Brand marketing or Performance marketing, which is better? Through brand marketing for a long time. Brands become brands by earning the trust of their customers. Usually offering a personal connection that a person can emotionally relate to. But this type of commitment does not happen overnight, it takes time and strategy. A brand agency is more suitable to make that happen. They have the means, creativity and strategy to make a company into a recognisable brand.
On the other hand, a business perspective needs to be taken into consideration. The investment that goes into marketing cannot go on forever without fruitful results. In business, every investment needs a return and then some. Performance marketing is the approach that a performance marketing activities-focused agency looks into. It is all about the returns, the performance of each campaign and setting up the next form of action. Today we will explore the pros and cons of both brand marketing and performance marketing.
What Exactly Is Brand Marketing?
To make a name, telling stories is very important, otherwise people simply will not remember. Brand marketing is in the same vain. Brand marketing is not something that is digital marketing. It has been around as long as marketing itself existed, companies have been associating their brand with famous actors to create a brand image. Furthermore, doing charity events, or sponsoring big events like sports or awards etc. A brand over time creates a narrative that its products are an indispensable part of the customers’ lives. Brand marketing is all about the emotional appeal and connection it can make. Let’s look at some of the key functions of brand marketing:
- Awareness: The major objective is to increase brand recognition and create loyal consumers. Strong brand-building efforts may help you establish your brand and distinguish it from the competition.
- Brand Loyalty: Every firm wants to keep its customers. This may occur when the organisation implements the appropriate branding approach.
- Real-Time Feedback: Branding is an excellent way to learn about what customers are thinking by analysing their feedback on the brand, whether directly or indirectly. Receiving favourable word of mouth is just one of the numerous aspects of brand activity.
- Emotional Connection: The stories surrounding a brand’s value drive frequently form a relationship. Many legacy firms develop marketing initiatives that rely largely on nostalgia. This has an emotional influence on the customers, who may return to the brand for that reason. Engaging in environmentally responsible activities is also quite effective. These brand-building actions make the brand appear nice, and as a result, many people desire to associate with it.
What Exactly Is Performance Marketing?
The aim of performance marketing differs from brand marketing. Brand marketing is more focused on long-term gains whereas performance marketing aims to increase engagement and sales. The method is pure analytic and a data-driven digital marketing method that measures marketing success by tracking clicks, leads, purchases, downloads, and data collecting. These actions are focused on delivering measurable results and enhancing return on investment (ROI). This method is used for better and quicker achievement of goals than waiting. Moreover, due to being more data-dependent, real-time feedback and quick action to change course are some of the benefits. But let us review a few more important aspects of performance marketing:
- Quantifiable Strategy: The overall purpose of various marketing initiatives is to acquire as much quantifiable data as possible. A performance-driven marketing strategy includes meeting specific targets or accomplishing quantifiable goals such as increased website traffic, lead generation, or sales conversions.
- Data-Driven Approach: This type of marketing is all about data. The gathered data is utilised to turn it into sales or to conduct further research to build a series of marketing initiatives. This strategy is also used to monitor campaign performance, identify areas for improvement, and optimise methods to get better outcomes.
- Pay-for-Performance Model: Brands pay for tactics that only charge a fee when a desired action is completed, such as affiliate marketing or pay-per-click (PPC). We can see examples of this in Google AdWords and Amazon-sponsored listings. This strategy saves the corporations a significant amount of money.
- Targeted Audience Reach: This marketing strategy allows for more successful targeting of specific demographics. It usually entails utilising their demographics, hobbies, and internet activities as guidelines.
Which One Is Better? Brand Marketing or Performance Marketing?
If you are in a stage where you want to concentrate on a type of marketing for your company, which approach should be better? Brand marketing or Performance Marketing? First, you need to know which one you need to prioritise first. Both have their strength and weaknesses which you need to use according to your advantage. Brand marketing’s main goal is to raise brand awareness among the target customers. Brand marketing heavily relies on creating a brand image that your potential, as well as existing customers, can relate to. Further, online reputation management is a big part of brand marketing. It is an effort to keep a good image of your brand on the internet.
On the other hand, Performance marketing is more interested in the ROI. Every investment must have a greater return, achieving such goals is the main focus of performance marketing. Furthermore, due to its power to measure data like CRT, engagement, impressions etc, the ad campaign can be modified on the go. Therefore, re-strategising is much easier in performance marketing. A marketer can do a lot more with the real-time data at hand and make marketing strategies that are result-driven. Let us further elaborate on this subject for better understanding of which is better Brand marketing or Performance marketing?
Benefits of Brand-Focused Marketing
One of the biggest strengths of brand marketing is to create brand loyalty in your company. Customers will come back to you due to the connection you have created as a brand. Creating the best campaign that sends the right message to your target audience is a big part of brand marketing. Furthermore, it also employs a larger set of channels, including social media content marketing, public relations, influencer marketing, sponsorship, experiential events and many more. But the problem with this kind of marketing is that it tends to take some time. You cannot expect a return on the go, brand marketing is always best in the long run.
Benefits of Performance-Focused Marketing
This approach is the quickest way of making maximum impact. The endeavour of this marketing success can be easily evaluated using a variety of matrices. How the invested money in the ad campaign is made back or in other words focuses on return on investment(ROI). This a all trackable through various tools like tracking clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS) etc. As alluded to before, performance marketing focuses on short-term achievements and profits that have been made out of marketing.
For example, lead generation from Meta and Google ads which are then converted to sales. Moreover, performance marketing can keep track of a brand’s performance across different channels. Which include, search engine marketing (SEM), social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and email marketing to create and improve brand campaigning. But unlike brand marketing where you can rely on organic growth, performance marketing does rely on paid marketing.
How Adivorous Can Help You to Grow!
If the answer was not obvious already, there is no Brand marketing or Performance Marketing, you need both types of marketing depending on the need. Because both are the face of the same coin, brand marketing is effective for longer plans for growth as already told before. But, brand marketing of course uses the data-driven approach of performance marketing for better efficiency. On the other hand, performance marketing can be used to increase awareness as well as generate sales. Both of them go hand in hand and at Adivorous we believe in this approach. Our marketing strategies combine the best of both worlds and create overall a better campaign.
