Welcome to the Next Wave of Performance Marketing

Surprise, your brand is the key asset!

At Sweeplift, we believe that the world is about to enter an incredible new era of marketing. Winners of the next wave will do two things better than competitors.

1. Gather and enrich behavioral and attitudinal data to truly understand the “why” connecting people and products and… 
2. Transition to rapid, truly differentiated cycles of product and creative development (amplified by the power of AI). 

The First Wave of Performance Marketing

The technical marvel that is the smart phone and the new playgrounds of walled garden social media brought us a golden age of low cost marketing conversion that we've known as performance marketing. Over the last 15 years businesses used incredible precision targeting at scale to rise to the Fortune 1,000 with unprecedented speed. But as we all know, post ATT and GDPR, the first wave of performance marketing is over. The signal and attribution that characterized the first wave are greatly diminished, leading to decreased media effectiveness and higher acquisition costs. And marketers are feeling the pain. Some are even closing their doors.

But, before we shed too many nostalgic tears, we must consider that there were already cracks in the performance marketing armor. Studies by Field & Binet make clear that many businesses had shifted too much of their focus to converting lower funnel audiences with unemotional advertising that left viewers with little or no connection to the brand. Their work shows that brands which proliferate ads that fail to make a connection with the audience, have to spend a whole lot more money to get the same results. Their latest even proposes an actual financial cost to brands who pump out conveyor belts of dull ads. Handy slides here.

And, let’s also remember the creative challenge presented by the first wave. Brands faced a crushing burden of producing content to fill an unprecedented number of channels. Versioning full ad sets across multiple platforms placed a huge burden on clients. And creative quality, let’s be kind and say it was an afterthought for many.

The Next Wave

As the cookie crumbles marketers are already shifting their emphasis. In our view, the winners in the next era will be the ones who best understand where their brand, current product offering, new product pipeline and messages meet the market. The ability to blend behavioral and attitudinal data at the speed of business will give early movers an advantage in bringing exciting, differentiated new products to market and selling them via relevant, breakthrough brands.

To ride the next wave, brands will do a few things brilliantly:

1. Embrace the exciting opportunity to move into a new era in which gathering and enriching first party data is the key to truly harnessing the power of AI. (The alternative being to outsource their strategy to Google or Meta.)
2. Put a new emphasis on understanding their consumers by blending behavioral and attitudinal data. Not just what ad is converting today but WHY prospects and buyers are embracing the category, the product, the advertising, the packaging.
3. Replace third party panels with the targeting algorithm and community-based nature of the walled garden platforms to ensure they’re finding the right people in the places where they’re comfortable sharing (vs professional survey takers in panels).
4. Reach beyond minimal marketing consent to offer individuals a value exchange - to gain willing consent for their thoughts and permission to gather first party data (overlayed with the previously mentioned platform data).
5. Experiment with the messages that resonate most with their most important audiences, learning along the way to refine current offerings, the NPD pipeline as well as ads.
6. Invest in creative and media that are focused on making an impression rather than just generating impressions. Bottom of the funnel media and creative alone are insufficient.
7. Learn how to feed AI with high quality prompts, including differentiated audience insights and connections to key product and brand differentiators. 
8. Leverage AI to scale their ideas at a fraction of the cost, allowing reinvestment in human strategy and creative.

At Sweeplift, we've brought a lot of things together to help brands gain an unfair advantage in the prompt-centric world. That's why we like to think of ourselves as first-of-a-kind consumer intelligence tool that generates and enriches first party data to illuminate the "why" that connects people and products.

We're unique because we:

• Leverage the communities of the walled garden ad platforms as starting points for finding the desired audience
• Harness a deep understanding of incentive-driven programs such as sweepstakes to earn consent
• Develop deep questionnaires that shine a light on pain points and opportunities that are most important to consumers
• Share creative on a highly flexible platform
• Seek out feedback on products, messages, ideas and ads
• Secure marketing consent that often extends beyond permission and into trial
• Allow for immediate media activation via the very same platforms 

Schedule a consultation with us here to find out what we can do for you.