Insights from The Awareness Advantage – Tracksuit and The Long and the Short of It – Les Binet & Peter Field
We LOVE performance marketing (paid ads, SEO, email marketing, PPC etc), primarily because it provides us with straight-forward success metrics e.g. sales, leads, clicks, ROI. It’s an easily justifiable expenditure.
What’s much harder to track is the impact brand building has on a business. Brand building is less quantifiable, it sits in the grey area, causing marketers and business owners to prioritise performance marketing methods.
Put simply, brand marketing is the work that focuses on developing brand awareness, customer affinity, consumer attitudes and perceptions of the business. From developing a strong brand identity and personality, it continues to drive home brand differentiation, ethos and character. Brand building aims at generating emotional connections with consumers and ultimately increases brand equity
To rudimentarily differentiate the two; performance marketing calls for immediate action (buy now / sign up / subscribe etc), providing short term success. Brand marketing influences consumer perceptions, providing more long-term success.
Interestingly brand marketing correlates with conversions at a higher rate than performance marketing.
The argument is not to cancel all performance marketing efforts, but rather balance those efforts and spend with strategic brand marketing.
Brand marketing lays the foundation for performance marketing to be a true success, because, the more familiar and likeable your brand is to consumers, the more efficient your performance marketing becomes.
Rather than rivals, performance and brand are more like a power duo with complimentary strengths.
So, how do you practically balance the two?
Data suggests that the ideal balance of brand and performance marketing expenditure is around 60% brand, 40% performance. For an even simpler principle, try working at evenly splitting your efforts and budget across the two.
It’s time for long-standing marketing rivals to work together and two-fold their success this year.
