Do you want your advertising efforts to be a success? There are usually two things that determine your success: building a strong brand and creating a campaign that actually converts. But what is the difference between performance marketing and brand marketing? The goals may be the same, but they take different roads to get there.
As an advertiser, it’s your job to master these strategies to ensure the long-term success of not only your promotional efforts but also the business itself. So, let’s dive into the world of brand and performance marketing, shall we?
Brand Marketing vs. Performance Marketing: Focusing on Building Awareness and Trust
First, let’s discuss brand marketing. Unfortunately, we see a lot of advertisers and business owners neglect this strategy. When comparing brand and performance marketing, many tend to focus on the latter because it directly brings in money. However, building awareness and trust is also important. The results of your efforts in brand marketing tend to last longer because:
- They help draw attention to the identity of the business;
- The brand is what makes a company stand out;
- They are what the audience associates with your products and services.
As you can see, brand marketing helps create a strong foundation for the success of your business.
Performance Marketing vs. Brand Marketing: Driving Measurable Results
With performance marketing, the focus is on things that are relatively tangible. When comparing the realms of brand and performance marketing, the latter involves dedicated efforts where you can link a result to an action.
For example, because you ran a campaign, sales went up by 50%. Brand and performance marketing efforts involve the use of metrics, but only performance marketing focuses on driving sales. And, although not always the case, this strategy tends to use more paid advertising options. Between these two types of marketing, it makes financial sense to spend money on performance because there are expected financial returns down the line.
Why Understanding the Difference Between Performance Marketing and Brand Marketing Matters for Your Business
Marketing is such a huge realm! However, it’s difficult for a business to operate effectively without a well-structured sales funnel. As we all know, the top of your sales funnel should focus on awareness. This is where brand marketing comes into play, along with a solid understanding of how to implement it correctly.
At the same time, performance marketing is more effective at the lower stages of the funnel, where the goal is to convert leads into customers. Mastering the concepts of brand and performance marketing means you utilize both to their maximum potential.
It Helps You Manage Your Ad Budget More Effectively
The key distinction between the two is that brand marketing works long-term, while performance marketing focuses on short-term results. So, which one should you prioritize? This is difficult to answer without knowing more about the brand and business. However, deciding to prioritize brand or performance marketing will depend on which is the better match for your needs. If you’re running ads for a well-established business, it can make sense to focus more on performance marketing. At this point, it’s time to reap the benefits of building a brand! However, if you don’t fully understand the roles of both brand and performance marketing, you may not be in the best position to decide how to allocate your funds.
It Ensures a Cohesive Customer Journey
We want to make clear that brand and performance marketing are necessary, and there will be some traces of both in any campaign that you run. For example, even if you decide to prioritize brand marketing over performance marketing, the growing familiarity with the company may still encourage target individuals to send an inquiry.
In the same way, being consistent with the branding when creating ads also helps build awareness, even though that’s not the main objective. Much of this discussion compares brand and performance marketing, but both will be in any campaign, even if one gets more of the spotlight.
It Helps Support Both Short- and Long-Term Growth
Building a brand is very important, but investing in awareness and loyalty may not leave room for financial growth. That’s why there has to be a balance between brand and performance marketing. Short-term growth is necessary to fund upcoming expenses like operational costs, for example. Immediate returns help grow the business financially, meaning more money to fuel brand and performance marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, long-term growth provides you with more financial freedom and long-term investments in the brand are essential for improving conversion rates and customer retention. When you master the differences between brand and performance marketing, you’ll be able to invest more heavily in generating business sustainability.
The Core Elements of Brand Performance in Marketing
As we have mentioned, brand marketing focuses on strengthening the company without putting immediate financial profitability in the foreground. That’s why, when choosing between brand and performance marketing, many make the mistake of neglecting the former, even though successful brand marketing makes it easier for a business to sell.
We’d like to reiterate that as an advertiser, you’ll still have to perform both brand and performance marketing. However, if your efforts right now are to boost the brand, then you need to make sure that certain elements are present. We hope that with the accompanying examples, it will become clearer how brand and performance marketing differ.
The Role of Storytelling and Emotional Engagement
The success of your brand marketing is deeply rooted in storytelling. From a business perspective, you want to create sufficient differentiation from your competition. This means that even if there are competitors selling a very similar product, your efforts in brand marketing will help ensure that customers choose your company. Emotional engagement created by powerful storytelling helps your audience feel closer to your company, inspiring trust and loyalty among them.
Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign — An Example That Demonstrates the Power of Storytelling
If you want to focus on brand over performance marketing, remember that the story doesn’t have to be elaborate. If anything, it’s better if it’s easy to follow. With the Share a Coke campaign, Coca-Cola ran TV commercials of people giving a bottle of Coke to friends and family all over the world. Then, they filled stores with Coke bottles with names on the label. What made this such a great example of the impact of the brand against performance marketing? It allowed Coca-Cola to be seen as something that you share. The audience became more emotionally engaged: they saw a bottle of Coke and thought of a person close to them who may enjoy it.
Long-Term Brand Building and Identity Creation
As we mentioned, between brand and performance marketing, the former is used for long-term efforts. Since the brand is the identity of the company, you can think of this as introducing yourself to a new group of people. Make sure you get these points covered:
- Make it clear what the company believes in;
- Be consistent with the brand elements across all communication channels;
- Be clear about how the company is different from all the others out there.
By focusing on brand over performance marketing, you want the company to be known and easily identifiable to the general public.
Apple’s Premium Experience — An Example That Shows the Outcome of Long-Term Branding Efforts
Comparing brand and performance marketing, your efforts on the former may not come to fruition overnight. However, as you can see with Apple, the smallest effort can pay off big time. Apple is known for minimalist design and innovative features, both of which help create a premium feel for anything that it slaps its name on. Imagine if they initially compared brand and performance marketing efforts and decided to just focus on performance marketing. This global company would likely not exist at its current scale. Thanks to their years of efforts to position their products as exclusive devices, they now enjoy a cult-like following worldwide.
Relevant Metrics for Assessing the Success of Your Efforts
Brand performance measures marketing efforts with metrics such as:
- Brand awareness, which indicates whether people know the company exists;
- Sentiment, which tells you how people feel about the brand;
- Loyalty, which indicates how heavily your clientele prefers your product over everyone else’s.
Looking at both brand and performance marketing, you’ll find these metrics aren’t only quantitative. They are normally assessed in both quantitative and qualitative forms. For example, 50% think positively about the brand. Qualitative information can establish what exactly that means.
Core Elements of Performance Marketing vs. Brand Building
Now that we’ve explored brand marketing, let’s move forward with performance marketing. Comparing the priorities for brand and performance marketing, you’ll see that the latter tends to focus on the short-term. Because the focus is performance, every result can be associated with a certain effort, allowing you to better gauge what your next step should be.
If you’re wondering whether to prioritize brand or performance marketing, the latter is better if you want to nurture and grow your audience and convert them into customers. In the following subsections, we’ll examine the elements that go into performance marketing.
Data-Driven Strategies for Immediate Results
With performance marketing, the results are faster and are driven by data. Given how digital marketing operates, you’ll likely be able to see real-time outcomes as soon as you launch the campaign. This is something that you won’t get if you prioritize brand marketing over performance marketing efforts.
Let’s say that the data tells you a certain creative and text combo isn’t working. With this information in mind, you can then decide to tweak or remove the ad from the roster. You may not be able to do this when you choose brand over performance marketing. After all, just because the audience didn’t interact with your company, it doesn’t mean that the campaign didn’t work.
Checkfox: An Example of How Performance Marketing Can Drive Immediate Results
To best demonstrate the stark outcome timeline differences between brand and performance marketing, let’s look at what MGID did for Checkfox. The company wanted to diversify their lead generation efforts and reduce their CPL (cost per lead).
Considering the purpose of brand and performance marketing, we knew that performance marketing would have more of an impact here. So, we conducted split testing, used AI images and even experimented with push notifications and incorporated programmatic media buying. As a result, we drove down the CPL 30% lower than the client’s target.
Focus on Direct Response and Conversion Metrics
When focusing on brand over performance marketing efforts, you’re not necessarily concerned about converting the audience right away. And as we have mentioned, the results here may not be instant. So, between brand and performance marketing, you’ll notice the latter seeks an immediate response from the target audience. This can be in the form of:
- Signing up for a newsletter;
- Visiting a landing page;
- Purchasing a product;
- Opening an email;
- Writing comments on a post.
As you can see, the campaigns you run for brand and performance marketing may have different short-term outcomes.
Dropbox: Demonstrating the Power of Direct Actions
When Dropbox first started out, it created a highly attractive referral program. If you were referred by an existing user, both of you got an increase in storage limits. Here, you’ll see the stark difference between brand and performance marketing.
As a result of this campaign, Dropbox went viral. From being virtually unknown, it became a household name. Most importantly, it gathered a significant number of leads, making it easier to convert them into paying customers.
Relevant Metrics for Assessing the Success of Performance Marketing
Since the areas of focus for brand and performance marketing are unique, it only makes sense that the metrics you look at will be different as well. For performance marketing, these metrics include:
- Click-through rates, which measure the percentage of your ad reach who clicked a link;
- Conversions, which represent the percentage of people who moved down the funnel;
- ROI, or return on investment, which represents the returns based on the ad budget.
These are things that you won’t necessarily measure if you prioritize brand awareness over performance. Using the information that you gather here, you’ll have hard numbers to determine what the next step for your marketing efforts should be.
How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together
For a business to be able to grow sustainably, you need both brand and performance marketing! The good news is that it’s practically impossible to completely eliminate one from a campaign. Remember that comparing brand and performance marketing doesn’t mean we think you should keep them separate. Instead, we invite you to become more conscious of your decisions when creating your campaigns.
When you have a clear understanding of brand and performance marketing, you should be able to determine what you need. More importantly, you’ll easily be able to address the requirements of both in a single campaign.
Use Performance Marketing to Test How Well Your Branding Efforts Are Working
Between brand and performance marketing, the latter tends to be more data-driven. However, that doesn’t mean that you should just leave branding up in the air.
Let’s say that you want to refine the brand storytelling to better resonate with your target market. Instead of choosing either brand or performance marketing, get them to work together. For example, use split testing to see which will get a better response from your target market. From there, tweak the elements until you’re satisfied with the outcome.
Highlight the Brand in Performance Marketing Campaigns
We’ve talked extensively about the differences between brand and performance marketing. However, did you know that you can use the brand itself to improve the performance of your campaigns? If you’re working with a fairly established company, the name itself already does a lot of the convincing for you.
So, you don’t have to stick to the traditional roles of brand and performance marketing. Emphasizing the brand can be enough to boost conversions, thus improving the returns that you get from your budget. Just remember, you still have to come up with a great ad. To avoid clashes between brand and performance marketing, be consistent in all modes of communication.
Use Storytelling and Retargeting in the Same Campaign
While there can be synergistic outcomes when combining brand and performance marketing efforts, you don’t have to combine them everywhere.
For example, you’re working with a startup that has little to no recognition. You can start off by focusing on the brand over performance marketing to establish a company story. Since you’ve already introduced the business, retarget those who have shown interest. When you do this, you are effectively using brand and performance marketing at different phases of the same campaign.
Tools and Techniques for Effective Performance and Brand Marketing
Considering how quickly digital marketing allows advertisers to reach any audience, going DIY (without any technical support) is not a good idea. Regardless of whether you want to prioritize brand or performance marketing, if you don’t use the right tools and technologies, you will lag behind your competition.
However, it’s not enough to just have access to them. Whether you want to focus on brand or performance marketing, following the best practices for campaign management and tracking is paramount for achieving success.
Analytical Tools for Measuring Brand Impact and Performance Metrics
Most of the time, you don’t have to find separate brand and performance marketing tools. Most of them can be used for both. These are the most common options:
- Google Analytics;
- Meta Ads Manager;
- Google Search Console;
- Sprout Social (for social media brand sentiment and engagement only).
It’s worth noting that the tools available rarely depend on your decision to go with brand or performance marketing. For example, regardless of whether you’re using Facebook to promote a brand or to convert, you’ll definitely be relying on the Meta Ads Manager.
Best Practices for Campaign Management and Tracking
Whether you’re enhancing your brand or performance marketing efforts, try to incorporate these best practices.
- Have clear KPIs: This is important because you’ll use these to determine whether a campaign was successful or not.
- Remember that data isn’t just numbers: Contrasting brand and performance marketing, the latter uses more figures. However, also consider qualitative data to identify where you need to tweak things.
- Track across channels: With both brand and performance marketing, don’t consider platforms as separate from each other. Remember that they’re all part of your singular effort to promote or convert.
These basics are enough to set you off on the right track!
Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Your Performance Marketing and Brand Strategy
As we have already discussed, campaigns usually rely on the integration of these two marketing types to generate quantitative successes. However, even if you’re putting more effort into brand or performance marketing (where there are fewer factors to consider), you may still encounter challenges.
Fortunately, a lot of these issues have been faced before by advertisers that we’ve worked with. Do you want to prioritize brand or performance marketing, or even both? Avoid potentially costly mistakes by being aware of the most common challenges and learning how to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Attribution and Tracking Across Multiple Channels
We’ve established that for both brand and performance marketing, it’s considered best practice to track across multiple channels. However, this can make it hard to credit the conversion. This can be a huge issue for either brand or performance marketing because it makes it hard to assess the effectiveness of the channel that you’re using.
Without clarity on the platforms that are working the best for you, balancing your budget for brand and performance marketing will be complicated.
Solution: Focus on Improving Your Understanding of the Customer Journey
We recommend the following:
- Using multi-touch attribution models like first-click, last-click and data-driven to analyze the customer journey;
- Taking advantage of CRM tools to help connect brand and performance marketing efforts to conversions;
- Incorporating GA4 into your system to easily collect both website and app data.
Of course, there’s no entirely accurate way of attributing when you’re using multiple platforms. However, we believe that this solution is the next best thing, regardless of whether you want to focus on brand or performance marketing.
Challenge #2: Finding the Right Balance Between Short-Term and Long-Term Goals
As a competent advertiser, you’re always thinking about how to get the best yield out of your advertising budget. However, as we’ve compared brand and performance marketing, we know that the former won’t get immediate returns. It’s understood that it’s necessary for long-term sustainability, though.
So, how do you allocate your budget? Do you really need to prioritize brand marketing over performance marketing? Or perhaps you should do it the other way around? Making the mistake of focusing too much on the short-term may limit the effectiveness of your campaigns in the long run. On the other hand, you could run out of cash to keep the business going if you focus too much on long-term goals.
Solution: Look at the Stage That Your Business Is In
Should your efforts prioritize brand or performance marketing right now? If the business has enough money, then it may make sense to put more into branding. However, allocating more to the brand over performance marketing may not make sense if you’re working on a very limited budget.
If you’re looking for an immediate capital injection, performance marketing is your best bet. Of course, you still need to invest money into branding efforts. However, more should be dedicated to campaigns with a faster financial yield.
Challenge #3: Ad Fatigue and Declining Engagement
Let’s face it: people are tired of seeing ads unless they’re already actively looking for a solution. Whether your priority lies in brand or performance marketing, this will definitely have an impact on your KPIs.
If your target audience sees your ads too often, they may start to get annoyed, resulting in a negative brand sentiment. However, that doesn’t mean that you should give up on brand and performance marketing. So, how do we prevent ad fatigue?
Solution: Use Native Advertising as Part of Your Campaign
When considering brand and performance marketing campaigns, some advertisers mistakenly believe that you need to be right in front of your audience to command attention. But the thing is, you don’t have to get attention directly.
If you seamlessly integrate your brand and performance marketing ads into a host platform, viewers are more likely to respond well. In this case, your goal is to present helpful and relevant content that will not break the browsing experience. If you need help here, MGID works with high-quality publishers to connect you with your target audience.
Brand Building vs. Performance Marketing: Let’s Do Both!
The way you measure the impact of your success can vary, and it’s practically impossible to implement only one strategy. It’s important to understand the difference between brand marketing and performance marketing when setting the direction of your campaign.
However, remember that anything you do will have an effect on both. Performance marketing and brand awareness go hand-in-hand, so always consider the long-term impact of your efforts on the brand. To get help creating seamless content across relevant platforms, sign up with MGID. With top tools, creative experts, personal managers and many other offers, you don’t have to choose between brand and performance marketing. Let’s help you succeed in both!
