BRAND VS PERFORMANCE-DRIVEN ROI MARKETING

Successful brands are twice as likely to think long-term, but the pressure to deliver immediate results remains intense. To tackle the growing effectiveness gap, they need to balance them both.

Long-term marketing is about the branding, the awareness-level stuff. It's building a brand identity and getting it in front of an audience, creating emotionally resonant messages that communicate who they are and what they're all about.

Short-term marketing is more action-oriented; quick promotions with rational communications show what's on offer and why people buy from them. It drives actions and tracks and measures those actions while attributing the ROI of each asset, campaign or activity.

An IPA study shows that the optimal balance of brand and demand is a 60/40 split - 60 percent branding, 40 percent direct response.

That's how to get optimal impact.

When it comes to sponsorship, successful brands have done their homework on ensuring a good value exchange. They stick to the plan on a brand level. Meanwhile, they continue to manoeuvre every week.

Sponsorship is a platform for communication, but often, brands do not integrate it into their other marketing channels. This is a mistake.

Some things work better together. Brands should give equal attention to how they activate their sponsorships and how they tell their story, and the ways they target and measure their audience response to these messages.

Investment in sports and entertainment sponsorships delivers a unique association for a brand. In a world where media is fragmented, audience attention is difficult to get, and differentiation is hard to come by, intelligent use of sponsorship can overcome these challenges.

Combining a solid brand with short-term activation can be a powerful way to increase profits. It makes the brands advertising, social media, PR, point-of-sale, and media have more impact, making the sponsorship work harder and have more meaning.

At the heart of every sponsorship agreement is a brand alliance. Parties leverage existing intellectual property and create valuable assets to gain commercial rewards.

Brands have got to be authentic in that space. And that authenticity takes time. Association is about being smart and looking at what it would mean to customers.

Association with the right property allows brands to have a credible dialogue with a fanbase whilst using IP to amplify their content output.

That value of association is precious and lucrative. 

For example, Pepsi saw their effective Cost Per Engagement decrease by 35 percent when promoting their Champions League association versus standard creative. 

But brands don't need million-dollar sports properties and huge activation budgets to create meaningful content delivered to the right audience. They can maximise their acquired IP through an insight-led content and distribution strategy.

Using research tools at our disposal, such as Amplify, brands can predict the increased effectiveness of all their comms channels by running test and control groups based on a defined target audience.

The four KPI's it measures against are:

• Attention
• Connection
• Brand
• Conviction

Test and control groups are run based on a defined target audience using different communications channels such as advertising, point of sale, social posts, etc., with and without the sponsorship IP. You can then compare the two results against the four KPIs to assess the amplification effect.

In our experience, ALL brands see uplift against all of the KPI's, assuming the right sponsorship for the target audience is in place. 

When the world is focused on personality and human connection, a clear brand strategy strengthens likeability and can even contribute to positive social impact. But that doesn't have to be at the expense of performance-driven ROI.

Effective sponsorships, amplified through media, help brands achieve both their short and long term business objectives. And, while their flexibility can make it hard to define, our experience will help pinpoint the role sponsorship plays to support business and marketing objectives. Get in touch with our team to see how we can help.