Growth marketing consultant and advisor Dan Reardon

When you ask around, do you find that enough people know your brand? Are they aware of your category? Before I was at DoorDash, I worked at brands with some awareness challenges. I heard: “I think I’ve used Vudu before” or “What do you mean there’s a service to find the best credit card for me?” (It’s Nerdwallet). If you hear this kind of feedback, you know your paid media isn’t doing enough to get the word out. You need to expand beyond performance marketing.

While performance campaigns work to capture demand among people already buying in a category, brand campaigns reach people outside of your category to pull them in. Brand campaigns show people how the category is relevant and why they should explore it.

Many people are not actively “in market” for your category today, but represent future category buyers. When the need arises for them, you want them to think of you first–and exposure to your brand campaigns will increase your odds.

First up: Make “incrementality” your #1 measure

You’re likely measuring the results of your performance ads based on view-through attribution or click-through attribution. While these marketing measures can help you optimize spends within a channel, they fail at identifying true ROI. And with the deprecation of cookies, attribution is getting more sketchy. What you really need to do is embrace incrementality as the true measure of your marketing spend.

Generating data to measure incrementality is the responsible thing to do. In my experience, once you do this, you’ll start to see the ROI of your marketing campaigns look pretty rough. This will present additional data confirming that you need to run brand advertising to reach more people. You’ll be more motivated to generate demand rather than merely capture it.

How do you measure incrementality?

For some digital channels, you can measure incrementality through ghost bidding experiments that your Google or Meta reps might help set up. Another way is to run geo tests where you select several pairs of match markets, and divide them into test and control markets. Run ads in some (and not the others), then measure the lift. Note: Don’t forget to “normalize” any ROI calculations to account for the fact that buying local media is often more expensive than national media.

Many marketers believe that brand campaigns should be measured by lifts in awareness and consideration, sourced through brand tracking. But it’s tough to make a case to the CFO for investing merely to increase awareness and considerations. Tracking lifts in awareness, consideration, and sales might help you understand correlations, but ultimately, you want to measure your brand campaigns with a “common currency” as you measure your performance campaigns: a lift in incremental sales.

Your brand campaigns have more lasting impact

Many viewers of your brand campaigns are not actively “in market” and will need time before they feel a strong need for your category. That means that you’ll likely see brand campaigns generating impact for a longer time, compared to performance campaigns with their typical 7-day or 30-day lookback windows. Track the lifts in your test and control markets over several weeks and months to plot your curve. That way, you can understand how long you see effects from your brand advertising.

Video ads allow you to share plenty of content in your ads but be sure to highlight your brand colors and mention your brand several times in the spot to make your brand memorable. While people can click on your Youtube or Facebook ads, video and TV ads should help people recall your brand easily, when they need it later.

Places you can start

You can start slowly, with a smallish percent of your paid media deployed for brand campaigns that reach your target demographic. Your branding campaigns don’t have to be a lavish Super Bowl ad: ConnectedTV ads can be bought in the range of $5-10 CPM, lower than Google and Facebook rates. And don’t forget video channels like Youtube’s “Youtube for Action” which is more affordable. Just be sure your reach and frequency are high enough to generate a lift signal you’ll be able to measure. I recommend you partner with an Analytics lead to get this right.

Other than this, what’s holding you back from starting today?

Dan Reardon has propelled growth at DoorDash, Vudu, Nerdwallet, and Snapfish. Contact him at dreardon@gmail.com