Don’t leave out awareness: 3 benefits of taking an integrated campaign approach
Return on ad Spend (RoAS) is a tempting metric. Put in 1,000 USD, get a return of 2,000 USD. The short-term payback of performance marketing campaigns is at the core of the tactic's meteoric rise, also known as Direct Response (DR) campaigns. A recent advertiser perception survey found that two-thirds (65%) of advertisers agree that the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic will result in advertisers focusing on performance media that drive direct sales outcomes.
As much as I know that RoAS driven campaigns can drive substantial short-term effectiveness, I’ve seen how an exclusive focus on DR campaigns will leave your marketing blind to the long-term results. The issue with DR exclusivity is that campaign successes decay relatively soon. You can witness that with some F2P games where the flywheel of new active users raking in money stops the moment you stop pouring in new user acquisition budgets. In extreme cases, even to close to zero because the organic user base is not built up to stay and drive sustainable growth and profit. That is why I’m in favor of a holistic ROI, including conversion and awareness goals.
Before you get a headache that taking care of awareness campaigns and performance campaigns will double your workload, let me make a case for integrated campaign planning. There are no walled gardens in the programmatic media buying world of today. Only in theory awareness campaigns and performance campaigns are from different worlds. In reality, both strategies’ final boss is the customer who you want to make a purchase. The one-stop-shop to reach them at relevant moments in their buyer journey is the programmatic DSP. You can still go the extra mile with well-selected direct media buying as the cake icing to secure top awareness. But the heart of the full-funnel campaign is beating in the programmatic DSP, building awareness, one step further down creating interest, which is already connecting to the lower funnel until the conversion happens.
Taking this integrated approach is crucial, as the buyer journey before making a purchase has become more fractured than ever before. A recent Google report has revealed that a car buyer has gone through 140 searches, countless video views, and images before finally taking action. Gaming is also not too different. The more core the gaming audience is, the more will they have watched trailers, influencers playing early versions, searched for news, and followed the game’s updates on social media long before release day. Your mission as a marketer is to reach them with the right message at the right stage in the funnel.
If you build on these moments in the customer journey with an integrated campaign, you will benefit from three positive effects.
- Sustainable ROI
Brand awareness does NEVER fall to zero once you have built it. Awareness also decays but much slower than a pure sales effect. For example, there’s always a new generation of users growing into your target audience with low or no awareness of your brand. Building awareness with these new audiences pays off: According to Nielsen’s findings, marketing’s long-term impact is 88% higher than the short-term impact. Les Binet and Peter Field call it the difference between sales and saleability in their The long and the short of it research. Saleability means that high awareness and interest in your brand are influencing future buying decisions.
2. Increased advertising efficiency
Awareness’s contribution to sales uplift is underestimated. While lower funnel messaging is often limited to rational product & price messages, the upper funnel creatives provoke emotional brand association. Taking both routes is what Binet & Field call balancing the head and heart. The effectiveness grows stronger with multiple brand exposures over time and results in a powerful impact on advertising efficiency. More precisely, also the CPA gets much more attractive. I’ve seen this effect with a recent multi-market campaign where we ran performance marketing at 48% lower CPA in the Netherlands vs. three other countries. It’s not a coincidence that the Netherlands has been the market where we allocated two times the awareness budget ahead of the performance portion, achieving a ten-point uplift in awareness.
3. Reducing price sensitivity
If the product feels (mark the emotion) like being worth it, you will not wait for it to be discounted in the next sale. Brand trust and loyalty are the two key motivators to pay full price. Building this price effect through emotional brand associations takes time. But the profit effect can be almost twice as high as with strict rational campaigns. Worth noting that creativity has an instrumental role here; creatively awarded campaigns see a 7% reduction of price sensitivity than other campaigns.
If you don’t want to miss out on the benefits above, work with an integrated approach! Recently, the term performance branding is becoming more and more common to describe this campaign strategy. What it means is, if you are deploying a well-balanced mix of awareness and performance strategies, you will be rewarded with significantly higher ROI over time.
Naturally, programmatic advertising will leave you with the flexibility to move awareness and performance budgets around based on your most relevant metrics, be it awareness lift, CTR, CPA, or view rates. Websites and network publishers also adapt to the new reality where marketers being used to working programmatically will ask for flexibility in their media plan. That comes in very handy for every integrated campaign and will allow you to take the approach performance marketers are familiar with: stay flexible with channels and budgets and keep optimizing until the ROI is right.
