Brand Marketing + Performance Marketing
Many companies don’t realize that a large majority of your audience are not in the market to buy what you sell at a given time. This is especially true in B2B marketing, where that breakdown is close to 95% not in market versus only 5% actively looking. And for those companies that are more focused on consumers in financial services, it’s only slightly higher at around 5-20%.
The following is our experience and research-based approach to why most marketing strategies need a balance of brand marketing and performance marketing to build long-term growth.
Why? Audiences are Rarely Buying
Audiences are rarely buying, especially in B2B and many financial services sectors. Therefore, to reach them we need a combination of tactics and a multi-pronged marketing strategy.
We use performance marketing to try to reach and convert the 5%, and brand marketing to build “mental market share” – a memory of your brand for easy recall when they are in market.
Focusing heavily on performance marketing is short-sighted, and not an ideal recipe for long-term growth. 95% of the market is a massive segment (and opportunity) to ignore.
Why? They Amplify Each Other
When you run both brand marketing and performance marketing in concert, it can have a “halo effect.”
It can raise brand awareness for the 5% in market, thereby making it more likely they will choose your brand. It can also work to expand that 5%.
Brand and performance marketing are not mutually exclusive. Both can contribute to brand awareness and conversions.
Why? Attribution is Highly Flawed
Given today’s challenges with accurately attributing what element or channel was truly responsible for a lift, we need to look at how we measure performance. While there are some minor exceptions, attribution fundamentally doesn’t work anymore. Approximating overall lift across channels and tactics is likely the most reliable path.
Every app or social platform has an incentive to keep you there. They reward embedded content, not click-outs. Users are now habituated not to click out (if it’s even an option) and go directly to search instead.
Attribution was killed by Apple’s cookie changes, anti-tracking and privacy laws, ad blockers, multi-device journeys, app dominance, zero-click consumption, and missing referral data (“Direct”).
Performance marketing’s flawed attribution and overstated impact – always claiming credit for brand marketing channels whose impact can’t be as easily demonstrated.
Marketing that Targets Your Full Audience
Brand Marketing
Build awareness and “mental market share”
- Be compelling and consistent
- Build positive and value-oriented associations
- Drive brand recall when shopping begins
- Create demand
Performance Marketing
Engage, capture and convert your audience
- Build upon and reinforce brand marketing
- Optimize for the conversion point
- Capture demand
Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought.
