What is a Brand Response Campaign?

As media companies continue to contract and new media forms are born, advertisers are left scrambling to both find and fill advertising space more efficiently than ever before.

When advertising dollars have to be stretched across both traditional and emerging media, this can leave significantly less money to work with to develop a message.

Branding in marketing is still an important part of the landscape, but its expense is increasingly harder to justify without some metric to justify the spending. This is the very problem marketers have attempted to solve by creating brand response campaigns.

What is brand response marketing? 

Traditionally, branded marketing is used to raise the awareness of a brand across a demographic. Unlike direct response marketing, which demands that your audience call now, click here or perform some other action right away, brand advertising only asks the potential customer to repeatedly watch the message. By watching the message over and over, marketers hope that when customers are shopping for that type of product, the brand will spring to mind.

There’s no doubt this type of advertising is effective, but it can be time-consuming and expensive, plus there is no way to quantify success of any given branding campaign. Direct response campaigns, on the other hand, demand immediate response, so their effectiveness is immediately obvious.

Brand response marketing marries the two, allowing an advertiser to provide a strong branding message along with a call to action that can help generate actionable data. Although the data is not as complex as with direct response, you can easily measure a number of metrics with brand response marketing, including:

• Gross Rating Points. A measure of exposure, calculated by multiplying the percentage of the target market reached by the exposure frequency.
• The number of times an ad is displayed is known as its impressions. The ad doesn’t have to be clicked or acted upon in any way to count.
• Cost Per Thousand Impressions. The total cost of a thousand impressions of a single ad.
• Cost Per Point. This is the cost of buying one point, or one percent of the target market’s attention.
• Rating Points. The size of a live audience, expressed as a percentage of the entire potential audience at any given time. 

Successful brand response marketing campaigns

As with any advertising and branding efforts, not every product is an immediate shoe-in for a brand response marketing campaign.

The trick is the product must have potential for both a strong brand message and some logical action tied to it to encourage the audience to act. A huge range of products fall into this category, making it a viable vehicle to increase long-term visibility of more direct response marketing products, and to generate more useable data for brand-marketed products.

There are a few things to keep in mind before launching a brand response campaign, such as:

• Your product must have a benefit that’s believable. For a brand response campaign to be successful, it has to rely heavily on the benefits of the product. If your dryer ball helps get clothes dryer faster, make sure you provide some data to back that claim up. The same applies to products more typically advertised using direct response marketing. Those strong benefits are what will generate both the brand building and the response that this type of marketing generates.

• Costs will fall between brand marketing and direct response advertising. If you’ve been focusing primarily on brand marketing, you’ll realize a significant savings by switching to brand response marketing. By accessing direct response media rates, the savings are typically 30% to 60% when compared to brand marketing campaign. Marketers only need to include a URL or phone number in their advertising to qualify for direct response rates. And since there’s more data available, it’s more obvious when campaigns aren’t working and they can be changed out more quickly. It’s also worth noting that the lower cost of brand response marketing allows marketers to run more GRPs vs. a branding campaign, which will translate into more consumers seeking out your product online or at retail.
• Brand response marketing campaigns take time. Most importantly, you’ll need to be patient for a brand response marketing campaign to work. While brand response campaigns allow marketers to cost-effectively drive retail and online traffic and while they typically show results sooner than a traditional brand marketing campaign, they are much slower than direct response marketing. Depending on which side of the marketing fence you’re coming from, you may be pleasantly surprised or become impatient during your first effort.

Brand response marketing means you can have your branding cake and eat it, too, but only if employed properly. If your product can bring a strong benefit to the table and you’re patient enough to let the marketing effort work, you’ll find that your product makes significant long-term strides while you stay well within your budget.