You launched a new marketing campaign. The artwork is engaging and your messages are spread out across a variety of touchpoints. But the campaign isn’t delivering the results you’d expected and you aren’t sure why. If this challenge sounds familiar, you aren’t alone.

That’s why we invited Carli Feinstein, Vice President of Partnerships and Strategy at Craft & Commerce, to join Michael Hoffman, CEO at Gather Voices, to demystify the process of developing and measuring marketing campaigns that actually deliver against predetermined outcomes.

Here are a few actionable insights from their conversation:

Not All Clicks are Created Equal

"So I think, yes, not all clicks or conversions are created equal. It comes down to what is that ultimate value? Not everything can be simplified to an e-commerce model, or a return on ad spend, or ROAS model, but where we can, we do try to drill down to what is that comfortable return that we want to see based on the investment we're putting into paid media? Basically, what's our threshold for investment to be able to drive the desired results that we're looking for." —Carli Feinstein

What is Performance Marketing?

"Performance marketing is really where you are, and you're making an investment for an outcome. So in the search world, it's pay per click. In the Facebook world, you can optimize for conversion. The opposite of performance in this definition is brand marketing, which is more about broad reach and frequency of a message, getting out into the marketplace. Something that's measured by impressions versus performance measured by tangible metrics of clicks, conversions, acquisitions, email acquisitions, petition signatures, phone calls coming in to your phone line. So performance is more outcomes-oriented, where brand is more awareness and reach-oriented, but still measurable." —Carli Feinstein

How Performance Marketing & Branding Work Together

"There are some marketing researchers who I follow, Binet and Field are their names. They're incredible, incredible scholars of marketing and advertising. Basically, they have studied and reported on the ideal blend of performance and brand marketing, and they have shown that the two work best in tandem. Performance marketing, you get little spikes of improvement, but ultimately, there's diminishing returns. You can't scale past a certain point. Versus brand is much, much slower, but when they work together, you see the greatest business effects.

So you do need both people. Usually, we'll start in the performance world because you can get real-time feedback, and then layer on brand. We actually saw a lot of this during the pandemic. A lot of advertisers that had been... these DTC brands that had never advertised on TV took advantage of the lower cost inventory they saw during the pandemic to dip their toes into the water for the first time with a more broad-reaching brand campaign. So far, it seems to be paying off for those brands." —Carli Feinstein

First Party vs. Third Party Data

"You look at a pair of shoes in my instance, and then that pair of shoes shows up across the internet, wherever you are, tracking you. That store didn't have my email address. They are tracking me through the browser and my browser history. So when I was on that page originally looking at the shoes, when I left, I'm leaving a trail of cookies, and they're following my path across the internet.

First-party data would have been, I logged into my Nike account, and they saw I was looking at the shoes, and then they used that to send me an email saying, "Hey, don't forget, you really liked these Jordans. Come back and get them." So that's an example of using first-party data versus the third-party, where I haven't given them any information, and somehow they know that I want that hat, for example." —Carli Feinstein