How adopting a holistic full-funnel approach to marketing helps get the most out of ad spend

 

Does brand advertising generate a credible ROI? How do marketing teams justify spends on content creators to a bottom-line-driven C-suite? How do brands partner with the right creators? 

 

Questions that cut to the heart of 21st century marketing were analysed and discussed during a Campaign360 roundtable organised by Campaign Asia-Pacific and TikTok, titled ‘Getting the most out of ad spend.’ The free-flowing group discussion that featured marketers from categories as diverse as fast-moving consumer goods, alcoholic beverages, online platforms, and fintech firms, was moderated by Camila Martins, head of measurement, SEA at TikTok and Campaign APAC editorial director Robert Sawatzky. 

 

Why brand marketing still matters

 

Brand building is under closer scrutiny than ever before, according to many marketers present, while short-term boosts from performance marketing-heavy campaigns are an easier sell to the C-suite. It’s an insight supported by data from Warc’s 2023 Marketer’s Toolkit Survey, which revealed that 46% of marketers are looking to increase investment in performance ads versus 31% looking to increase investment on brands. 

 

Monika Mikušová, senior director of marketing, APAC, at Foodpanda said, “One of the biggest challenges is to defend brand spend and the importance of a long-term consistent approach to investment, versus short-term effects that they can showcase to investors or somewhere else.” Vaughn Coomansingh, former Mill Street Brand Manager (Canada) said, “It's no longer solely about brand health. It's very important for marketers to effectively communicate to key decision-makers the direct impacts of brand-building investments and marketing efforts on key commercial results like revenue and market share.” 

 

Acknowledging the conflict between performance and brand advertising, TikTok’s Camila Martins said, “There has been an overreliance on short term KPIs, but we now see a shift towards building a sustainable business.” This involves educating marketers about ‘Brandformance’ — the value of full-funnel campaigns that involve a mix of both brand- and performance-driven communication. 

 

To underscore the efficacy of this approach, TikTok partnered with Flip, a leading payment service provider in Indonesia. A control group of users who only saw performance advertising from Flip was compared to an experimental group who saw both brand and performance campaigns. With the holistic strategy and combined upper- and lower-funnel campaigns, the latter group saw a 9.9% lift in conversion and 10.9% improvement in cost-per-action. 

 

While 42% of advertising profit is revealed by attribution modelling and short-term econometrics, 58% is hidden from view in the short term. Martins said, “We have studied past campaigns to measure the synergies between brand and performance advertising. In Southeast Asia, advertisers who use mixed objectives — lower-, mid-, and upper-funnel campaigns — see 2x more conversions, with 36% more cost per action and 33% higher conversions.”

 

Cracking the code on creator-driven marketing

 

Another area of concern for attendees was on working with content creators on social media platforms and leveraging these relationships in an optimal manner. While creator collaborations are not mandatory on platforms like TikTok, online consumers are often more amenable to marketing messages from key opinion leaders rather than brands. Leveraging the equity and stickiness of content creators thus results in better engagement. However, large traditional marketers such as financial institutions are frequently conflicted about adopting this route, due to brand safety considerations. 

 

When it comes to content creators, marketers are also having to choose between quantity and credibility. A purely metric-driven strategy guides brands towards influencers with the largest following and most engagement, while a more nuanced approach favours choosing individuals who align with brand values.

 

Priyadharshini Seevaratnam, regional marketing lead at Singapore-headquartered consumer marketplace Carousell, said “We only pick influencers whose lifestyles and personas focus on sustainability or are making conscious choices to positively impact the world.” The marketplace has thus been able to tide over a common complaint about influencer marketing being inorganic and easily ignored.

 

Finding these connections is simplified by the TikTok creator marketplace, which helps marketers discover the most appropriate spokespeople for their brands among the platform’s 800,000-strong community (as of December 2022) of qualified creators. TikTok helps marketers gauge creative talent on metrics such as views, engagement, follower count, and completion rate. The customised search function allows them to dive deeper for creators who engage with topics that are relevant to their target audience, facilitating the development of more engaging content. 

 

The rise of shoppertainment

 

However, discovering the perfect collaborator on social media is only the beginning. Marketers at the roundtable were still grappling with the perfect mix between branded messages from content creators, ads featuring or made by these creators, and the typically better produced but more generic advertising from brands. 

 

Another topic of discussion was whether consumers on social media platforms were more receptive to homemade organic looking visuals or those that were more well produced. The panel advocated a judicious mix of both, with a skew towards creator-produced content. According to Jean Leong, regional head of marketing and branding at furnishings specialist Goodrich, “We would like to raise our brand awareness with potential customers on TikTok.  It showcases our product offerings with a touch of quirkiness. Our followers simply love seeing the unboxing of our wallcoverings and behind-the-scenes installation videos.” 

 

Such an approach is driven by purchase cycles which are not as transactional or linear as they used to be. It’s what TikTok calls “shoppertainment” — where brands drive discovery with paid media, boosted by further amplification through earned media. An entertainment-first, commerce-second approach combines content and community to create a highly immersive shopping experience. Unlike the linear funnel of awareness, interest, and action, TikTok likens this to an infinite loop powered by users returning to the platform at every stage of their purchase journey.

 

 

The power of shoppertainment was evident in a TikTok campaign Maybelline ran in the Australia market, with creatives that featured products integrated into entertaining real-life scenarios to connect with the target audience. This fusion of content, culture, and community resulting in a 12% uplift in product awareness — 9x higher than the benchmark. Leveraging creative best practices drove a 4.9% uplift in in-store sales, which is 75% above Nielsen’s benchmark for FMCG brands, and demonstrates how online campaigns can impact offline behaviour.

 

For marketers, the return on ad spends on the paid + earned model is twice what is delivered by a pure paid campaign. Being a great platform for shoppertainment has boosted TikTok’s appeal, with 76% of marketers expecting their investment on the platform to increase, according to Warc.

 

Getting a holistic view of attribution

 

Marketers have spent decades trying to build robust attribution models — a task made more complex by social media and digital marketing. A common issue is knowing for sure if deploying a particular content creator has resulted in an actual inflow of consumers. 

 

Many marketers continue to over-index the last point in the consumer journey before purchase. This is an assumption that needs to be challenged. Research from TikTok and AppsFlyer reveals that up to 58% of users delay visits to brand websites and apps as they do not want to disrupt their viewing experience. And so, for a view-based platform like TikTok, traditional click-based attribution is unable to capture the full consumer journey. Brands are better off measuring both clicks and views — which typically foster awareness and interest in the product — rather than clicks alone. 

 

Other solutions need to be deployed to arrive at a clearer understanding of attribution. At the roundtable, Lars Bjorge, managing partner, The Scale Factory said, “While search is a digitally attributable link, it also gets too much undue credit. Perhaps they have heard of you elsewhere, like on Podcasts, Linkedin or other content." A workaround is to use the first engagement with consumers to ask them where and how they had heard of the brand in question. 

 

A rise in the number of avenues to reach consumers has resulted in an even larger increase in complexity. Marketers who wish to make the most of these new paths need to train themselves to ask the right questions — have clarity on their objectives and the expected changes in user behaviour. An overreliance on tactical communication and last-touch attribution are unlikely to yield long-term advantages for a brand. Martins said, “To use a football team as an analogy, you have defence, mid-fields, and strikers — it is teamwork. That’s why we advocate a holistic approach.” 

 

To get deeper insights into how best to harness TikTok for marketing effectiveness, please download ‘A TikTok and WARC report: When entertainment meets effectiveness.’