Emphasize the importance of establishing a strong brand identity before investing heavily in advertising expenses.
In the bustling world of tech, it's easy for companies to get caught up in the race for performance marketing, often without a clear understanding of their brand identity. This can lead to high CPCs, underwhelming CTRs, and inconsistent messaging, as many tech companies have discovered.
However, a well-defined brand strategy can be the key to success in performance marketing. On May 19th, 2025, we'll delve into this topic, highlighting its importance and the benefits it brings.
A solid brand strategy provides clarity on what the company does and why it matters, consistency across all touchpoints, messaging that scales, and the confidence to stick with it for optimization. It answers questions about the problem being solved, the target audience, unique offerings, the role in the user's life, and the timing of the product launch.
Before launching performance marketing, startups should lock down their positioning and tone of voice. A well-defined tone of voice reflects the product's personality and positioning, matches the audience's mindset, stays consistent across all touchpoints, and flexes in tone without losing the brand's voice.
KOTA, a Creative Digital Agency based in Clerkenwell London, specialising in Creative Web Design, Web Development, Branding, and Digital Marketing, has helped startups improve their campaigns by establishing a solid brand foundation.
People remember brands, not just products, and a brand is crucial in creating emotional stickiness and brand salience in a crowded market. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, brand salience is a reliable predictor of long-term market growth. A proper visual identity reinforces a startup's positioning without saying a word and creates a recognizable presence across product, marketing, and operations.
The Brand Pulse Audit tool, a valuable resource for startups, helps evaluate their brand's performance and identify areas that need improvement. A strong visual identity, or brand codes, helps build familiarity and trust over time through consistent, recognizable elements such as typography, color palette, layout guidance, photography & illustration style, motion principles, and logo system.
Paid ads work best when the brand underneath is tight. Weak foundations result in pouring ad spend into a leaky funnel. Performance marketing is an amplifier of brand strategy, resulting in lower CPAs, higher retention, faster trust-building, clearer product-market fit signals, and a narrative that can be scaled.
Moreover, a messaging framework provides structure to a startup's communication about its product, across audiences, channels, and contexts. It includes a core narrative, value pillars, audience-specific messages, and message laddering.
According to LinkedIn and Edelman, 71% of B2B decision-makers say they're more likely to engage with a brand that has a consistent, recognizable voice. Running ads without a brand strategy leads to mixed messages, irrelevant traffic, creative that doesn't resonate, clicks that don't convert, endless A/B testing, and potential blame towards the brand or the audience.
In a market where more than two-thirds of buyers find that many brands they see at work have similar marketing and communications messages, a strong brand strategy sets a company apart, making it memorable and impactful.
