Branding Building and Performance Marketing: Can They Coexist?
In the ever-evolving landscape of advertising, finding the right balance between brand building and performance marketing is crucial for success. Insights from a Chief Marketing Officer and a Co-Founder shed light on how to navigate this complex dynamic.
Trust And Quality Drive Sales
Balancing brand building with performance marketing is crucial for long-term growth and immediate results. For our company, we focus on trust and quality as the foundation of our brand, while simultaneously driving sales through targeted campaigns. A prime example is our “Same-Day Freshness” promise. We showcase this unique offering through brand-building content such as videos and testimonials that emphasize the quality and freshness of our products, building long-term trust.
Simultaneously, we run performance marketing campaigns across social media and search engines to drive immediate sales, targeting consumers who are actively looking for fresh, antibiotic-free seafood and meat.
This dual approach has resulted in a 37% increase in customer retention and a 21% boost in online sales within the past year. By combining emotional engagement through brand campaigns and direct conversions via performance marketing, we successfully build loyalty while meeting short-term business objectives, ensuring sustainable growth and customer satisfaction.
Vrutika Patel, Chief Marketing Officer, Cambay Tiger
Brand And Performance Work Together
As someone deeply involved in the world of digital marketing and branding, I see brand building and performance marketing as two sides of the same coin. They must work in tandem for a successful advertising strategy. It’s not about choosing one over the other, but about finding the right balance for each situation.
Branding is about trust. A strong brand is a shortcut to trust and credibility.
Performance marketing is about action. It’s focused on driving specific actions, like clicks, leads, and sales.
Your performance is always better when you have a strong brand at your side. I’ve repeatedly proven this for my clients and companies over the years.
The best part is that a well-crafted ad campaign can drive immediate sales while reinforcing the brand’s core values and messaging.
One of the best ways to illustrate this balance is by using our own experience in building the MeasureU brand. MeasureU emerged from two existing brands: MeasurementMarketing.io and DataDrivenU.com.
Initially, we tried to cross-promote the brands while maintaining their separate identities.
However, this created confusion in the market. Customers weren’t sure what each brand stood for, and the lack of a unified message created friction in our growth.
We realized that we needed to consolidate the brands under a single, strong identity. This led to the creation of MeasureU. We retained individual products and frameworks, like the Measurement Marketing framework, as sub-brands under the MeasureU umbrella.
This approach allowed us to present a clear and consistent message to the market while still catering to different segments with specific offerings.
The result has been a significant increase in sales while also building brand awareness and customer trust.
Ultimately, the key to balancing brand building and performance marketing lies in a deep understanding of your target market and a commitment to consistency in your messaging and values. By focusing on these core principles, you can create advertising efforts that drive both short-term results and long-term brand growth.
Jeff Sauer, Co-Founder, MeasureU
Complementary Strategies Boost ROI
Balancing brand building with performance marketing starts with understanding that they’re not at odds—they’re complementary. Brand building is about creating emotional connections and trust, which fuel long-term growth, while performance marketing drives immediate results. For example, with one of our clients, we allocated about 60% of their budget toward storytelling campaigns across social media to build brand recognition, and 40% to targeted ads focused on conversions. Over time, the trust built through brand campaigns significantly boosted the ROI of the performance efforts.
The exact balance changes depending on the client’s growth stage. For newer businesses, we often prioritize performance marketing to build cash flow, while for established brands, we lean into brand building to cement loyalty and drive sustainable growth.
James Hill, CEO, Golden Goose Digital
Educational Content Builds Trust
Balancing brand building with performance marketing comes down to creating trust while also delivering results that you can measure. To make this work, we focus on providing educational content that establishes our brand as a trusted resource while including clear, actionable elements to drive conversions.
For instance, when we promote our products, we design campaigns that share valuable insights about the health benefits of the product while also encouraging immediate actions like downloading a guide or taking advantage of a special offer. This allows us to cultivate long-term trust with our users and attain short-term performance objectives.
The key is understanding what the audience needs—offering useful information that resonates with them while gently guiding them toward meaningful actions. In one of our email campaigns, for example, we offered a free guide on red and near-infrared light therapy. The email highlighted our expertise in health and wellness while building trust through social proof like testimonials and strong Trustpilot ratings. At the same time, it included clear calls to action, ensuring that the content wasn’t just educational but also results-driven.
Even Fusdahl Hulleberg, Chief Marketing Officer, Recharge Health
Harmonious Relationship Between Strategies
Balancing brand building with performance marketing is all about creating a harmonious relationship between long-term recognition and short-term results. They aren’t opposing objectives; in fact, they work best when they support each other.
Brand building focuses on emotional connections and lasting impressions, while performance marketing is driven by immediate, measurable outcomes.
For me, the key is to build a strong brand foundation that resonates with your audience and then layer on performance tactics that drive results. I view it as planting seeds for a garden. Brand building is about nurturing the soil and performance marketing is how you water and see growth in real time.
One example of how I balance these two is through storytelling. Let’s say we’re working with a new e-commerce brand. Initially, performance marketing drives sales and gathers data, but we also incorporate brand-building elements. The ads, content, and messaging highlight the company’s mission and values, not just the product. This creates an emotional connection with the audience, turning first-time buyers into long-term fans.
For more established brands, the emphasis may shift. The brand is already built, so performance marketing often takes center stage to drive consistent sales and retain customers. However, we still make sure every campaign reinforces the brand’s core message, even in performance-driven ads.
What changes between clients is the approach, but the principle remains: customers should always feel connected to the brand, whether they’re seeing their first ad or making a repeat purchase.
By blending these two strategies, we ensure that every marketing touchpoint builds not only immediate results but also long-term brand equity.
Michelle Merz, Marketing Consultant, Silience and Sonder
Integrating Awareness And Conversion Strategies
Balancing brand building with performance marketing requires integrating long-term awareness campaigns with short-term conversion-focused strategies. For example, I might run storytelling-driven video ads to establish a brand’s identity while simultaneously deploying targeted retargeting ads to drive immediate sales. This dual approach ensures that while brand recognition grows, measurable actions like purchases or sign-ups are also achieved.
For clients in emerging industries, I emphasize brand-building to create trust, whereas established businesses benefit from a heavier focus on performance marketing to optimize ROI. Tailoring this balance based on a client’s goals and market position ensures both sustained growth and immediate results.
Brenton Thomas, Founder, Twibi
Clear Storytelling Improves Outcomes
Balancing brand building and performance marketing means telling a clear story while driving results. For one client, we focused on crafting a relatable message before launching ads, which built trust and improved outcomes.
With a tech client, their ads struggled because the product wasn’t clear. We created simple content to explain its value, supported by targeted ads. Once the audience understood, conversions quickly improved. Sometimes, clarity comes first.
Dinesh Agarwal, Founder, CEO, RecurPost
Famous Brands Perform Better
This whole “balancing brand and performance” discussion is mostly marketing nonsense.
The idea that there’s some magical formula for dividing your budget between “brand building” and “performance marketing” is another example of the marketing industry making simple things complicated.
Here’s the truth: All advertising is brand advertising. And all advertising should perform.
I once had a client who sold high-end kitchen appliances. The digital zealots convinced them they needed to split their budget: 30% for “brand building” (basically expensive TV ads showing beautiful kitchens) and 70% for “performance” (mostly search ads and social media targeting people who’d visited their website).
Know what happened? Their sales tanked.
Why?
Because they’d forgotten the most basic principle of advertising:
Famous brands sell more stuff. They’d chopped up their budget so finely that they couldn’t achieve proper impact in any channel.
Here’s what actually works:
Focus on getting famous in your category.
Why?
- If you’re not famous, nobody gives a damn about your “performance” ads.
- Famous brands get better performance from ALL their advertising.
- Being well-known is your best “performance” metric.
Stop treating brand and performance as separate things.
- Every ad should build your brand.
- Every ad should drive some kind of action.
- The distinction is artificial and harmful.
The real balance isn’t between brand and performance—it’s between long-term success and short-term survival. Some businesses need immediate sales to keep the lights on. Fine. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a strategy—it’s just staying alive.
The most successful brands I’ve worked with understood this. They didn’t waste time trying to find the perfect balance—they focused on becoming the best-known brand in their category. Everything else followed from that.
If you’re struggling with this “balance,” you’re probably asking the wrong question. The right question is: “How do we get famous enough that all our marketing works better?”
Justin Oberman, Co-Founder, Genius Scouts
Analyze Variables To Allocate Budget
It’s easy to do when you take into consideration all relevant variables. The first question is what is the current state of the brand. We can measure that if necessary. The easiest way is the use of Google Trends and/or the quantity of brand traffic on the website.
Next question is the state of sales or lead generation. Is our sales stable, have we already made a sales machine from our website?
What do we do? Are people familiar with our products/services and is there a strong demand? What is our position in the market? Who are our competitors? What’s our USP and how important is it for our customers?
We usually do a full discovery workshop and deep dive analysis as the first step of cooperation. It’s not a game if you sell an iPhone or you are a startup that invented something that didn’t exist. Depending on that, the budget can go 90% one way or another.
Start preparation with Google Ads keyword research and check if you can do pull marketing. If yes, that’s a much easier market approach. Brand awareness is done in waves and performance marketing is always-on consistent work.
If I had to decide the rule of thumb budget allocation for a new small business, I’d allocate 1/3 of the budget to Brand Awareness and 2/3 for performance marketing. Please be cautious, every business is unique and their business landscape is different. One-size-fits-all solutions are never your best option and can harm your business. Do a serious analysis or if you lack knowledge and experience, ask for help. When you have clear numbers it will be easier to make data-driven decisions.
David Peranic, Digital Strategist, Scoreminds
Performance Marketing and Brand-Building Must Work Together
Navigating the nuanced world of brand building and performance marketing requires a strategic blend of long-term vision and short-term action. By understanding your target audience, crafting compelling narratives, and consistently analyzing your efforts, you can create a harmonious balance that fosters lasting brand loyalty while driving measurable results. As the experts highlighted, the key lies in integrating these two powerful approaches to create a cohesive and impactful customer journey.