When it comes to attracting customers and generating revenue, it’s not a matter of focusing on performance marketing vs brand marketing. These two approaches are like the yin and yang of your strategy—as a marketer, you need both.
A business needs to balance immediate sales with lasting customer relationships. Understanding the characteristics and differences between brand and performance marketing can help you make the right decision about where your resources and investments should go.
What is performance marketing?
Performance marketing is a branch of marketing focused on driving specific measurable actions, such as clicks, leads, or sales.
The strategies are usually executed on channels like affiliate marketing, social media, and paid search. The results inform which campaign is bringing more return on marketing investment.
This approach is also known for being part of data-driven marketing. With more information about how customers perform on different platforms, you can decide where the revenue should go and estimate how much will return.
The value of performance marketing
In a world where every marketing dollar counts, consider these top benefits of performance marketing:
- Tying direct results to your efforts: Every penny spent gains a purpose and allows you and your team to understand which actions have the best outcome for your goals.
- Measuring the return on spend: When choosing where to invest your marketing budget, you can better decide which partners and channels will bring you the best return. If associated with data-driven media planning, the results are even better.
- Tracking actions and results: New, more expensive decisions are supported by the data gathered with performance marketing strategies. It’s also easy to keep track of actions for a prolonged period and observe how factors such as seasonality affect campaigns.
Bottom line: marketing performance measurement helps you make smarter decisions and deal with less risk.
Key performance marketing metrics
Knowing and using the right performance marketing metrics helps you track the effectiveness of each campaign. The most important include:
- Click-through rate (CTR): Correlating the number of people who saw your ad and clicked on it helps you strategize how to make your campaigns more attractive.
- Incremental return on ad spend (iROAS): Relying blindly on low-funnel metrics can impact your growth. With iROAS, you gain a holistic view of marketing performance to help you estimate how much revenue an ad can generate for each dollar you spend.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): Great! Someone just finished a conversion. But how much money did you spend for that to happen? Calculating the CPA is an easy way to know the cost of acquiring a new customer.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): The longer your client stays with you, the better. But how much revenue does each client bring throughout the relationship? With CLV, you can estimate that.
- Engagement rate: In social media campaigns, you should measure more than just conversions. Likes, shares, and comments are also important to improve customer interest and connect with new potential clients.
What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is a segment of marketing focused on building a longer, stronger relationship with customers. It relates to how you create an image that people associate with your business, and what values and emotions you transmit.
While branding refers to the process of creating and defining a brand’s identity, brand marketing promotes and communicates that identity to the target market. To do so, it takes into consideration design choices, language, tone of voice, social media presence, customer services, and more.
The direct impact of a brand marketing campaign may not be immediately measurable. But its value is undeniable when it comes to cultivating a strong brand that influences consumer behavior and supports long-term business success.
The role of brand marketing
Brand marketing is key to promoting a distinct identity—one that your customers will remember. That’s why good branding can:
- Increase sales: Knowing who you are makes customers rely on you. Strong brands attract potential customers and retain existing ones.
- Impact business valuation: An Interbrand study shows that companies might be undervalued due to the market’s misunderstanding of branding and how it impacts potential earnings. So, the better your branding strategies, the better your chances of having a meaningful impact on valuation.
- Enhance growth: Companies that become meaningful to people—through branding—have better chances of growing fast. The 2024 Kantar BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands reveals that companies that manage to improve their meaningful difference saw a 19% brand value growth advantage.
- Improve brand loyalty: Branding is all about creating a meaningful relationship with customers. When you do it right, you create a positive impact, which leads to them coming back for more.
Remember: in a competitive environment, brand marketing can be a game changer. When people trust and connect with you on different levels, they will choose you any chance they get.
How to measure brand marketing
Brand marketing is known for being more qualitative than quantitative. But that doesn’t mean you can’t rely on data to track and measure brand marketing efforts and impacts.
Here’s what you can check:
- Brand awareness: If you want to see how well-known your brand is, you can measure the number of times you’re mentioned across different platforms, or how much you’re searched online.
- Brand sentiment: What is the overall emotional tone associated with your brand? You can check social media platforms for comments or create a survey that assesses sentiment (positive, negative, neutral).
- Net promoter score (NPS): By asking customers to give products and services a score, you can better understand what is working and what’s not.
- Customer perception: Creating a survey that asks customers how they view your brand and how it compares to competitors can help you pinpoint where your branding strategies can be better.
Keep learning: Top strategies for marketing spend optimization
Brand vs performance marketing: Key differences
Both performance and brand marketing play important roles in business success, but their purposes and strategies differ.
| Aspects | Performance marketing | Brand marketing |
| Goals | Measuring the outcomes of each action | Building a long-term relationship and image |
| Possible impact | Fewer risks, more return on Investment and data for future decisions | More business valuation, growth, and customer loyalty |
| Timeframe | Short-term. Results are tracked in real-time | Long-term. Results tend to be gradual |
| Audience | Targeted, based on behaviors and demographics | Broader, based on emotional connection |
| Measurement strategies | CTR, ROAS, CPA, CLV, engagement rate | Brand awareness, brand sentiment, NPS, customer perceptio |
| Ad tone and language | Transactional, focused on offering value | Emotional, focused on storytelling |
How to combine brand and performance marketing campaigns
Leveraging both performance and brand marketing is the best way to create a full-funnel marketing strategy.
Here’s why. Brand marketing helps your company create an image that captivates and attracts more people. Performance marketing, on the other hand, gives you an understanding of which channels do the best job of selling your brand at a smaller cost.
To combine both approaches, you should:
- Collect all data: Performance marketing needs data, and brand marketing can benefit from analytics too. Measure all the funnel steps and keep in touch with customers to understand how they feel about your company after the transaction is over.
- Cross-utilize channels: Some channels are useful to both performance marketing and brand marketing. Social media is a great example: it allows you to measure the interaction (with likes, shares, and comments) and still gain a qualitative point of view by reading what people say about you and how your content makes them feel.
- Trust social proof: User reviews can make or break your business. Emplifi’s Meeting the Demands of the Modern Customer shows that 87% of customers rely on real-life ratings and reviews before making a purchase decision. So keep track of how much social proof you have, where it comes from, and what it says.
Keep learning: How to create the perfect balance between brand and performance marketing
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