Striking a Balance Between Brand and Performance Marketing

If you’re a marketer, are you on team brand marketing or team performance marketing?

You have to pick a side, right?

That’s exactly the wrong kind of thinking. Most successful marketers need to embrace the skills from both sides. 

Why? Because 95% of B2B customers aren’t ready to buy at any given moment. That being said, you will still need to keep your brand at the top of their mind so that when they are ready to convert, your brand will be the one they think of first. 

This is where the balance between brand and performance marketing comes into play. In this post, we’ll explore how to align these two approaches, why they’re both crucial, and how to optimize your efforts for meaningful results.

Understanding Brand Marketing

Brand marketing builds trust and awareness with your customer. That means that when they need your product or service, they’ll be thinking of you hopefully first, and in a positive way.

This type of marketing relies on three aspects, all built over time:

1. Trust
2. Credibility
3. Emotional connections

You can build these by leveraging social proof (testimonials, reviews, and/or customer quotes). You will also want to craft narratives that highlight your differentiating factors, including your reliability, innovation, and values.

It’s important to understand that brand marketing will not typically drive immediate conversions. Instead, this type of marketing creates awareness and share of mind for future engagement. 

Effective brand marketing leads to, and enables, effective performance marketing. Your performance marketing will rely on your foundation to drive conversions.

Understanding Performance Marketing

Performance marketing delivers measurable results. It’s measured via clear, actionable KPIs like clicks, sign-ups, and sales. While brand marketing builds awareness, performance marketing works to capture that awareness and drive it into your funnel.

Key elements of performance marketing include:

• Targeted offers
• Optimized calls to action (CTAs)
• Data-driven execution

Your performance marketing will live by precision (finding the right customers where they are) and multi-channel targeting (making sure you’re not siloing your efforts into a single channel). 

For performance marketing to truly work, 80% of your effort should go toward audience segmentation and crafting compelling offers.

Why a 50/50 Approach Works

Brand and performance marketing is not about choosing a team. It’s about balance. A 50/50 approach allows your campaigns to build long-term awareness while also meeting short-term revenue goals.

Brand marketing ensures customer recall and fosters emotional loyalty, which translates into higher lifetime value (LTV) over time. Performance marketing, in contrast, ensures that when the customer is ready to buy, they can seamlessly move through the funnel. 

Together, they create a virtuous cycle that powers sustainable growth.

How to Combine Brand and Performance Marketing

To make brand and performance marketing work together, you’ll need an integrated strategy. Here are four key ways to align them:

1. Adopt a Lifetime Value (LTV) Framework
   
   Instead of focusing solely on cost-per-click (CPC) or return on ad spend (ROAS), consider the bigger picture of customer lifetime value. Use this framework to allocate spending between brand-building initiatives and conversion-focused tactics.
   
2. Rely on Integrated Campaigns
   
   Integrated campaigns allow your brand and performance marketing efforts to support each other. For example, a video ad showcasing your brand values can drive awareness, while retargeting ads guide interested viewers toward conversion.
   
   
3. Respect Channel Specificity
   
   What works on one platform won’t necessarily succeed on another. Your TikTok strategy should look different from your Google Ads or email marketing approach. Ensure your messaging, creative, and targeting are tailored to each platform.
   
   
4. Test, Iterate, Repeat
   
   The key to balancing brand and performance marketing lies in continuous optimization. You have to constantly test your efforts. Measure outcomes, learn from your results, and refine your strategy accordingly.

The marketers who succeed aren’t the ones who pick sides. They’re the ones who understand that brand and performance marketing have to work together to create a comprehensive, impactful strategy. The future of your marketing success depends on finding the right balance.