The case for brand building alongside performance marketing

In recent years there has been a shift towards performance marketing, with eMarketer reporting that performance marketing accounted for 55.5% of the global advertising spend in 2022, which is up from 49.2% in 2021. 

The reason for this shift is due to factors which include the accountability of data-driven marketing, the increasing effectiveness of performance channels and the ability to track and attribute performance more accurately than marketing activity offline. 

Should brands ignore brand building activity? 

One brand bucking this trend is Airbnb. Back in 2019, they made the decision to slash their marketing investment by 58% ($662m!) with 82% of this reduction coming from performance marketing channels such as Paid Search.  

Airbnb shifted their focus to above the line marketing including PR and TV advertising in a bid to increase their brand awareness, and recently reported their most profitable Q4 to date.   

Dave Stephenson, CFO said

"Our brand marketing results are delivering excellent results overall with a strong rate of return, and it’s been so successful that we’re actually expanding to more countries.” 

Whilst this is an extreme example (and we certainly don’t recommend cutting your performance marketing investment by 58% unless you have budgets of their size) it does convey the power of investing in brand marketing.   

So why does brand marketing matter?

Brand advertising has always been crucial to delivering long-term customer recall and trust. It helps companies reach wider audiences, make their products or services recognisable and memorable, and help build customer relationships.

Data from IPA research found that businesses which recorded a big increase in brand advertising also saw significant growth in their business metrics.What's more, the more marketing activity strengthened brand recall, the more the performance of the business improved overall, over an extended period. 

How can we help? 

At equimedia we recognise the importance of both brand marketing and performance marketing.

We work with our clients to implement an audience-centric full-funnel approach to marketing planning and utilise our proprietary technology equiEDGE to show the full impact of both online and offline channels through attribution analysis.

Launching holistic, multi-channel campaigns allows us to discover key audiences at each stage of the decision-making journey. We can refine our understanding of these audiences and their needs as they move from consideration, through research to purchase.

With a consistent reinforcement of brand and message, retargeting and conversion activity can then be more efficient, boosted by brand activity.   

If you'd like help developing multi channel advertising campaigns that deliver reach and results, feel free to get in touch.