Top of funnel branding: leveraging paid ads for enhanced brand awareness

Top-of-funnel branding is crucial in developing effective marketing strategies that reach your target audience and build overall trust with your consumers. Leveraging paid ads for enhanced brand awareness is not just a quick solution for driving sales and leads, but also a vital part of a full-funnel strategy.

When consistently applied over time, it establishes credibility for emerging brands. As we continue to prioritise conversions, it’s imperative to explore new ways to expand our audiences and increase opportunities for driving leads at the top of the funnel.

Understanding Top of Funnel Brand Building

In order to justify the need for top of funnel branding, we need to explore and understand some of the psychology around brand identity, awareness and perception and its importance in driving your audience to convert.

The Psychology of Brand Awareness

Understanding the psychology behind brand awareness and perception is key to building brand identity and shaping customer attitudes and decision-making. By harnessing the power of brand identity, we can understand consumer behaviour further, allowing us to influence consumer decision-making and drive sales.

Your brand identity is based on the consumer’s perception across all aspects of your business. This includes components such as your logo, brand colours, messaging, tone of voice, and customer experience. These aspects all feed into your paid advertising strategy and can be the key difference between success and failure.

By tapping into your brand identity, you will gain an understanding of your consumer values, loyalty and advocacy, which can assist you in developing customer profiles. This will lay the foundation for building appropriate audiences and expanding into new markets.

Key Differences Between Performance and Brand Campaigns

Once we have established our brand identity, we will be able to create campaigns that will stand out in a crowded market. By connecting with our target audience on a personal level, we can build brand trust. Branding campaigns take a top level view and use a long term approach.

They’re different from paid performance campaigns as they are less oriented towards driving conversions and are intended to encourage engagement and appeal to consumers on an emotional level. Performance marketing is very sales-specific, driven by (pay per click) platforms such as Meta and Google Ads. It’s based on quantitative results and will often utilise the majority of the budget. This is something we will discuss in greater detail later on.

Setting Brand Marketing Objectives

When incorporating brand awareness into your campaign mix, it’s important that you’ve set brand marketing objectives as well as performance-based objectives. Your brand marketing objectives should be unique and provide a realistic representation of what you are trying to accomplish. It should also tell a compelling story of your brand whilst establishing your brand positioning in order to capture a larger share of the market. Using these objectives in your branding will enable you to deliver high performing top of funnel campaigns, which will ultimately result in an increase in higher quality leads.

Crafting Your Paid Media Brand Strategy

In order to craft the most effective paid media brand strategy you’ll need to be on several platforms. This is achievable with both smaller and larger budgets provided you implement an effective cross channel strategy, which we will delve into a little more deeply shortly.

Selecting the Right Platforms

When it comes to choosing your platforms, it’s important to understand the nature and interests of your audience. At Gordon Digital, we do this based on audience profiles and demographics to ensure our platform recommendations are suited to the unique needs of your business. Social media is the perfect touchpoint for engaging with consumers as it allows you to build your brand identity whilst communicating with your target audience. It will help you increase your online presence, boosting your performance campaigns further down the funnel.

Then there’s Google Ad’s suite of tools that allow us to build your brand through Display and YouTube campaigns as well as Performance Max campaigns. This has the potential to help you rapidly scale your reach in a short period of time. It’s important to consider your business type to determine the platform that aligns with your objectives while allowing you to reach the right audience. For example, a B2C brand with a lot of creative assets will be best suited to Meta and Pinterest, whereas a B2B brand will leverage LinkedIn to help them achieve their goals.

Budget Allocation Frameworks

Research from Deloitte indicates that paid media is being allocated a larger proportion of marketing budgets since 2019. As financial pressure increases year on year it’s imperative that marketing budgets are spent as efficiently as possible. Budget allocations are variable depending on your overall goals, however we’d recommend spending up to 20% of your paid media budget on brand awareness and top of funnel campaigns.

Campaign Structure Best Practices

In order to achieve an effective top of funnel campaign structure on platforms such as Meta you need to have clear audience segments and custom audiences as well as strong creative.

There are 3 key segments we would expect to tap into when it comes to top level branding:

• Broad audiences- targeting a wide audience with brand messaging
• Interest audiences – targeting more relevant interest groups with specific brand messaging
• Lookalike audiences – targeting users who share similar attributes to your current customers

Cross Channel Brand Campaign Orchestration

As discussed in one of our previous knowledge centre articles, it’s almost impossible to achieve success by only advertising on one paid media channel. Once we have established relevant audience,s it’s important to use a mix of channels as they each have their unique strengths and weaknesses.

Platform Specific Targeting Approaches

Whilst we are likely to see higher overall conversion rates using a mix of channels, we can use certain platforms to then target specific audiences, taking into account differences such as demographics and behaviours. For example, with a trade-based business, we can use different platforms to reach our audiences.

We can use Meta for B2C to reach a broad audience of users who may be interested in your services. We can also use Meta to tap into lookalike audiences. Alternatively, LinkedIn can help with the B2B side of the business, building engagement and interaction with key stakeholders in relevant industries or job roles.

Frequency Management Across Channels

If we’re using cross-channel campaigns, it’s important to measure ad frequency to determine the optimal ratio of reach to impressions to increase brand uplift and recall. Defining frequency goals allows us to maintain consistent exposure across platforms whilst maximising our reach. Frequency management can include budget adjustments, regular ad copy and creative changes, as well as consistent audience optimisation.

Sequential Messaging Strategies

The final component of your awareness and top of funnel activity is ensuring copy and creative assets are sequential both across channels and the funnel. Your messaging sequencing will tie in with the rest of the funnel, which incorporates storytelling and lead nurturing.

We expect to see informational ad creative and copy at the top of the funnel, in comparison to a more sales focused approach further down the funnel. This should also be taken into account when assessing platforms. It’s imperative to ensure your messaging is appropriate for each platform and the audience you are trying to reach.

Measuring Brand Campaign Success

Measuring the success of a brand awareness campaign can be challenging. But there are 3 ways that we can approach the calculation of brand awareness efforts.

Brand lift studies are the most direct measure of campaign effectiveness with research showing that well conducted brand studies can detect awareness increases of up to 6-10% for successful campaigns. We can measure this by focusing on the following metrics:

• Ad recall and brand awareness
• Purchase intent metrics
• Brand sentiment changes
• Message association
• Consideration metrics

In order to measure this we recommend using experimental and control groups to isolate the campaign effects. By comparing these groups we can measure the exact lift in brand metrics.

Attribution Modelling

Measuring attribution has become increasingly important in order to capture top of funnel marketing, due to its complexity. Multitouch attribution models have proven to be far more effective in measuring conversions and sales.

For brand campaigns, we’ve also seen that time decay attribution modelling is important. It assigns a high proportion of the credit to interactions that occur closer to the time of conversion and proves efficient for campaigns with longer sales cycles.

ROI Calculation Methods

When measuring success, reporting based on return on investment (ROI) is one of the best ways to measure branding success. A branding campaign that achieves a ROI ratio of 5:1 is a strong benchmark of success, with some exceptional campaigns reaching a ratio of 10:1.

Your ROI calculations need to include:

• Total campaign investment
• Brand lift metrics
• Incremental revenue attribution
• Long term value assessment

It’s also key to understand the customer lifetime value in ROI calculations in order to gain a full picture. For example, some customers will remain loyal to the brand for a longer period, which makes them more valuable.

By doing brand lift studies we can compare test and control groups in order to help improve measurement accuracy. Successful brand awareness campaigns can boost revenue by up to 20% if delivered and executed properly.

Conclusion

Paid ads are key to building brand awareness, especially when they are used strategically in top of funnel campaigns. Brand campaign success comes with the right choice of platforms, smart budget allocation, and creative optimisation. Brands that have full funnel strategies see up to 287% higher purchase rates with cross channel strategies. Brand building takes time due to testing, measuring and continued optimisation.

At Gordon Digital, we understand the importance of long term brand building alongside driving results through performance marketing. Get in touch to schedule your free growth call.