Everybody say “funnels”! It’s that time of the year when we aggressively write a blog series on how great performance marketing is, so that you know that we’re wannabe ‘thought leaders’ in this space who can help your brand achieve great results. 

Nobody show this blog to my CEO (or the SEO team; this has exactly 0 keywords).

We’re not really thought leaders. Because there’s not much thought-leading to do when it comes to running ads that convert. What you need is someone who understands your customers and the internet. Then voilà, you have your own little formula for success. Optimize for best results. 

So in today’s blog, we’re going to talk about something else – not 5 Reasons Your Ads Aren’t Converting – instead, we’re going to break down what makes insurgent or high-growth brands thrive on the internet, through performance marketing and the ecosystem you can build to support rapid scaling. 

What are insurgent brands? 

Insurgent brands are rogue consumer brands that don’t give too many ‘ifs’ about the titans that rule their industry. Think ‘Surreal’ in the UK’s competitive cereal market, dominated by mammoths such as Kellogg's. Surreal sells high-protein, low-carb cereal that comes in amazing flavors, with a dose of epic laughs. The brand has effectively forced itself on culture through humor that most performance marketers cannot decode. We’ll get to their strategy in a second. 

In 2018, Bain & Company studied brands that were disrupting their industry by creating a better product, offering lower prices, or adding more value through convenience and understanding consumer’s unmet needs. Bain generally categorized these brands by their revenue: Insurgents generate $25 million in annual sales and while they might be comparatively smaller players, their growth rates leave incumbents in the dust. 

E.l.f cosmetics, Dollar Shave Club, Mini Melts, Scrub Daddy, and Prime are some names you might have heard of before. They all needed a robust performance marketing strategy to increase sales. Here’s how some of them did it. 

How do insurgent brands run their performance marketing? 

Performance marketing is a subset of digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay for measurable outcomes such as conversions, brand awareness, consideration, engagement, website clicks…you get it. You can do it through affiliate marketing, by running social media ads, engaging influencers, or setting up robust email sequences for every stage of your user journey. 

It comes in many shapes and forms. But for high-growth or insurgent brands, it’s often about these things:

1. Focus on acquisition: Insurgent brands prioritize acquiring new customers rapidly, often through digital channels. 
   Example: See a lot of BuzzFeed types of quizzes from these new-age brands? Using contests, quizzes, and discounts are popular ways to capture zero-party data and acquire qualified leads.
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2. Lean and agile: They’re smaller brands with limited funding. This means insurgent brands have to be nimble and acquire customers through experimentation with various channels.
   
   
3. Disruptive channels: They often have to explore unconventional channels and tactics, such as getting creative with influencer marketing, user-generated content, or niche platforms.
   
   
4. High spend on brand awareness: Insurgents often invest heavily in performance marketing to build brand awareness alongside driving conversions.

How does wonderwork look at performance marketing?

As I was saying, it’s not rocket science. But it is a lot of hard work. Here comes the shameless plug-in. 

At wonderwork, we start with a comprehensive understanding of your industry. Every category is different – which means the length of your sales cycle, the competitor moat, and the dynamics of your global distribution can differ greatly from another industry. We develop thorough customer personas and hyper-targeted messaging. We draw upon our expertise in 50+ global markets to create a sound performance marketing strategy that offers key insights on industry benchmarks (for conversions, engagement, awareness, and more), a channel mix covering traditional and disruptive platforms, and content that has proven to work for your industry. 

We then implement, test, optimize, and innovate. It’s a journey of self-improvement. If the ‘self’ was your sales target. 

How do insurgent brands make users listen in relatively noisy markets?

Our first example is Surreal. Partially because we love their copywriter. Partially because they made cereal fun. 

Surreal Cereal carved a unique niche in the advertising world through its content-first approach. By subverting expectations of traditional cereal advertising, they've managed to capture attention and resonate with audiences. Their ads, often characterized by a DIY aesthetic (think Comic Sans for fonts) and a tongue-in-cheek tone, make them stand out from everyday cereal brands that lack innovation or character.

From photographing their founders in questionable settings to creating an ironic contrast between high-production value expectations and low-fi MS Paint executions, Surreal uses understatement and self-deprecation to appeal to the internet. 

Their ads usually feature UGC videos with their value-proposition loud and clear: This is high-protein, low-sugar cereal that doesn’t taste like cardboard. They recently hired Neil Burgess, the "Bang!" man from Cillit Bang advertisements, bringing his energetic persona (and associated nostalgia) from cleaning products to Surreal cereal.

Our second example is e.l.f cosmetics.

e.l.f. Cosmetics has been a pioneer in performance marketing, particularly on TikTok. 

Their strategic release of the original song "#eyeslipsface" sparked a viral trend, cementing their brand in the minds of Gen Z. By partnering with micro-influencers, e.l.f. has effectively reached niche audiences, fostering authentic connections at low cost. And third, their community-centric approach, exemplified by the e.l.f. Beauty Squad, encourages user-generated content and strengthens brand loyalty, making e.l.f. a standout in the beauty industry. Superfans everywhere. 

So, there you have it. Performance marketing for brands that are driving some serious growth by being very funny, imaginative, and thrifty. Brands like Surreal and e.l.f. have proven that with creativity, data-driven insights, and a relentless focus on the customer, you can disrupt an industry and build a loyal following.

Even if you’re not a part of the big boys club.