Balancing brand and performance marketing has nothing to do with giving each side its amount of time in the limelight.
There’s no magic harmony you’re going to create that delivers some sort of marketing tactic equilibrium and equality.
This is the most controversial article I have ever written. A lot of people reading this will not be happy about what I have to say. For the record, there’s a bit of irony in this, considering I have said way more controversial things about marketing and SEO in the past.
Yet, here we are as I am about to tell you that the only way to balance brand and performance marketing is to give brand supremacy.
Let the fireworks begin.
Balance Brand & Performance Marketing? Why Is There Even A Problem?
In keeping with espousing heresy I will not start this post with “What is brand marketing?” and/or “What is performance marketing?” nor will I dive right into how to balance the two.
Instead, I’m going to challenge the very premise of the article so that you can better understand why this question is even worth your time.
While I see the problem as basically being self-evident, let’s flush it out a bit. The way I see it, there are two fundamental issues at play here (there are more, but this post is going to be long enough as it is):
1. Mindset
The mindset required for good brand marketing is, at times, lightyears away from the performance mindset.
I’m not saying that they intrinsically have to be this way. As I’ll get into later, I think the two ways of thinking complement each other.
However, at the risk of generalizing, there does tend to be a strong divergence between how the two types of marketers think. At least, this has been my experience over the past decade or so as someone who straddles both marketing disciplines.
I often find performance marketers very focused on the immediate. What’s bringing traffic right now, and how do we get more of it?
For the record, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is it unreasonable (I mean, it is, but it’s not).
This hyperfocus on immediate performance metrics is quite logical since performance marketers are graded on immediate ROI. Is it thus any surprise they focus on the immediate? (So, performance marketers, it’s not you…it’s the system.)
Brand has an entirely different goal. With brand building, the focus is on exactly that: building. Building an identity, associations and sentiment, messaging, positioning, etc.
All of that takes time. You don’t immediately leave an imprint on someone. If you want to create an impression with an audience, it’s pretty obvious it’s going to take time.
This process is also far more compounded and less linear than performance marketing is often perceived. It’s not like getting a page to rank well and driving in traffic who will convert.
You’re creating a reputation for yourself that involves micro-moments and micro-activities compounding over an extended period (like how any association is formed).
(For what it’s worth, I would argue that performance-based activities, such as SEO, also compound over time. You’re not going to rank for that meaty keyword on day one).
Brand marketing naturally lends itself to a bit more of a holistic long-term mindset whereas performance-based marketing lends itself to focusing more on the immediate impact of a given activity.
These divergent mindsets make it entirely difficult to properly balance brand and performance. They’re almost at war with each other.
To sum it all up: Performance marketing (to its detriment) looks at the end result and often doesn’t care about context, environment, and ecosystems. Brand, on the other hand, is all about contextualization and understanding the environment and ecosystem the brand is operating within.
Now, you might be thinking, well a lot of brand marketers also seem to care less about context, environment, and ecosystems and generally operate in the here and now much like a performance marketer might.
Which brings me to my next point.
2. Misunderstanding What Brand Is
Part of what makes balancing brand and performance marketing almost an inherent difficulty is the lack of understanding of what “brand” actually is.
Too often, what we call “brand marketing” is really performance or product marketing disguised as brand marketing.
What happens is that a company will put emphasis on brand when in reality it’s just another form of performance marketing. The net result is a lack of balance but without even realizing it.
Imagine a TV commercial that doesn’t have a message or any positioning but rather simply tells you what the product is and what it does. Is this brand marketing? I say no. This is just product marketing. It’s pure product awareness.
The web is filled with the equivalent of this.
You talking about your product or service across the internet is not brand marketing; it’s product marketing.
Brand marketing is entirely about who you are in the context of who your audience is and how you want to then be perceived. It is fundamentally associative. If it’s not associative, it’s probably not genuine brand marketing. That is a hot take right there.
Branding is about putting yourself in a position to grow; it is not growth per se. If brand marketing were farming, it wouldn’t even be planting the seeds; it would be sowing the soil so that you could eventually plant the seeds.
Brand is concerned with perception and momentum, not adoption. I know that sounds crazy, and half of y’all out there on both the brand and performance side of marketing are shaking your heads, if not your fists, right now.
But it is the truth. Real brand marketing, the kind you see the Cokes and Lexuses of the world doing, is about perception that leads to momentum. It’s about putting you in a position to grow and to have opportunities that you can capitalize on.
How Do You Then Balance Brand And Performance?
Brand is the setup for performance. Brand creates the opportunity, and performance captures it.
It’s all one dance.
Allow me to explain.
Brand Is Primary, And Here’s Why
Balancing performance and brand marketing isn’t about some sort of give-and-take between the two approaches. If you’re thinking about balance in terms of scales, that’s not how this is going to work.
It’s about knowing where each discipline sits in the “marketing hierarchy” and how the two interact.
This is why I am telling you brand is primary – and it’s not even close.
There are two fundamental ways brand is primary to performance marketing (I was going to insert another, but I think for now these two are the most important):
The Ultimate Goal Is To Have People Come To You
Brand is primary in the very goal it sets out to achieve – to bring audiences to you (as opposed to you chasing your audience across social and search screaming “Pick me! Pick me!”).
It’s like the old line from the Cheers theme song, “You wanna go where everybody knows your name.” No one wrote a line in a sitcom theme song that said, “You wanna go chasing everyone around the block screaming like a mad person so that they will know your name.”
Consumers knowing who you are and seeking you out is self-evidently more advantageous than trying to chase after your consumer base and hoping to heaven you found them at the right moment in the buyer journey.
In case it’s not entirely self-evident (because I have heard performance marketers say the complete opposite), people coming to you creates more momentum and opens up new revenue possibilities than the inverse ever could.
Buzz is contagious. I’m not saying you need to go viral or anything like that, but creating momentum naturally leads to more momentum. The momentum your brand creates for itself leads to all sorts of new possibilities.
Being sought after on whatever level builds upon itself. If done with care and patience it can create real stable opportunity growth for you. This is really what any serious company wants: long-term stable growth. Nothing is more long-term and more stable than being sought after and enticing.
Serious connections with your audience are hard to create but they are hard to really break as well.
Unless you become a known quantity in your niche, no amount of performance marketing is going to help you achieve what you really want: self-sustained staying power.
Brand helps fulfill the ultimate goal any company has: to be a market leader.
Brand Is What Allows Performance To Perform
Can pure performance marketing perform (for lack of a better word)? Yes, obviously.
Can it reach its true potential without brand? No.
Brand marketing is what creates the willingness to invest and interact with your performance marketing.
Imagine you’re on a train, and some random goofball starts waving at you. Are you gonna wave back? And even if you do, are you really interested in interacting with this person?
Now imagine instead that some random whacko your friend sees you on the train and waves. Would you wave back? Wave? You might go on mosy over and have an actual conversation.
Performance without brand is randomly waving at people and hoping that they converse with you. Sometimes they might, but you’re fighting an uphill battle.
Creating a connection with your audience that exists beyond utility is what enables your performance marketing to perform the way you want it to.
To use an SEO analogy, trying to get your product or service to perform without brand is like trying to get a single page on a new website to rank for a highly competitive keyword without any other content history to support it.
Effectively establishing your brand is what enables you to make the pitch that can covert at the appropriate time.
That’s why I would say 99% of brand marketing is not about trying to build revenue. It’s about building the possibility of building revenue. It’s about building cadence and momentum so that the part of your marketing that asks folks to open their wallets works.
Brand puts you on the doorstep of performance. In effect, brand creates the lead, and performance signs the deal.
Like I said earlier, if marketing were a farm, then branding wouldn’t even be planting the seeds. It would be sowing the ground so that you could plant them. And like a field, if you don’t sow it first, you will not have a crop.
If you want revenue without fighting an uphill battle, you have to realize that brand is primary. It is what allows your other marketing activity to perform as you really want it to.
This goes back to what I was saying earlier about people not understanding what brand is.
As far-out as it sounds, brand is not about revenue, it’s about building the opportunities that will eventually lead to revenue. Understanding this one point puts you so far ahead of everyone else.
The Problems In Giving Performance Primacy In A Balanced Approach
Let’s take this from the other side of the coin. What would happen if you gave performance primacy, not brand?
If performance is the building block of the marketing strategy you’re setting yourself up for significant problems down the road.
There are more than a few reasons why this is true, here are some of the more notable ones:
Performance First Means Working With Your Hands Tied Behind Your Back
I don’t even know where to start with this one because a performance-first mindset limits you in so many ways.
Broadly speaking, performance being primary, as I mentioned earlier, means fighting an uphill battle. You’re constantly trying to find the right audience at the right time and then convincing them to funnel through.
Yes, you can get to a good place that way but it’s never really working on its own for you. You never really become a “thing” this way and can’t naturally build momentum upon your activities the same way.