By Omar Reda on September 28, 2024 | Reading time: 5minutes | Brand Vs Performance Marketing

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For years, businesses have struggled to find the right balance between performance marketing (focused on immediate results like clicks and sales) and brand marketing (the long-term work of shaping customer perceptions). But what if these two approaches didn’t have to compete? By establishing the right metrics, companies can amplify both at the same time.

Performance Marketing’s Rise on Account of Brand Marketing

Over the past 20 years, performance marketing has become the dominant way businesses reach consumers. It’s attractive because it’s measurable—you know exactly what you’re getting for your money. However, this focus on instant returns has caused some companies to neglect brand-building efforts, which aim to create lasting customer connections.

The Misconception of Trade-offs

Executives often see performance marketing and brand building as trade-offs: one delivers short-term revenue, and the other is a long-term investment. However, viewing them this way leads to missed opportunities. The truth is that focusing on both can provide greater returns for your business.

A New Approach

Rather than seeing them as rivals, companies should adopt metrics that measure the impact of both brand-building and performance-marketing activities. These metrics link brand equity to financial outcomes, such as revenue growth and shareholder value, and allow businesses to optimize both.

Building Brand Metrics That Matter

Brand metrics are often too abstract, focusing on awareness or advocacy without a clear link to financial performance. Instead, companies should focus on four key elements: familiarity, regard, meaning, and uniqueness. These factors deeply influence how consumers feel about your brand and, in turn, their purchasing decisions.

Examples of potential case studies where success can be achieved through balance between both Brand & Performance Marketing:

1. Airline: By pinpointing areas where brand equity needed improvement, an airline targeted its marketing budget more effectively and saw a measurable increase in market share.
2. Fast-Food Chain: By focusing on attributes like being “cheerful” and “reliable,” a fast-food chain successfully expanded its audience without alienating its core customers.
3. Coffee maker: This brand successfully broadened its appeal to younger consumers through packaging and distribution changes while maintaining its uniqueness.

Making Performance Marketing Accountable for Brand Growth

Performance marketing campaigns often ignore their impact on brand equity, focusing solely on short-term gains like conversion rates. Companies that integrate brand metrics into their performance marketing strategies can achieve sustainable growth, benefiting both the brand and the bottom line.

Key Takeaways:

1. Performance and brand marketing shouldn’t compete. Both impact short-term revenue and long-term value.
2. Brand building is measurable. Companies can hold brand-building efforts to the same financial accountability as performance marketing.
3. Not all performance marketing is positive. Without considering brand equity, performance marketing can hurt your brand in the long run.

ConclusionBy linking performance marketing and brand-building metrics to a single financial measure, companies can achieve better results from both efforts. It’s time to stop pitting them against each other and start using them together for a more holistic, impactful marketing strategy to reach integrated marketing communications that concept that we all seek for applying it in our new era of marketing.

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