth audience, and your brand needs to be at the forefront of their mind when they come to make that purchasing decision. These are your future customers who do not know that your brand exists yet. Brand marketing is key to broadening your audience.

Brand marketing opens your business up to 95% more potential customers.

Often, the buyer’s journey is a long road; a potential customer may require multiple touchpoints with your brand before they purchase from you, and this is where brand marketing thrives. Brand marketing does two things which performance marketing alone cannot – it allows you to convert inactive customers and gives you the opportunity to tell a compelling brand story, one which will build an emotional connection with your growth audience. Once a customer feels an emotional connection to a brand, it is hard to break that loyalty. There’s a reason why big brands successfully build unwavering loyalty with their consumer base and have some of their customers become brand advocates. It’s because they can tell amazing brand stories which people even outside of their customer base can relate to. Big brands use brand marketing not to sell you a particular product but to showcase how their brand has helped to enhance a person’s life or experience, and this method of storytelling connects with us on a deeper level than any direct sales strategy could. As humans, we can empathise or relate to a situation or experience another person is going through, it’s instinctive. You can’t help but feel an emotion whenever you hear a story, and storytelling is the most common form of human communication.

How The Big Brands Do It

I used to never understand brand marketing and thought advertising without selling a product or service was a waste of marketing budget, but there’s a reason why big brands are market leaders and spend a significant amount of their budget on brand marketing. It’s because it works! It’s not directly measurable and will initially mess with performance marketing attribution models – but it works! When done effectively, it will reduce the overall CPA and grow your audience way beyond the performance plateau.

If you ask a person to name a fizzy soft drink, most will instinctively say Coke, ask them to name a trainer brand, and most will say Nike. Why do 90% of the world respond with the same answer even if they don’t use the brand themselves? This is the effect of great brand marketing and brand storytelling. Coke doesn’t use its adverts to tell you to buy their drink; instead, they show you people enjoying Coke and having an amazing time with their friends. They sell you a lifestyle which makes them remember Coke when they want to socialise or if you want a refreshing drink which you associate with having a good time.

Next Steps

It’s important to consider brand marketing when you’ve fully optimised your performance marketing channels and need to grow beyond the audience which knows your brand. You could incorporate brand marketing earlier, but why would you embark on new campaigns which will disrupt a process which has not reached its full potential? So focus on achieving the best CPAs for your performance marketing channels first.

Once you have achieved those optimal CPAs, it’s time to rip up the rule book and look at your marketing effectiveness from a holistic perspective. The direct attribution model no longer works. All activities lead your growth audience down the path to that final click before they make a purchase. Every touch point is essential and helps contribute towards customer acquisition.

Look at the marketing budget against CPA – initially, the CPA may rise, as brand marketing is a long-term strategy. The marketing efforts seen by your growth audience today will reap the rewards six months down the line. Rising brand awareness is the initial goal of your brand marketing activity (get noticed by a new audience), then brand recognition and brand recall (how memorable is your brand), and then brand resonance (build an emotional connection with your new and existing audience).

The best form of brand marketing is brand storytelling, and there is no better storytelling platform than video.

For most DTC brands, Christmas is the most profitable time of the year, so why do so many successful brands try not to sell you anything in their adverts? Instead, they try to create the best story to build an emotional connection with their audience, and, again, it works! We’re all familiar with tear-jerking Christmas adverts which get everyone across the country talking. It reinforces the brand when people come to buy their presents.

So, how do you make a compelling brand marketing campaign? It’s probably a good exercise to ask your customers and even your non-customers what they think of your company. What do they think of your product or your service? What does your product or service help them achieve? How does it make them feel? What do they see as the benefits of using your product or service (over your competitors)? What does your brand mean to them in terms of your values? What is their understanding of your business?

This research will form the basis of what appeals to your existing audience and what appeals to your growth audience, and most importantly, what your brand story should communicate to attract people from your growth audience.

The final article in this series explores how video can be a highly effective tool for breaking through the plateau:

Article 3: Why Video Is The Best Performance Plateau Breaker

If any of this information sounds like your current position, drop us a line. We’d love to help you break through the plateau!