What brand work can, and can’t, do for conversion rate

Sometimes, I receive a tricky brief, and it’s usually some version of: “We need to increase our conversion rate.”

Of course, I understand why that’s important. Conversion is an important metric and, if you’re running a consumer brand, it’s always going to be one of your key focuses. But for the work I do, it’s not a brief I can comfortably take at face value, and I thought it was worth going into why.

It’s not because I don’t think brand work can influence conversion, because it absolutely can. It’s because I think it’s important to be honest about what brand work can reasonably be expected to do in isolation. 

Conversion isn’t caused by one thing

The problem is that conversion is the end result of a lot of different things. Your positioning and messaging might be part of it, but so might your product, price, photography, reviews, website experience, page speed, availability, shipping costs, payment options, promotions, seasonality, where the customer came from and whether they’ve bought from you before.

If conversion goes up after I’ve worked on your positioning, I’d like to think my work played a part. But I couldn’t honestly tell you that it was the only reason it went up.

And the reverse is true too. If we do a really good piece of brand and messaging work and conversion doesn’t immediately move, that doesn’t necessarily mean the work hasn’t worked.

Where brand work actually comes in

This is because brand and messaging work sits upstream of conversion.

I work on the things that happen before someone gets to the point of deciding whether to buy. Who are you trying to attract? What do you want them to understand about you? What makes you different from the alternatives? Why should they care? What makes your product or proposition relevant to them? What story are you telling consistently enough that they actually remember you?

Those things shape whether the right person notices your brand, understands it, becomes interested and decides to find out more. And of course, that matters commercially.

If your brand is attracting the wrong audience, it doesn’t really matter how good your checkout is. If people land on your website and can’t work out why they should choose you rather than the ten other brands they could buy from, that’s a problem before you even get to conversion rate optimisation.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t the brand

But there are also plenty of situations where the brand isn’t the problem.

Maybe people understand exactly what you sell, but the product page is difficult to use. Maybe the price is too high for the market. Maybe delivery is expensive. Maybe there’s a technical issue at checkout. Or maybe your paid traffic is bringing in people who were never particularly likely to buy in the first place. Those aren’t positioning problems, and it doesn’t help anyone to pretend they are. 

The metric tells you where. The problem tells you why.

That’s why I’m wary of briefs that jump straight from a metric to a solution. Saying, “We need to increase conversion” tells me where the problem is showing up, but it doesn’t necessarily tell me what’s causing it, or what kind of intervention is needed.

If the problem is that people understand the brand and want the product, but they’re dropping out at checkout, that’s a very different problem from people arriving on the site and not understanding why they should choose you in the first place. The first might need CRO or a better website experience. The second might need stronger positioning or messaging.

So the more useful question is: “What do you think is stopping the right people from taking the next step?”

Sometimes the answer will be something I can help with. Perhaps the proposition isn’t clear enough. Perhaps the brand has grown but the story hasn’t kept up. Maybe the messaging is too generic, or the thing that makes the business genuinely different isn’t coming through.

That’s where positioning, messaging and storytelling can do some really valuable work.

And I think that’s a more useful way of talking about the commercial role of brand work. It wouldn’t be right to claim that a new positioning will magically increase conversion by 20%, and no brand expert should be asked to do that to prove their value. What I can show is how it creates a stronger foundation for the marketing that follows: giving the website something sharper to communicate, giving PR a more interesting story to tell, giving social content a consistent point of view, and giving customers a clearer reason to choose the brand.

Ultimately, I think good brand work should make it easier for the right people to understand, remember and want your brand.

What happens after that is influenced by a lot of other things. So whilst I care about conversion, I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that every part of the customer journey belongs to the same person or marketing discipline.

My job is to work upstream of conversion — making sure the right people understand why your brand matters and giving them a compelling reason to move closer down the funnel.

To see more about my services, click here.