In today’s social media-driven world, measuring the return on your marketing investments is more crucial than ever. While building your brand helps tell your story and build customer loyalty, it’s performance marketing that helps you measure whether your strategy is actually working. According to a recent eMarketer survey, 56% of global brands experienced better results when they blended branding and performance, breaking down the traditional barriers between the two.
That’s where “brandformance” comes in. It’s the sweet spot that combines strong brand recognition with data-driven results, giving you the best of both worlds. Let’s dive into five key strategies for growing your reach with a brandformance approach.
Choose the Right Channels to Maximize Reach
Omnichannel marketing is essential in today’s retail environment. As Retail Dive reports, campaigns using three or more channels have an average engagement rate of 18.96%, compared to 5.4% for single-channel campaigns. Failing to deliver high-quality omnichannel experiences can lead to a 10% revenue loss.
Before diving into brandformance, assessing your current performance marketing channels is important. Take a step back and evaluate how your performance marketing is doing and how your resources are being used.
Amazon is an excellent example of how a multi-channel strategy works. Originally just an online bookstore, Amazon now includes an e-commerce platform, Amazon Prime, physical stores (like Amazon Go and Amazon Books), and third-party sellers working together to maximize its brand’s reach.
Set a Performance Budget That Works for You
According to Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, marketing budgets have held steady at 9.1% of total company revenue. However, in 2025, 75% of marketers expect their budgets to grow, with 20% predicting increases of over 20%.
In some cases, adopting a blended omnichannel brandformance strategy may require adjusting your marketing budget. If a company is willing to invest in brandformance at the expense of short-term profits, the budget for performance marketing can be expanded. Alternatively, it can reduce the performance marketing budget and reallocate some of it to brand-performance efforts.
A prime example comes from Nike in 2020, when they brought in a new CEO, John Donahoe. The company’s heavy focus on short-term performance marketing led to brand erosion, ultimately lowering its customer awareness and impacting long-term growth. Donahoe shifted the focus to performance marketing and ignored long-term brand building, which led to reduced recognition of Nike among new customers and weakened the brand.
Keep Track of Key Metrics
89% of leading marketers use strategic metrics, such as gross revenue, market share, or customer lifetime value (CLV), to measure their campaign effectiveness.
When analyzing performance marketing, you should assess the impact across different regions—whether cities or countries—and track shifts in organic traffic, conversion rates, and click-through rates (CTR) within performance channels. Be sure to evaluate both performance and brand metrics as part of your analysis.
Social media is one of the most effective brandformance tools available today. We combine aspects like brand image with measurable data points, such as cost per thousand impressions (CPM), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and app installations.
At Flowwow, we use brandformance marketing tools that influence both brand reach and recognition while also delivering measurable sales. For example, influencer marketing helped us acquire over 40,000 new customers and generate over 100,000 orders in 2024, with the total reach from this effort being over 220M.
Define Your Target Audience and Craft the Right Messages
In 2024, advertisers can reach over 1.08B adult TikTok users each month or about 17.9% of all internet users aged 18 and older. Moreover, 92% of TikTok users take action after watching a video, and 37% end up purchasing something they discovered through the app.
Once you’ve identified your channels and allocated your budget, it’s time to craft a unique value proposition for each platform. Highlighting your competitive advantages is key in helping potential customers understand why they should choose your brand.
IKEA uses TikTok to promote its products and inspire users to redesign their homes. For example, through the #IKEAHomeTour campaign, IKEA showed how to transform small spaces using its products, which particularly resonated with younger audiences. Videos using this hashtag gained thousands of views. Additionally, IKEA hosted a virtual IKEA Festival, which offered a global home tour where participants shared ideas and inspiration for improving their homes.
Continuously Update and Refine Your Strategy
To stay on top of your game, use popular tools like Google Search Console, SKadNetwork, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other social media platform metrics to keep your data fresh. For example, at Flowwow, where influencer marketing plays a key role, our success relies on carefully selecting our target audience and brand messages. We continuously refine our strategies based on customer responses to improve campaign effectiveness.
A solid brandformance strategy not only boosts brand awareness and customer loyalty but also helps drive quality conversions and reduce customer acquisition costs in the long run. We track metrics like sales through tracking links, orders with unique coupon codes tied to different channels, organic search growth, and share of voice.
Youfoodz, which specializes in delivering prepared meals, ran a successful influencer campaign that included using unique discount codes, tracking sales via referral links, evaluating organic search, and monitoring the increase in brand-related search queries post-campaign. As a result, they saw a significant boost in sales and enhanced brand awareness.
Wrapping It Up: The Power of Brandformance
When you combine the best aspects of brand-building with performance marketing, you get a strategy that drives both measurable impact and lasting brand loyalty. By carefully selecting the proper channels, setting a flexible budget, tracking key metrics, and continuously refining your approach, you can create a powerful brandformance strategy that delivers measurable success. Embrace this integrated approach, and watch your brand reach new heights!
Irina Tatarinova is the brand director at Flowwow, a global gifting marketplace.
