Digital marketing strategy is a balance and dynamic interchange between two pillars – performance marketing and brand marketing. Both approaches play a role in maximizing marketing program effectiveness, and those roles support each other. And, they are not mutually exclusive – they often amplify each other when planned and executed thoughtfully.
Learn more about our approach to marketing and growth, and build an understanding of how we think about creating and capturing demand.
Let’s dive into the half focused on performance marketing.
Performance Marketing for Fintech and Financial Services Brands
We use the term “performance marketing” to refer to those marketing strategies and tactics that aim to produce near-term ROI through lead capturing. These tactics are good at targeting the small percentage of potential customers who are in or near buying mode. It’s less good at and more expensive for piquing interest, creating positive memories and recall of your brand, and generating demand.
Performance marketing is easier to track than brand marketing, but be careful not to confuse tracking and measurement with attribution of performance. Attribution today is no longer reliable given browser privacy, privacy laws, cookie blocking, a new era of user behavior, the rise of apps and siloed platforms, and more. So while we can gather tracking data from performance marketing, it’s tricky to clearly assign “performance” outcomes to these efforts – rarely does someone click on an ad and convert, for example, without first having been exposed to the brand via other channels and tactics. It makes things rather murky for financial services and fintech organizations as to which element of your marketing convinced someone to become a customer – and most likely it was contributions from multiple touch points in their brand journey that when combined created the desired outcome.
The reality is that only around 5% of your audience (5-20% for consumer audiences) is in buying mode and any given time, and 95% are not. Performance marketing focuses on the 5%, but ignoring 95% of your audience would be a terrible near-sighted mistake. You can’t easily build a company solely focused on the here-and-now. This is why our approach is to apply a balanced, symbiotic strategy that includes both performance marketing and brand marketing. Rarely on their own can either approach generate the growth that most companies desire over the long-term.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is a digital marketing strategy that primarily focuses on measurable, quantifiable results. It’s all about driving immediate actions, such as clicks, conversions, or sales.
Most often, performance marketing is associated with paid media advertising. But it can also include other channels and tactics that are designed to push for or capture the final conversion. And they are often tuned and refined over the lifetime of a campaign to optimize conversion points. We also think of marketing channels and strategies in SEO, webinars, email outreach, social media advertising, affiliate marketing, retargeting and re-marketing among others as playing a significant performance marketing function.
It’s not that they can’t also contribute to brand awareness and recall in some instances, but the primary focus of performance marketing tactics is to capture leads, subscribers, and customers in the near-term.
Optimizing Financial Service Performance Marketing
We find that this balanced approach rings particularly true in financial service and fintech marketing programs, with a few caveats. First, performance marketing can look a bit different if your audience is businesses versus consumers. For example, paid media adversing can play a role in marketing strategies for both, but typically the much larger consumer market allows for greater scale and growth than smaller B2B markets which tend to cap out at a certain level. And a performance tactic such as webinars tend to be much better suited for business audiences who have longer research, contemplation, and sales cycles.
Given the importance of trust and expertise in financial services, performance marketing can get a real boost from being paired with brand marketing. Utilizing brand marketing campaigns to build positive associations, highlight value propositions, and implant favorable brand memories in your audience is crucial to a buyer being able to recall your brand once they are ready to engage or buy. We refer to this as the Halo Effect. And that means running brand campaigns in parallel with performance efforts can very often amplify those desired performance campaign outcomes.
The CSTMR team works with our clients to build marketing strategies that utilize the most appropriate performance marketing strategies for their audience and business, while striking a healthy balance with brand awareness and memory building. Because the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought.
