Performance Marketing v. Brand Marketing: What is the Right Combination?

Good marketing contains multiple components that consider both the long-term and short-term success of your business. Performance marketing is the short-term, easier to measure marketing tactics that include, pay per click ads, discount offers, etc. Brand marketing is the long-term, brand building efforts that can be more difficult to measure. Examples of brand marketing are TV, radio, and sponsoring the lanyards at an event. Healthy marketing includes both performance and brand marketing. Building brand awareness takes time, effort, and/or monetary investments in the brand. Depending on the type of business and the market you’re entering, it can be more difficult to build brand awareness and you may need to lean on performance marketing before your brand marketing efforts pay off.

Brand marketing is accretive, which means that it builds upon itself over time. Each brand marketing action helps to form the overall brand experience and the brand equity with the customer. Many household brands have built their name and reputation with long-term investments in brand marketing. It’s hard to separate the Coca-Cola product from the Coca-Cola brand at this point and a lesser brand might not have gotten away with a misstep like New Coke.

Performance marketing is primarily transactional. Many performance marketing campaigns are based around a discount offer or specific launch with a campaign that encourages the customer to make a purchase right away. Performance marketing does not always gain customers beyond a single purchase since those customers are often clicking on a price-based ad and do not immediately see the value in paying full price for your products. However, if their first purchase experience is positive, your customers may come back and buy from you again. Many brands include brand marketing efforts in their packaging or the purchase experience to encourage customers they gain through performance marketing to stay with them long term.

When you’re creating a marketing budget for a new consumer-facing brand, set your marketing up to invest at least one third of your total budget in brand marketing. Set metrics for success for both short-term and long-term customer conversion and test the budget for at least 4-6 months before you make changes.

Not sure where planning your long-term v. short-term marketing efforts? We can help.