What is a marketer to do when they’ve tested and grown direct response campaigns to the point where further scale at desired ROI appears to have hit the wall?  SEM/SEO are extremely effective but require demand generation to create intent at the top of the funnel. Retargeting similarly yields fantastic results, but maxes out at limited scale due to data availability and cookie churn. In a nutshell, hitting the DR ROI wall is a strong signal that a brand’s messaging is over-weighted to bottom-of-the funnel channels and tactics.

So what’s required to get over that wall and jumpstart a brand’s digital media ROI?  How can a sophisticated DR-oriented marketer use top of the funnel channels and tactics to move results throughout the funnel?

At Brand.net, we’ve seen a number of sophisticated advertisers tackle this challenge using a similar blueprint for success. Here is a generalization of that blueprint in 5 steps:

1. Research

Do ongoing, regular customer research to understand what types of messages change *perception* about your brand and its benefits, with an eye towards those perceptions that link closest to driving intent and consumption. This type of research should be done before designing creative and planning campaigns.

2. Keep creative simple. Test and measure early.

Focus the creative on simple, clean messages that will drive awareness of the brand’s benefits based on your “out of band” customer research. Build creative testing into the early phases of your campaigns and measure for lift in preference – on a per user basis.

3. Select campaign planning metrics and targeting tactics with scale in mind.

Explore traditional planning metrics, like reach and frequency, demographic and geographic composition and targeting tactics, like contextual alignment, that can grow to address your total potential customer base. If you limit yourself to tactics that rely solely on cookies, you’ll never get your digital program to address more than 15-20% of your target audience.

4. Measure.  Capture ROI

Evaluate full funnel performance, from top-of-funnel metrics such as recall and consideration to bottom-of-funnel purchase impact.  Similarly, make sure you’ve selected measurement and attribution tools that align with your planning KPIs and targeting tactics. Ideally, you create room in the budget to execute measurement throughout the funnel, with simple attitudinal or survey-based measurement of awareness and intent at the top and direct or representative panel-based ROI measurement at the bottom. Each measurement tactic should have test and control populations and statistical significance to ensure repeatable results.

5. Grow top of the funnel budgets in stages

Leverage measurement results for top of the funnel programs to scale budgets over time, growing your total digital budget or rebalancing between top and bottom of the funnel programs over time.

To highlight how this framework drives the needle moving results, we asked Elina Vilk, Advertising Team Leader at PayPal, a series of questions.  Elina has implemented the scale-the-wall blueprint at PayPal with significantly successful results.

Q. What was the challenge you were facing?

A. We hit a ceiling with the impact we could drive at a reasonable ROI using tried and true direct response tactics. Increasing spending was not going to increase transaction volume and frequency among our consumers. All of the new developments in direct response technology promised incremental gains, but for only a small portion of our potential target audience – so overall not a great impact on the business.

Q. How did you identify an opportunity?

A. First, our internal research highlighted that driving awareness of select PayPal product benefits could increase purchase intent. This was a very different approach than an offer/deal message intended to directly drive an action online. Second, we developed a series of creative that communicated those key benefits with very simple, straightforward creative treatment. We wanted users to glean the key messages without requiring interaction with the creative.

Q. How was planning for this program different from your “standard” approach to digital campaigns?

A. We wanted to run a program that could grow to the size of our total addressable audience, which is effectively the entire US adult population. So we thought carefully about what we needed to scale a program to that size without sacrificing the control we need to ensure valid measurement and minimize waste. It was key for us that Brand.net guaranteed target audience reach and frequency, within the contextual environment proven to be most effective by our initial measurements.

Q. What were the key learnings from the campaigns you ran with Brand.net?

A. Two important ones: a brand message could be incredibly effective at shifting audience perceptions and driving scalable, provable ROI, and designing and delivering a full funnel measurement program enabled us to rethink how we use digital advertising.

Q. Where do you go from here? What’s next?

A. At PayPal we have a learning mindset, we will continue to test and learn new approaches.  In terms of digital advertising our next big challenge is to take a more offline, traditional way of buying media (focusing on reach) while developing attribution models that can only be facilitated in digital advertising.