Best Practices For Your Next Brand Response Campaign

After discussing the psychology behind TV's power as a response marketing medium, we reach the nearing end of our series on online companies' use of brand response marketing. This week, we're sharing some tips on how to create a brand response campaign that drives online engagement and sales.

1. Ensure You Are Active Online

Before thinking about running media on another channel like TV, advertisers must ensure they are utilizing as many other options available, like digital–which is much easier to do at a lower cost than TV, and can still provide them with untapped markets. Having an existing presence on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram for example (or both), is no longer a 'bonus' strategy; it is a must if one of your campaign objectives is to increase brand awareness and engagement.

Running digital media like paid search ads or paid Facebook and Instagram ads alongside your TV spot is a great way to boost your overall campaign performance. This strategy maximizes the space offered for you to reach as many potential customers as possible. According to Nielsen, advertisers who run online video ads simultaneously or shortly before launching their TV spots see up to a 15% increase in brand recall and 40% increase in brand likeability.

In addition, advertisers must ensure their online webpages are properly set up and run seamlessly and with a short loading time. All of these tactics are important in ensuring they don't lose a lead or a potential purchase on account of their errors in not checking their sites and links. Poorly built sites and non-functioning links can be a huge disappointment for users that will surely impact their decision to revisit your website ever again, and will engrain a negative experience towards your brand.

2. Know Your Audience

When running a brand response campaign, advertisers may wish to use a broad spectrum of targeting, and appeal to the nation as a whole. While this may seem like a plausible idea in theory, it is better to define a few personas the campaign is aiming to appeal to, based on the product or service being advertised. After all, all of the general public cannot be interested in your product or service or have the means to acquire it.

Analyze things like general income, access to a device, general interests that relate to your brand, etc. to build a better picture of who you should really be after. Media buyers make use of that information in order to make their decisions, so the closer you can define your ideal viewer, the better your chances are at reaching them.

Brand response TV campaigns that work in congruence with digital campaigns on the web will, unsurprisingly, have a similar pool of target audience. Though, sometimes, some pieces of your target market puzzle will more likely be found through TV, particularly older segments between the ages of 50-65.

3. Perfect Your Creatives

More than ever, the stakes for a brand response campaign are set pretty high. Viewers will not engage with just any spot they find on TV; they now react especially well to brands who appeal to social issues and human values, so that is worth making a note of. In order to resonate with these people, you must ensure that as a brand response campaign centered around building brand awareness and identity, your creative communicates exactly that, by choosing a social issue or a human value that aligns with your company.

Most importantly, make sure your TV and digital media are cohesive and work in unison. This is done through ensuring that creatives on each medium are aligned in terms of design, and video ads you choose to run online be a shorter snippet of your TV spot, or reference it in some way. For example, take Amazon's holiday spot ran last month. To carry on the theme of choice for this year's holiday ads of their signing shipping boxes, Amazon promoted a similar 6-second ad on Instagram stories of their singing boxes to promote their Black Friday sales. This works in bringing your users perfectly between TV and digital and feeling the brand presence more concretely since the ads are all cohesive. If the ad was an entirely different creative on Instagram than on TV, it would've been much more difficult to establish good brand recall and connection with the customer.

4. Let The Ad Do The Talking

Another tactic that works in driving online engagement is very common among many advertisers, and that is using hashtags in their TV spot to increase the likelihood of online brand interaction and recognition. This is mostly prevalent in brand response marketing that doesn't opt for a strong call to action with phrases like "Call us now" or "Shop now", but rather close their spot with a tagline or hashtag, leaving the ball in the viewer's court and have them do the next step of visiting the site or conducting a quick online search of the brand.

For example, Airbnb's latest Super Bowl commercial involved the use of the hashtag #WeAccept, that promotes diversity and inclusion. Released around the same time President Trump introduced an immigration ban in the United States, the spot definitely gained some attention on the web, powered through the hashtag. The hashtag sets the tone for the conversations held on Twitter and creates a sense of unity among online users engaging with it. This in turn gives back to the brand with impressions, reach and, of course, app installs and engagement. For Airbnb, this tactic allowed the brand to reach 2.4 million Twitter users, which undoubtedly increased brand trust and loyalty to Airbnb since they tackled a social issue while still adhering to their identity as a company which is to make people feel at home everywhere they go.

However, this links to our first tip of establishing an online presence. Simply placing a hashtag and waiting for it to do its magic will bring nothing but disappointment. As the brand in question, you must be ready to start the conversations online and moderate discussions, media exchanges and monitor all interactions with your brand under the hashtag in use.

5. Wait and Optimize

As mentioned in our first article in this series when we explained the process of setting up a brand response campaign, advertisers are advised to launch with a 30 second spot to allow their brand enough initial exposure time, then introduce 15-second spots later on in the course of the campaign. It also goes without saying to be patient and ensure they analyze the success of the TV campaign in terms of their chosen Key Performance Indicators that relate to branding and brand response. These include brand recall, ad recall, viewing time, etc.

Since brand response campaigns are generally of longer lengths than direct response, it is important to refresh creatives every once in awhile to match whatever newer trends and topics constantly changing.

Got any questions about how Kingstar can help you with your brand response marketing? Get in touch!