Performance vs Brand Marketing: an extensive guide

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that marketing is foundational for business growth. Deciding how to allocate your marketing resources, though? You might need a degree and a half for that.

Two of the most impactful marketing fields today are performance marketing and brand marketing, both of which still feel like uncharted territory to many of us.

While both approaches serve a particular purpose, they operate best together. Allow us to unpack the main differences, help you understand the strengths of each approach, and give you a few proven strategies for using them in your day-to-day marketing efforts.

The main goal here is to increase audience awareness, connection, and trust—to establish a positive market perception of your company. While performance marketing heavily relies on immediate results, brand marketing is in it for the long haul: slowly shaping how your brand is interpreted in the minds of your consumers.

A strong brand marketing strategy will increase your overall loyalty and recognition, lodging your brand deep in people's minds, even in a saturated market. Brand visibility is not just about being seen but remembered for your values, mission, and personality—and that can’t be bought.

Key elements of brand marketing

Great brand marketing is based on clearly defined elements, which create a consistent and memorable identity. Elements like these are vital for communicating a successful brand message.

• Mission: Your brand mission defines your core purpose and long-term ambition. It’s the north star for all things brand, ensuring that every decision is in the best interest of your brand goals.
• Values: Brand values embody your beliefs and key principles — the baseline of how you talk to people. If you’re creating absolute, authentic values, they’ll be a whole easier to uphold, and they’ll also resonate better with your audience. And that leads to trust.
• Visual identity: A strong visual identity ( logos, typography, color schemes, and design) often makes your brand feel you. It helps communicate your brand personality, and sets you apart from competitors.
• Positioning: Your brand's positioning is a unique space in your industry that your brand tries to occupy. Well-executed positioning allows your brand to stand out by clearly communicating your values and aligning them with the needs of your audience.

Together, these elements help outline a brand that’s both memorable and full of meaning, undeniably leading to deeper connections between your brand and your audience.

The lifelong upside of brand marketing

When you invest in brand marketing, you create long-lasting benefits that will outlive any current sales or campaigns. Brands that can connect with their audiences establish real brand equity, strengthen their brand loyalty, and help increase audience engagement across every media platform.

• Brand equity: Brand equity is the best way of representing the somewhat intangible value a brand holds. It’s based on recognition, trust, and emotional connection. High brand equity leads to more customer loyalty, a more reputable brand, and (the real kicker) the ability to charge more for your services.
• Strengthening customer loyalty: Loyal customers don’t just come back for more. They become brand advocates, telling others about their positive experiences. This organic advocacy helps increase your brand’s reach and influence.
• Enhancing customer trust: To build trust in your brand, you must invest in consistency. As 88% of customers believe that a company's experience is just as important as the actual products, you better try giving them a consistent brand experience. 
• Compounding benefits over time: Where performance marketing is mainly about short-term results, brand marketing is about long-term benefits. As your brand presence and reputation grow, all your marketing efforts will reap higher rewards.

Actionable metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) are your best friends in performance marketing. They help you better understand overall effectiveness. Made for businesses that want quick results, performance marketing is a fantastic tool for pushing growth in the short term, often giving you cost-efficient returns.

Unlike brand marketing (which is all about long-term value), performance marketing is focused almost exclusively on producing immediate, quantifiable results—perfect for getting some quick wins or testing campaigns. Coupled with its advanced data and analytics, performance marketing helps give detailed insights into what strategies actually work and where adjustments are needed—a perfect cocktail for continuous business growth.

Foundational performance marketing channels

Performance marketing is known for using a wide array of channels, each designed to achieve measurable results. 

• PPC (Pay Per Click): PPC campaigns get targeted traffic by showing paid ads on search engines or social media. This approach is excellent for increasing your visibility or generating direct conversions (even more so when coupled with optimized keywords).
• Retargeting: Retargeting is a way for businesses to reconnect with lost users who have already visited their website or engaged with their brand. Showing these users tailored ads can encourage them to finalize a purchase or revisit your site.
• Email marketing: Email marketing is a channel for delivering personalized (and timely) content to a unique set of people, making it a cost-effective way to drive engagement and conversions. 
• Affiliate marketing: With affiliate partnerships, brands leverage a third-party promoter to drive sales and/or traffic—often paid through a commission. This is a great way to boost your reach without any major upfront investment.
• Social media advertising: Paid ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—which have access to considerable user data—are perfect for targeting precise demographics with tailored messages.

How to measure your performance marketing success

The success of any performance marketing hinges on keeping a watchful eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketers continuously analyze these metrics to assess their campaigns and improve their real-time strategies.

• Cost per acquisition (CPA): The CPA shows the average cost of winning a new customer through a campaign. The common goal is to lower the CPA since that would reflect a more cost-efficient campaign.
• Return on investment (ROI): Your ROI tells you the overall profitability of your campaign. It gives you an idea of whether or not the marketing spend is delivering value.
• Click through rate (CTR): CTR is simply the percentage of people who click on an ad or link, giving you a clear indication of its effectiveness in grabbing people’s attention.
• Conversion rates: The conversion rates help track the percentage of people who complete a desired action (making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, or filling out a form). This is a critical metric for understanding the overall impact of targeted campaigns.
• ROAS (return on ad spend): ROAS tells you the revenue created for each dollar spent on ads, giving you a detailed picture of your ad performance.

Performance marketing’s best friends: analytics and technology

Performance marketing is heavily reliant on analytics and technology to get results. Things like Google Analytics, social media insights, and various data management platforms (DMPs) help marketers track user behavior, measure the effectiveness of campaigns, and execute data-driven decisions. Machine learning algorithms have recently improved this process by seeing patterns, predicting results, and automating manual tasks like ad placement or bid optimization.

Benefits of performance marketing

The advantages of investing in performance marketing are many, but most people would agree the main upsides are:

• Speed: Your marketing campaigns can be set up quickly and adjusted just as quickly, allowing your business to respond to trends and opportunities in real-time.
• Precision: With significant data and targeting possibilities, marketers can reach detailed audiences with custom messages, minimizing dollar spending while maximizing impact.
• Scalability: These marketing campaigns can always be scaled up or down based on your budget, objectives, demand, or overall results.

All in all, performance marketing is a great way for businesses to make informed decisions and maximize ROI while actually serving their audience.

To develop a balanced and effective marketing strategy, you first need to understand the differences between brand and performance marketing. As you probably figured out already; both approaches serve distinct objectives, employ unique methods, and measure their success with different metrics. This makes them very much complementary, rather than mutually exclusive.

A joint effort between brand and performance marketing allows your business to balance your short-term goals with long-term growth. As you’re leveraging the strengths of both approaches, you can build a marketing strategy that is both comprehensive and highly effective.

Brand awareness through performance channels

Performance marketing channels like PPC, social media advertising, and retargeting are great tools for amplifying brand awareness. In combination with your brand marketing efforts, these channels can help your brand reach both existing and untapped markets with custom messages that help reel them in. 

• PPC campaigns: These campaigns drive direct traffic and reinforce your brand’s visibility. When ads are targeted with real precision, a wider audience begins associating the brand with a specific solution.
• Social media advertising: Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They all provide perfect opportunities for businesses to share their brand story, values, and offerings — building an emotional connection while getting you some sweet impressions and clicks.
• Retargeting: This tactic helps you re-engage with might-be customers who’ve interacted with your brand before (a high-intent audience). It can help provide you with consistent exposure that heavily strengthens recall and leads your audience toward conversion.

How to use brand equity to improve conversion rates

Strong brand equity will directly impact the performance of any and all marketing campaigns simply by influencing consumer behavior. When an audience trusts and recognizes your brand, they’re more likely to take your offers. This synergy manifests in many ways.

• Increased conversion rates: A trusted brand minimizes hesitation during decision-making. Customers feel more confident choosing a brand they associate with quality and reliability, which increases your sales.
• Enhanced campaign ROI: Performance campaigns built on substantial brand equity are more effective because they encounter less resistance from people already familiar with — and loyal to — the brand.
• Word-of-mouth amplification: Your loyal customers act as return customers and brand advocates, promoting your brand organically and creating a domino effect of new audience segments for performance campaigns to try and target.

Creating a holistic strategy

As you start using these approaches, you’ll be able to achieve outcomes that neither strategy could accomplish alone: Performance marketing can be used to test and optimize your brand messaging, which can inform your long-term brand initiatives. At the other end of the spectrum, the credibility and trust built by your branding efforts will undeniably enhance the impact of your performance-driven campaigns through accumulated trust.

It’s true that these two strategies were practically made for one another. However, there are a few scenarios in which brand marketing has the upper hand over performance marketing.

Launching new products

Introducing a new product or service is hard work. Flashing people with ads depicting products they’ve never heard of is not your best bet. Building a strong brand identity behind it is essential. With a memorable brand presence, potential customers will naturally associate the product with quality and reliability, which will help sales. This identity creation often involves creating a good brand story, investing in visual branding, and leveraging the right platforms to build awareness. Successful brand marketing during a product launch will help differentiate your product and stir up genuine curiosity in your community.

Attempting to connect emotionally with your audience

An emotional connection with your customers is the heart of brand marketing. This approach puts less emphasis on promoting your features and a whole lot more on addressing the values and aspirations of your audience. Emotional connections are extra powerful in industries where trust, loyalty, and relationships play a more significant role (like banks, healthcare, or education). With a grand narrative, consistent messaging, and meaningful engagement, you can become more than a service provider: You can become a trusted partner.

Investing in long-term growth and positioning

Creating an excellent market position involves identifying and consistently communicating your brand’s unique value proposition. This eventually becomes a perfect foundation for entering other markets, launching new products, and maintaining your competitive edge. Brand marketing is one of those long-term investments in your company’s future, and with sustainable strategies, you can build a reputation that stands the test of time.

Trying to establish credibility and trust

Brand marketing is a little extra important for businesses trying to build credibility in an industry where reputation is of utmost importance (like finance, healthcare, or technology), where you often need to rely on a strong brand to convince potential clients or partners you’re the real deal. 

Performance marketing becomes a real priority when you need to deliver immediate, measurable results. This normally requires a targeted and results-driven approach to maximize ROI and/or optimize campaign performance.

Running short-term campaigns

Short-term marketing campaigns, like the ones promoting a limited-time offer or seasonal sales, are ideally suited for performance marketing. Campaigns like these look to create quick traction, drive purchases today, and maximize your returns within a defined timeframe. With tools like PPC ads and retargeting, you’ll ensure that your campaigns effectively capture the audience’s attention and turn leads into paying customers.

When you’re evaluating and/or refining your campaign

Performance marketing gives you the precision you need to measure and refine any marketing efforts — helping businesses identify what strategies are working and which ones are in desperate need of adjustment. Metrics like CTR, CPA, and conversion rates offer clear and actionable insights into your campaign successes (or failures). This way, you can continuously optimize your efforts and increase your effectiveness.

Optimizing the budget for maximum ROI

Performance marketing offers a more cost-effective solution for businesses with tighter budgets. Focusing your spending on high-performing channels and targeting high-conversion audience segments can help you reach maximum ROI. Tools like A/B testing and analytics-driven targeting allow marketers to allocate resources more effectively while reducing overall waste.

Boosting lead generation

If your business’s primary goal is to generate leads for your sales funnel, performance marketing gives you the tools to reach and convert your customers. Channels like email marketing, affiliate programs, and social media advertisement help you better target specific demographics with personalized messages that encourage action.

Product launches require measurable goals

Like we’ve already established, brand marketing is an excellent strategy for establishing the foundation for a product launch. Performance marketing can play another pivotal role here, when it comes to driving measurable outcomes. With performance-driven campaigns, you can track the success of your product introductions in real time to ensure they meet your sales targets. And if they don’t – you guessed it; you can adjust your strategies based on the available data and feedback.

If you’re taking one thing from this article, it should be that brand and performance marketing are indispensable tools in a successful marketing strategy. They both have unique strengths for different business objectives — and, together, they create a holistic approach for you to achieve sustainable growth.

It’s definitely not an easy task, but balancing both approaches will get your business a long way.

1. Start by defining clear goals: Identify when you need to prioritize a long-term objective vs short-term results. 
2. Integrate your new strategies: Lean in to your brand to establish trust and recognition. At the same time, use performance insights to improve your messaging and positioning.
3. Leverage every technology and data point available: Google Analytics and CRM systems provide excellent insights for optimizing your brand and performance efforts.
4. Allocate your resources wisely. Your marketing budget should always support both your day-to-day campaigns and your ongoing brand-building initiatives.

Once you’ve aligned brand and performance marketing, you can bask in the glow of both short-term wins and long-term success. If you’re looking for some help getting started, partnering with a brand strategy firm that’s done it all before is a great way to find your marketing zen.