Is Brand Image more important than Brand Growth?
Brand image > Brand Growth?
The two are inseparable and yet they usually have an adversarial relationship in any company, big or small.
(Small hint: it doesn't have to be that way)
TLDR
- Creating 1 perfect branded ad will almost always fail you, so test many and find more customers to grow your business.
- Performance can only ever be as good as the brand it’s advertising. The teams need each other.
A Pencil customer recently shared 👇
"We're worried about our brand, everything has to be right for us to run an ad"
I will say it’s something we hear often. It's also a sneaky way of saying we don't trust your software to create something as branded as we can.
We won't argue anything like that (feels biased) what we will yell from the mountaintops is that TESTING: VOLUME & VARIETY with VELOCITY always win. How you might ask?
Our data supports that 1 in 10 ads you run scale. 🚀 The charts below back that up, showing performance uplifts start showing up with more consistency when brands test more than >10 ads on a monthly basis.
Check out our data here.
Of the remaining 9 ads
- 3-4 usually hover around your standard performance
- The last 5 are below the average.
These aren’t lost opportunities though. Each one of these ads is an opportunity to draw warm prospects closer to closing warm, and warm up cold ones. (Hint: these users will move into retargeting 😉)
If you fixate on HOW your brand looks rather than showing prospects HOW valuable your brand is to them, you will:
- Test slower than the market requires
- miss out on long term growth of your customer base
- Fall behind competitors for market penetration
The Brand team or steward's counter argument might be, if the ads look bad we won’t win the customer anyway because performance teams:
- Care only about reaching a revenue goal, no matter how it makes the brand look
- Use assets that are old or not branded (Stock photos, am I right?)
- Speed of iteration always trumps the quality generated
This is why we strongly advocate brand and performance teams having their company growth goals aligned so they can work together to grow the user base.
Here are 3 ways to bridge the performance → brand bridge 🌉
- Have your brand standards/assets shared across teams (logo, fonts, hex codes, tag lines, usable assets)
- Agree on the boundaries of the brand (what can't we do) → so you can create, test, and learn quickly.
- Align on the growth goals so initiatives are able to move quickly without there being a bottleneck between teams. (MOST IMPORTANT STEP)
If you implement these three of these points across both teams, you will have shared targets, less bottlenecks in the production of on-brand ads, and a strong understanding of what the brand can + cannot be.
This has led to brands testing more ads in less time, finding more winners that help them grow their businesses sustainably.
We want to see you and your teams off to the races this year! 🏎💨 Use this framework to start the conversation!
