Performance marketing is often seen as a short-term, tactical approach, while brand purpose is labelled as long-term and somewhat ‘fluffy’. Referring to them as such can lead you to believe they have nothing in common, but in reality, they fuel each other. At RKH, we strongly believe that brand purpose is key to creating a solid foundation for generating results, and we’re going to tell you why.
Plotting any route requires a destination, and the same goes for your marketing. Knowing your brand purpose is integral to creating a marketing plan that aligns with your brand and delivers results. Of course, you can create a marketing plan without a brand purpose, but it’s going to be reactive and inefficient, and reactive and inefficient marketing doesn’t build brand equity.
Your marketing should tie in to the overarching purpose of your brand - why your brand exists beyond numbers on a spreadsheet or end-of-year report. Aligning your strategy with your purpose means you always have a larger goal to work towards, and it minimises the risk of getting caught up in reactive tactics which waste time, money, and resources.
When every tactic and every move is geared towards the ultimate vision, your whole business can work more efficiently and effectively.
Ensuring your teams know what they’re working on the minimum for a cohesive project, but they need to know the why, too. Knowing the reasoning behind any campaign is better for planning, and it also helps to encourage buy-in from the team themselves.
Brand consistency isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have for any brand that is serious about building long-term equity. In order to build that equity, brands must be instantly recognisable to consumers, so that they’re always front-of-mind when the time comes for people to make a purchase decision.
Without brand purpose, achieving creative consistency is difficult at best. Purpose is the golden thread that runs through every channel, campaign, and touchpoint - it’s the component that makes all your output stand out as yours. Inconsistency can be disastrous for a brand campaign, so your brand purpose needs to be front and centre for every team on every project.
In a recent blog post, we wrote about the importance of collaboration across teams, and how working in silos can hamper the effectiveness of campaigns. With a clear brand purpose, all your teams are singing from the same hymn sheet; this collaborative approach helps to create more insightful data analysis, more impactful creative, and ultimately, more effective campaigns.
Purpose is the golden thread that runs through every channel, campaign, and touchpoint
Customers spend more with brands they trust, and they’re more likely to recommend those brands to their friends and family. Building a reputation like this requires immaculate consistency, and brand purpose is key to defining what that consistency looks like.
Brand purpose should inform your brand guidelines, which then inform consistent campaigns across all platforms. When customers see that consistency and feel that familiarity, it deepens their trust in your brand.
If you’ve got a strong direction for your brand, then you won’t need to waste resources testing random campaigns or creative - you’re testing your brand purpose. This efficiency of spend will help to increase ROI over time, as brand trust grows.
Performance marketing is geared towards the rational side - promoting offers and features, using CTAs to encourage conversions - but with brand purpose, you’re adding an emotional hook to your marketing, which can make your messaging more meaningful to your customers.
You might already know the answer to that question, or you might be wondering about it whilst reading this article. Here are a few things to do to find out whether you’re putting your purpose front-and-centre:
Get under the hood of a campaign you’ve got running at the moment, or the most recent campaign you delivered. Compare it with your brand purpose - is the campaign enforcing it or contradicting it? If it’s the former, then great, but if it’s the latter, then you need to make changes.
In order to fully understand whether your campaign supports your brand purpose, you need to look closely at how you’re measuring success. Too often, brands only track surface-level metrics (reach, clicks, conversions) without considering if the campaign is also reinforcing the values and mission that sit at the core of the brand. Make sure your framework includes not just performance metrics but also perception measures -things like brand sentiment, awareness of your purpose.
Brand purpose carries more weight if everyone is familiar with it, and this is key to maintaining cross-channel consistency, too. Can everyone on the team relay the purpose of your brand as well as the current campaign? If not, consider creating some refresher materials or talks to bring people up to speed.
Performance marketing can be fantastic for driving success, but only when it’s backed by brand purpose. Without brand purpose, performance marketing is like running fast without knowing where you’re going.
Brand purpose is more than just inspiration for marketing campaigns; it informs your performance marketing, making it more consistent, impactful, and profitable.
Before you plan your next campaign, make sure to revisit your brand purpose and assess it for relevancy and authenticity. If you need help refining your brand purpose, or threading it through your next campaign, get in touch with us today - we can help.
We've helped brands identify and establish their brand purpose, and devised campaigns which share that purpose with an engaged audience. Chat to us to see how we can do the same for you.
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