We talk to lots of brands with plenty of budget but even more frustration with persistently increasing acquisition costs. When we ask whether they’re ready and willing to invest in upper-funnel campaigns, there’s a common refrain:

They’re not sure how to measure them.

Most people are familiar with upper-funnel metrics like awareness, impressions, reach, brand affinity, etc., but to performance-focused marketers, those can seem squishy and too removed from the actual point of conversion. As a result, those marketers stick stubbornly to bottom-funnel and DR campaigns, where they can report more “concrete” metrics like conversions, revenue, and ROI.

Here are the problems with that approach:

• It costs way too much.
• Reach is extremely limited.
• It keeps marketers stuck in a growth-capped mode and leads straight to diminishing returns.
• It has almost zero long-term benefits.

To truly break that cycle and realize scale and efficiency, it’s time to reconsider how to measure your overall marketing – starting with upper-funnel campaigns. Here’s how we’re doing that at Playbook – and why it’s helped us convince all of our clients to invest confidently in brand campaigns.

Phase 1: Gather Your Data for MMM Use

Marketing data lives in a lot of places – channel-specific walled gardens, GA4, your CRM, etc. The first step toward understanding the return on your investments in any channel or campaign is to get that data centralized. Given enough history, that data is the basis for MMM (marketing mix modeling), which will give you an objective look at the contributions each channel has had on your marketing conversions and revenue.

What we consistently find from MMM is that performance marketers over-index on (you guessed it) performance – which means there is almost always a good chunk of budget we can cut from performance-based channels and campaigns without affecting revenue.

Phase 2: Build Experimentation Roadmaps

Now things get fun. With our focus squarely on incrementality (which is essentially the functional opposite of diminishing returns), we leverage MMM data to develop a series of hypotheses for testing (e.g. new CTV campaigns will increase scale and lower CAC by 10%). 

We then design a testing roadmap supplemented with an infrastructure for monthly incrementality tests. 

With that in place, we move to…

Phase 3: Launch New Campaigns

In this phase, we design a media plan according to the experimentation roadmap. With the plan locked, our media and creative teams hunker down to build and optimize campaigns – with all the channel-specific creative needed. 

At this stage, it’s important to recognize that many previously performance-focused brands will need a TON of new creative, whether to support new campaign objectives within familiar channels or to stand up new channels like CTV and YouTube. We’re well versed in pulling this off quickly and creating a cadence of fresh new creative going forward, but you’ll want to make sure your team and/or your agency partners are ready to do the same.

Phase 4: Repeat the Cycle

With that motion established, it’s time to rinse and repeat. The outcomes of the cycle:

• We find and cut inefficiencies.
• We find new hypotheses to test.
• We update our testing roadmap and media plan accordingly.
• We launch new campaigns to reach evolving growth and performance goals.

So Does It Work?

As I mentioned, our entire client portfolio is investing in the upper funnel now, with results popping off the page for brands as varied as OhmConnect and Elfster.

If you clicked into this blog expecting to see studies of those upper-funnel metrics I mentioned above, it’s time to re-imagine the way you’re thinking about measurement. Brand campaigns influence the entire purchase journey, so measuring their effects in a zoom-out is the most accurate approach (and it’s a much more effective way to measure the true ROI of your performance campaigns as well).

The way I’ve laid this out might sound simple, but it’s not – especially because it’s an entirely new way of looking at (and investing in) your campaigns that needs to be communicated to your executive team. But the benefits have been so transformative for our clients that I can say, without reservation, the initiative is one you need to prioritize. 

As always, we’re happy to help get you off the mark – just drop us a line to start a conversation about how to start making the pivot.