What Is Brandformance?
The term "brandformance" merges the concepts of "branding" and "performance marketing," describing a campaign or marketing initiative that pursues branding and performance goals at the same time. In other words: measurable growth through long-term brand building and brand awareness.
On social, that might mean effectively boosting your visibility while simultaneously maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS). Or, to put an even finer point on it —
Brandformance on Social Media
Why does brandformance matter so much on social media specifically? Because it ensures companies don't just score short-term sales wins, but also build a strong brand for the long haul. The concept is especially relevant on the socials, where the measurability of your ad campaigns and the weight of your brand identity are equally critical.
Why? Attention! Companies have to stand out from the crowd with their content, communicate their values, and deliver measurable results — all at once. More and more people spend more and more time on social platforms. But at the same time, there's ever more content competing for every interest. Meaning: the competition is bigger, and the audiences are diverse. For perspective, here's a little side fact: in 2021, roughly 695,000 new stories were shared on Instagram every single minute.
Brandformance can be the key to winning the social media game. It lets companies communicate more effectively and get more out of every advertising dollar — well, euro.
So, how does brandformance actually work?
Planning Brandformance Campaigns
First, let's take a step back like Steph Curry. Before we can cover planning a brandformance campaign, we need to define branding and performance marketing.
What Is Branding?
Branding is about deliberately painting a specific image of your brand in the user's mind. Put differently, the goal is to link certain (positive) emotions to the brand. This builds the brand's intangible value, creates trust, develops customer loyalty, and earns sustainable reach. The entire corporate identity feeds into this goal: a distinctive design creates recognition, and the wording carries the message and the values the brand stands for. Think of the messaging from the big sportswear brands like Nike or Adidas. Clear theme: motivation.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Measurability, testing, and optimization are the core elements of performance marketing. This strategy is about hitting concrete goals and making the performance of every initiative tangible. Your marketing efforts are held to specific key performance indicators (KPIs) — click-through rate, conversion rate, or ROAS, for example. This data-driven strategy is a particularly good fit for paid social, since the platforms come with native measurement tools and make it easy to test different creatives against each other.
How Brandformance Works
Brandformance is meant to unite branding and performance marketing. Measurable results, growth, and long-term brand building are the strategy's target outcomes. To make it work, keep the following in mind:
- Goal setting: Define what you want your campaigns to achieve. In a brandformance context, that means locking in the specific KPIs your ads will be optimized toward — plus the message or image you want to convey at the same time.
- Modular creatives: Testing is essential for brandformance campaigns. So build your assets modularly. Test different motifs and claims against each other and optimize toward your goals.
- Style: Develop appealing, memorable ad assets that strengthen the brand and drive conversions at the same time.
Brandformance Examples
Enough theory — here's what brandformance looks like in practice.
Brandformance Campaign for Schwäbisch Hall
The building society Schwäbisch Hall built a successful brand in traditional media with slogans like "Auf diese Steine können Sie bauen" ("These are bricks you can build on"). To make a "dry" topic like home-savings contracts work on social, we deliberately combined that branding with a performance marketing approach. The result: a new, younger audience and a high conversion rate. The full case is here.
Brandformance Campaign for Nevernot
For our client Nevernot, the brandformance approach is the decisive sales lever. The brand doesn't just want to sell personal care products — it wants to reframe the entire conversation. The ambition: market products like soft tampons in a way that's aesthetic, modern, and sex-positive, while raising awareness. "Do what you want" is the lifestyle; Nevernot is the brand that stands for it. You'll find the full case here.
