The controls and measurement for performance advertising keeps getting more granular, more precise and more sophisticated. Yet brand advertising – even on digital channels – may feel like it’s stuck in the 1950s.
Advertisers blanket broad audiences with high-level brand messages, accepting that the value and impact of these efforts may be largely intangible or unmeasurable, and conceding to the infamous lament of John Wanamaker from the 1950s: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Advertisers no longer have to accept this lack of specificity in controls and measurement of their brand campaigns.
Savvy advertisers are working backward, applying the core principles from performance campaigns: aligning more precise strategy, reaching more granular audiences, with more tailored creative and more relevant and goal-aligned measurement – with an eye focused on longer-term brand growth.
But this all centers on one key ingredient: full-funnel, cross-channel visibility of a customer journey that’s no longer neatly linear.
What advertisers are missing: full-funnel visibility
A person may not start out with a quest to buy a specific black cocktail dress, for example. Instead, they might spot by an influencer in a social post wearing a dress they admire. Later, they might watch a movie while streaming their favorite TV show and take note of a fashion choice one character wears to a party. That’s when they might take notice of ads for black dresses. Only then might the real research begin.
On the surface, today’s brand advertising has the appearance of modern, sophisticated digital campaigns. Underneath, it still adheres to conventional mass media paradigms.
Advertisers accept imprecise reach, more generic messages and less concrete measurement because it’s also accepted that it’s nearly impossible to see these early stages of the customer journey. Advertisers don’t know who these top-of-funnel prospects are, as they’re not yet in their first-party infosphere. So, they lack campaign effectiveness, have difficulty tailoring creative, and may struggle with measurement and campaign building techniques.
The customer journey isn’t linear – and that’s good news
But the traditional model of the customer journey as a linear process or a chronological funnel no longer represents the way people shop today.
Rather than a straightforward, one-way process, today’s customer journey more closely resembles constellations mapped across the stars. Customers interact with brands throughout each day. They engage while researching products and placing orders online, when streaming music and movies, scrolling through social media feeds and catching up on emails.
Those interactions occur across multiple channels and devices. According to a survey by Salesforce, 71% of customers say they’ve used multiple channels to start and complete a single transaction, and 64% have used multiple devices to complete one purchase.
Harnessing full-funnel visibility to refine brand advertising
The constellation of the modern buying journey may generate a vast amount of relevant information, presenting tremendous opportunities to gain insights around customers’ interactions with brand advertising.
This visibility enables advertisers to, in a privacy-safe way, build out profiles of audiences that engage with their brand advertising, understanding where they are online and what else they’re interested in and shopping for. With this focus, advertisers can more reliably stitch together a buying journey, connecting engagement with brand advertisements – whether it’s a first touch in a short, linear journey or a first, third, and seventh touch in the constellation – with a purchase later on down the line.
Granted, this may seem daunting to most advertisers, who often lack a broader view of industry trends. But the forward-thinking advertisers who are demonstrating the viability of this new approach are leaning heavily on partners like Amazon to piece together full-funnel visibility and using tools like Amazon Ads that let them more accurately quantify goals through measurement.
It’s never been easy for marketers to justify their budgets, but it is now more important than ever for them to understand how their ad spend contributes to the outcomes they need. Part of the challenge may be focusing exclusively on a few metrics.
Revenue and profit are obviously important, but they tend to represent the end of the consumer journey. It’s time to begin monitoring and reporting on metrics specific to the earlier phase and learning about how audiences are moving from one touch point along the journey to another. These could be as simple as the number of branded searches a campaign is driving or the amount of traffic to a store page. It could also be as granular as the number of pageviews a product is receiving, or using an ad partner to compare your consideration percentile to that of your peers.
The real takeaway is that this approach doesn’t require an overhaul of the entire ad program, deployment of new technology or reliance on expensive consultants. We’re seeing savvy advertisers use our self-serve tools to test out this more refined approach without a massive budget. They’re proving out their use cases for growing the impact of their brand advertising, while aligning the overall approach with performance advertising tactics, strategies and best practices.
Reimagining brand advertising through a performance lens
Brand awareness has always been a fundamental part of the customer journey. Yet today, as businesses increasingly focus on the lifetime value of a customer, brand advertising is no longer just a first-touch tactic. It’s now critical for maintaining engagement, loyalty and stickiness – keeping customers engaged with the brand across more nebulous buying journeys, as well as in between discrete buying journeys when customers may not be in-market for anything a company offers.
This expanded role and increased focus on brand advertising demands a more sophisticated approach than the old “spray and pray” method with no firm metrics on the back end. In a last-touch attribution world, advertisers need to think one or two steps ahead. They need to understand what metrics align with the right strategy at various stages of the customer journey.
The key is gaining full-funnel visibility and harnessing the rich signals surrounding the constellation of customer touch points to get the insights advertisers have traditionally been missing. These insights enable advertisers to tie to the controls and targeting to the creative and measurement – and get much more specific with their brand advertising strategy.
By aligning more refined campaign strategy with more precise controls, more tailored creative, and more relevant, reliable measurement advertisers are enabled to work backward from performance advertising — and transform brand advertising from an outdated art into a modern science.
