Mining The Synergies Between Direct Response & Branding Campaigns

The rela­tion­ship between direct response and brand­ing cam­paigns can be mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial.

George Gutierrez By George Gutierrez from Acronym. Join the discussion » 0 comments

It’s a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that direct-response and brand­ing cam­paigns oper­ate in sep­a­rate dimen­sions and, there­fore, do not over­lap. How­ev­er, it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble, and wise, to apply direct-response prin­ci­ples to how a brand­ing cam­paign is man­aged by apply­ing real-time learn­ings from brand stud­ies to opti­mize against top-per­form­ing strate­gies. The key point is that the rela­tion­ship between both cam­paigns can be mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial.


A brand­ing cam­paign can help build audi­ence pools of new cus­tomers for direct-response cam­paigns to nur­ture or trans­late into find­ing sim­i­lar prospects.

Sim­i­lar­ly, insights from direct-response cam­paigns (retrieved from pix­els placed on an advertiser’s site) can help boost the effi­cien­cy of brand­ing cam­paigns by help­ing apply the right blend of tar­get­ing to reach the audi­ence in envi­ron­ments in which they are most like­ly to engage with the brand.

What fol­lows are some com­mon approach­es to direct-response cam­paigns and brand­ing cam­paigns that can max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of both.

Approach To Direct-Response

A direct-response campaign’s objec­tives always involve dri­ving users to com­plete a conversion—whether it be by engag­ing the cur­rent cus­tomer base, users who have engaged but not con­vert­ed, or by find­ing new users to engage. A thor­ough direct-response cam­paign will seek to engage users at all stages of their con­sid­er­a­tion. The audi­ence that the adver­tis­er seeks to engage will help deter­mine the strat­e­gy devel­op­ment and the lay­er­ing of tar­get­ing tac­tics employed in the cam­paign.

Pro­gram­mat­ic vendors—due to their abil­i­ty to lay­er tar­get­ing from their Data Man­age­ment Plat­forms, or, in some instances, build audi­ences from scratch with pix­el data–are nec­es­sary play­ers in a direct-response cam­paign and are essen­tial in dri­ving effi­cient response. The results include achiev­ing strong cost-per-acqui­si­tions and return-on-invest­ment due to low CPMs.

Depend­ing on cam­paign objec­tives, tar­get­ing tac­tics to con­sid­er can be bro­ken out thus­ly:

Engage current/interested cus­tomer base:

  • Retar­get­ing: Tar­get­ing users who have pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed an advertiser’s web­page
    • Dynam­ic Retar­get­ing: Serve cus­tomized mes­sag­ing to users depend­ing on whether they did/did not con­vert, what products/services they browsed, or their geo­graph­ic loca­tion

Reach and impact new cus­tomers:

  • Demo­graph­ic: Tar­gets users based on cri­te­ria such as age, gen­der, house­hold income, edu­ca­tion, etc.
  • Behav­ioral: Tar­gets users based on online behav­iors: con­tent consumption/browsing ten­den­cies, online pur­chas­es, etc. For exam­ple, tar­get­ing a user who is deter­mined to be a “Sports Fan”, “Tech­nol­o­gy Buff” or “Fre­quent Trav­el­er” based on online con­tent con­sump­tion and online pur­chas­es.
  • Con­tex­tu­al: Tar­gets users through spe­cif­ic con­tent top­ics rel­e­vant to your brand.
    • Chan­nel: Tar­gets users through site con­tent cat­e­gories
  • Geo­graph­ic: Tar­get users based on loca­tion: Coun­try, State, City, ZIP Code, etc.
    • Dynam­ic: Serve cus­tomized ad depend­ing on loca­tion
  • Look-alike Targeting/Prospecting: Tar­gets users with sim­i­lar web brows­ing behav­iors to users who have pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed an advertiser’s web­page or have con­vert­ed

Depend­ing on the objec­tives of the cam­paign, one or sev­er­al tar­get­ing tac­tics may be employed and test­ed in seek­ing to impact the tar­get audi­ence. Pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors may be select­ed to exe­cute the tar­get­ing accord­ing to their strengths or—as is the case with many pro­gram­mat­ic vendors—according to how many dif­fer­ent tar­get­ing tac­tics they are able to exe­cute to the high­est cal­iber.

In addi­tion to cre­at­ing a strat­e­gy around reach­ing your intend­ed audi­ence via a pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dor and dri­ving actions, a key ele­ment of a direct-response cam­paign is opti­miza­tion.

Real-time algo­rith­mic learn­ings allow pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors to apply com­put­er-based opti­miza­tions to con­tin­ue to serve against the most effi­cient­ly con­vert­ing audi­ences, in the right envi­ron­ments. Addi­tion­al­ly, man­u­al opti­miza­tions against Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tors (KPIs) can be applied as such:

  • Ven­dor
  • Cre­ative
    • Mes­sage
    • Ad Size
  • Tar­get­ing Tac­tic
  • Sched­ul­ing (Day — Time of Day)

Approach to Branding/Awareness

Branding/Awareness cam­paigns should seek to engage the current/potential cus­tomer and help dri­ve per­cep­tion and con­sid­er­a­tion.

Estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion with your tar­get audi­ence is often dif­fi­cult to do with a sim­ple ban­ner ad. A stronger approach is to pro­mote cap­ti­vat­ing con­tent and/or make ban­ner units engag­ing.

Native adver­tis­ing – through a pre­mi­um pub­lish­er net­work with exclu­sive part­ner­ships and empha­sis on brand safe­ty and cus­tomer trust – can assist in bring­ing aware­ness to the brand by pro­mot­ing:

  • Owned con­tent
  • Earned con­tent
  • Social chan­nels
  • Video chan­nels

Addi­tion­al­ly, an aware­ness cam­paign should accom­plish user engage­ment through the use of high-impact and high­ly-engag­ing cre­ative exe­cu­tions that cap­ture users’ inter­ests and prompts them to want to learn more about the brand.

Cre­ative exe­cu­tions such as Road­blocks, Takeovers, var­i­ous rich media units with embed­ded engage­ment func­tion­al­i­ties and video are all visu­al­ly dom­i­nat­ing exe­cu­tions. Incor­po­rat­ing high-impact units on endemic/contextually rel­e­vant envi­ron­ments are typ­i­cal­ly the high­est engag­ing, lay­ered in with rel­e­vant tar­get­ing.

Brand stud­ies are a rec­om­mend­ed ele­ment to an aware­ness cam­paign because they help pro­vide insights on met­rics beyond sim­ply track­ing clicks, social shares, video views, or rich media unit engage­ments.

A brand study helps deter­mine whether cam­paigns are tru­ly hav­ing an impact with the audi­ence with regard to brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent. Sur­veys are served to a group of users who have not viewed the ad and anoth­er group of users who have, then mea­sur­ing the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion the view­ing of an ad has on an audi­ence.

With a brand study, real-time insights into how users are engag­ing and being impact­ed by adver­tis­er mes­sag­ing can assist in opti­miz­ing the cam­paign to what is help­ing dri­ve increas­es in brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent. Brand stud­ies pro­vide insights on per­for­mance against Aware­ness KPIs against the fol­low­ing:

  • Ven­dor
  • Cre­ative
    • Type (stan­dard ban­ner, rich media unit, etc.)
    • Mes­sage
    • Ad Size

An aware­ness cam­paign can share prin­ci­ples with a direct-respon­se/per­for­mance-dri­ven cam­paign as it seeks to opti­mize against KPIs such as brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent gath­ered from the brand study.

Integrating Direct Response & Awareness

Brand­ing efforts can help dri­ve vis­its from new and engaged prospects, which can boost effec­tive­ness of audi­ence pools used in direct-response cam­paigns for nur­tur­ing and build­ing of prospect pro­files.

Specif­i­cal­ly, branding/awareness cam­paigns can enhance the efforts of a direct-response cam­paign through assis­tance in build­ing cook­ie pools for the employ­ment of retar­get­ing and prospecting/lookalike tar­get­ing.

For instance, through the pix­el­ing of a land­ing page(s) used in a branding/awareness cam­paign, pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors can build a cook­ie pool to retar­get users who have engaged via the branding/awareness cam­paign with cus­tomized, direct-response mes­sag­ing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, if the objec­tive is to fur­ther expand the cur­rent cus­tomer base, pix­el­ing a land­ing page(s) uti­lized in an branding/awareness cam­paign can help a pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dor build prospecting/lookalike audi­ence seg­ments from the cook­ie pool. This can find users sim­i­lar to those who have engaged with mes­sag­ing and then tar­get users with direct-response mes­sag­ing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, pix­els from direct-response ven­dors that are placed on branding/awareness land­ing pages can help gath­er demo­graph­ic and behav­ioral insights about the users engag­ing with the brand­ing mes­sag­ing. This includes infor­ma­tion about age, gen­der, income, lev­el of edu­ca­tion, fre­quent­ed sites and pre­ferred con­tent.

Lever­ag­ing the infor­ma­tion and the audi­ence insights that these pix­els pro­vide can help the effi­cien­cy of branding/awareness cam­paigns by nar­row­ing and lay­er­ing tar­get­ing applied to the cam­paign.

The result can be the abil­i­ty to focus on the audi­ence that is engag­ing most with the brand­ing mes­sage and reach­ing those peo­ple in the most rel­e­vant envi­ron­ments to help boost brand trust and pur­chase intent.

Per­for­mance-dri­ven prin­ci­ples, such as the lever­ag­ing of real-time data for opti­miza­tions, can then be applied to the brand­ing cam­paign, through the use of brand­ing stud­ies. This can help opti­mize per­for­mance beyond stan­dard met­rics like clicks, site vis­its, etc. so that the cam­paign can con­cen­trate on best per­form­ing publishers/creative/etc. that dri­ve the most brand trust and pur­chase intent.

George Gutierrez

Written by George Gutierrez

Digital Display Strategist, Acronym

George is Digital Display Strategist at Acronym and is responsible for all elements of Display media strategy and campaign management. George is a huge proponent of innovation and staying ahead of the curve; as the Display landscape continuously evolves, he is always seeking ways to leverage new ideas” both on the technical and creative side" to help guide client initiatives to experience great success. Prior to joining Acronym, George was Senior Digital Associate at MEC, working on the AT&T Business Solutions account. While at previous agencies, George has worked across several industries and verticals with clients such as Dell, Clarks, Travel Channel, National Geographic, Univision Network, Sara Lee, and Smashburger. George's experience has fostered deep knowledge of the Display industry, having partnered with many of the top publishers, programmatic vendors and data providers in the industry.

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