It’s no secret that brand marketing and performance marketing are critical pieces to an organization’s growth. In contemporary marketing, these two approaches are viewed as distinct entities with different objectives and metrics. Brand marketing focuses on building long-term value for the organization by developing brand equity, trust, affinity, and loyalty. Performance marketing focuses on driving immediate, quantifiable results like conversions.
But the customer journey has never been a linear path from awareness to conversion.
There is a growing need for enterprises to find a competitive advantage to better connect with consumers. Bridging the gap between brand and performance marketing might be the key to better connections, addressing the true complexity of the customer journey to maximize marketing effectiveness.
Fusing brand and performance marketing into a more holistic, full-funnel approach gives brands the opportunity to support consumers along their entire journey, showing up in the right place at the right time with the right solutions.
The Current Gap
A siloed approach to brand and performance marketing no longer supports consumers (and never really did) or the business catering to them.
Enterprise brands that rely solely on brand marketing to connect with consumers throughout their complex buying journey risk missing real opportunities to convert their audience. Brand marketing creates awareness, shapes perceptions, and builds long-term affinity, but brand marketing alone is like casting a wide net but forgetting to close it.
Brand marketing efforts don’t necessarily capitalize on the immediate needs and impulses of consumers. For instance, a potential customer might resonate with a company’s message and be inclined to engage. Without a clear and immediate call-to-action (a staple in performance marketing strategies), the potential conversion from consumer to customer is often lost.
Brand marketing alone runs the risk of missing the action-driven consumer.
Conversely, brands that over-prioritize performance marketing take on a different set of risks, potentially “coming on too strong” and damaging consumer trust with premature, aggressive calls for action. Performance marketing is marketing on the brand’s terms with the purpose of meeting the brand’s needs. By nature, it fails to address the consumer’s needs first.
The goal of performance marketing is to incite immediate action. But if consumers are consistently asked to take action, without first establishing a trust-based relationship or understanding the brand’s value proposition, they can feel pressured, annoyed, or confused.
We’ve all experienced this: you continually receive hard-sell ads from a company you barely know. Does it make you want to engage with the brand, or ever even consider buying from them? It’s annoying and you likely come away from the experience feeling exploited rather than valued.
This leads to negative consumer experiences and, in the long run, damages consumer trust and the brand’s reputation.
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The Balanced Approach: Integrating Brand and Performance Marketing
A solid brand strategy builds trust, customer loyalty, and an emotional connection between the audience and the brand. A well-executed performance strategy captures consumers at the moment that they are ready to convert, driving immediate results and contributing to overall business objectives.
Integrating both strategies gives brands the ability to build strong relationships with their audience, guiding them along their journey while being ready at any moment to convert them not just to customers, but brand advocates.
The key to successful brand and performance integration is taking a consumer-centric approach.
Brands that listen to and understand the signals their consumers are sending can develop and optimize marketing assets for both consumer connection and conversion. By aligning their assets directly with consumer needs and providing valuable solutions, brands build trust, authority, and awareness while simultaneously optimizing those assets to convert customers when they are most ready to take action.
The alignment of brand and performance strategies enhances the overall customer journey, from the first touchpoint to conversion and beyond, to customer loyalty and advocacy. The integration also paves the way for holistic data analysis, providing insights across the entire marketing spectrum to inform smarter, data-driven decision-making.
This combination can result (and has resulted) in increased ROI, improved customer satisfaction, and sustained business growth.
How to Strike the Balance
Unification of brand and performance marketing starts with assessing the current state of your marketing, identifying the gaps to fill and silos to shatter.
Next, encourage collaboration between brand and performance teams to identify how the benefits of each approach can solve the problems of the other. Merging data from both silos is critical to gain a holistic view of consumer behavior and campaign effectiveness.
This combined team can formulate a unified strategy, backed by data-driven consumer insights, that encapsulates the goals of both brand and performance marketing. Satisfy both the brand and performance experts by focusing on the fortification and expansion of your owned brand assets, while optimizing them to convert those motivated to take action.
Then, distribute those assets across your brand’s digital landscape. As consumers interact with more of these brand-owned assets, the stronger the relationship between brand and consumer becomes, and the more likely a performance tactic is to convert a newly motivated consumer.
A focus on assets allows brands to step back from chasing marketing channels and refocus their efforts on creating the content their audience is asking for, then distributing that content across the right channels. Aligning consumer needs with brand storytelling and performance optimizations helps ensure consistent messaging across all touchpoints. This boosts brand recall and reinforces purchase decisions.
An example: A large-scale home improvement retailer decides to take the leap into owned asset optimization and starts by digging into the consumer needs data both their brand and performance teams have.
From UX research, they see that a typical consumer visits 30 product pages in a single category before converting. Using search intent data, the brand finds that users are searching for comparisons on key, high-consideration products like flooring, carpets, and expensive appliances.
Realizing consumers are trying to compare complex products to one another to find the one that fits their needs and price point, the brand identifies core assets to give their audience the answers they are searching for. These assets include an interactive comparison tool on all products, a comparison of similar products highlighted in their weekly deals, and blog posts comparing various appliances and highlighting real customer reviews.
The team optimizes these pages to both move consumers through their journeys more efficiently and to convert motivated users — saving the user time and frustration, and connecting the brand to truly engaged consumers. When that consumer is ready to purchase the next big item for their renovation, they’re likely to remember the ease of research that the brand provided and return to their services.
The same can be said across all industries and B2B or B2C verticals: make a meaningful connection with a consumer to increase the future performance of your marketing efforts.
As markets grow increasingly competitive, bridging the gap between brand and performance marketing can provide a competitive edge, driving long-term brand value while delivering immediate results. By adopting an integrated approach, enterprises can enhance their marketing effectiveness, optimize ROI, and deliver an improved customer experience.
This approach requires an enterprise-wide shift in mindset, structural changes in the organization, and a renewed focus on data integration and cross-functional collaboration. However, the potential benefits, including greater returns and improved customer journey, make this a strategic imperative for modern enterprises.
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