Brand and Performance Marketing: The Key to Sustained B2B Growth

Let’s face it - as a modern B2B marketer, you live and die by the stats. Lead gen numbers. Engagement. Conversion rates. With so much focus on data and measurable ROI, it’s easy to become consumed by the day-to-day performance marketing grind and lose focus on long-term brand building. 

Performance channels like PPC, lead gen landing pages and targeted ads promise easily attributable, fast results. In contrast, brand development seems more intangible and disconnected from revenue.

However, this is a false dichotomy - and a strategic mistake to pit the two against each other.

The truth that top B2B brands know? Your brand is everything when it comes to getting through to your desired customer base and convincing them that you bring more to the table than your competitors. Consistent, emotionally-resonant brand building lays the foundation for sustainable success and provides insulation from market turbulence. 

The real opportunity lies in an integrated framework blending brand building with performance: use digital capabilities to quantify brand impact, and strategic branding lends context and credibility to performance efforts. The result is an agile strategy, optimising both long-term reputation and short-term financial return. 

An integrated approach sets up B2B brands for resilience, relevance and measurable growth in the years ahead.

Understanding the Dual Forces in B2B Marketing

At first glance, performance marketing and brand marketing seem much too different to potentially be part of just one integrated marketing strategy. However, the two have more in common than you might think.

But before we get into how to integrate them, let’s go over the key principles of each individual concept and where they fit into the mix.

Brand Building: The Power of Emotional Connections

At its core, brand building is about shaping how your business is perceived by establishing an identity that resonates with your audience and stands apart from the competition. It generates authority, relevance and affinity with the target market.

This involves consistent messaging, visuals and experiences that reflect the values your brand stands for. It also requires understanding motivations and viewpoints of potential B2B customers at a deeper level in order to make those connections.

For your customer, their first encounter with your brand is a lot like meeting a new person. They’ll quickly form a first impression that will hopefully inspire them to learn more. As they take the next step, the process of getting to know your brand has only just begun.

More than products or services, you are selling a promise with the aim of forging a long-term relationship. This demands nurturing emotional rapport and credibility beyond rational purchasing factors. Customers want to feel they are buying into not just what you sell, but why you sell it and what makes your organisation unique.

Brand marketing is all about better facilitating this process and building stronger brand equity in the process. Equity is the set of intangible assets giving your brand influence across the market. It is what convinces B2B customers that a particular brand is trustworthy, reliable, and worth integrating into how they manage their own companies. It takes time and consistency to develop, but forms the bedrock of sustainable success.

Rationale alone does not breed preference - brands must also foster trust on a more primal level. Matching value propositions with emotional resonance is the hallmark of brand building done right.

Performance Marketing: Driving Outcomes with Data-Powered Precision

If brand building focuses on the qualitative, performance marketing is its quantitative counterpart - leveraging data, analytics and precision execution to generate tangible results.

Performance marketing employs targeted advertisements, promotions and messages precision-tailored to motivate specific actions from your audience. Channels ranging from paid search and social to referral programs can be powerful avenues for driving conversions.

The appeal for B2B brands is in the clarity of results and being able to tie marketing activity to specific actions. While brand building takes patience, performance marketing promises faster returns that scale through relentless analysis and adaptation.

Performance marketing campaigns come with measurable objectives. Whether you’re trying to  generate leads via landing pages, acquire new customers, or close sales, they’re all things that can be measured. Metrics such as click-through-rates, cost per lead, deal cycle velocity and sales growth are easy to track and assess. 

This makes both success and failure easily identifiable. Finetuning individual efforts to attain different or better results is a reasonably simple process, as well. When paired with testing and audience segmentation, data informs decisions on allocating budget and engineering customer journeys for efficiency.

Bringing Brand and Performance Together

Given the distinct natures of brand building and performance marketing, it can be tempting to silo them into separate strategies. However, to unlock their full potential these should function as integrated disciplines.

Brand efforts lend crucial context, personality and meaning to performance campaigns. Likewise, performance data and results provide tangible proof that brand presence delivers hard business outcomes.

An interdependent approach also improves cohesion across touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey. Landing pages should reinforce the visual branding from display ads. Lead nurturing emails should evoke the same voice as sales conversations. 

Consistency and coordination maximises impact. Brand building supports performance, quantified performance validates brand ROI. In tandem, the two propel sustainable, measurable growth.

Conversely, a disconnected strategy offers significant downsides:

• Performance campaigns not grounded in brand context lose impact and resonance over time due to lack of relevance and personality.

• Brand-building programs not measured on hard KPIs struggle to justify ROI or generate exec buy-in and budget allocation.

• Inconsistent messaging and positioning across touchpoints dilutes potential impact.

The key to success is to remember that every short-term win is a step on the path towards long-term business goals. Combining branding and performance efforts will help your company meet both.

Building a Cohesive Strategy

An integrated playbook reflects today's digital-powered reality. Everything must be data-informed for optimisation. But in isolation data lacks meaning. Fusing brand building with performance also fuels innovation.The two disciplines’ complementary capabilities drive new ideas that are amplified by culture and quantified through data.

Look for ways to enrich your performance marketing using brand assets and brand-building strategy. Meanwhile, transition your standard branding approach to a performance branding model that successfully integrates performance-based key performance indicators (KPIs) and quantitative data into the mix.

Build a Common Language

The first step in integration is establishing a baseline - defining shared insight and goals that meet in the middle between brand efforts and performance outcomes. This common language breaks down the silos that lead to consequences like inconsistent information, higher overall marketing costs, and a lack of innovation. 

You can address this by facilitating closer collaboration between performance focused campaigns and branding strategies. For example:

• Leverage the data insights from performance marketing to gain deeper insight into what makes your existing and potential customers tick.

• Use what your brand tells you about what matters to your audience to create more effective ads, marketing content, landing page copy, and more.

• Add a brand marketing human element to performance campaigns, such as video ads or  by experimenting with formats like live videos and influencer marketing.

• Analyse purchases, inquiries and reviews to identify brand associations, then inform all content and messaging to reinforce those connections.

• Consult your performance-based KPIs for additional insight when assessing how your customer base has evolved over time.

Fostering Sustainable Performance Marketing

Although increasing conversions and sales will always be a part of any successful performance marketing campaign, it’s important to broaden the scope to unlock long-term value and brand impact.

All performance efforts should consider the long-term impact on your brand. 

A good place to start is by making sure your individual performance campaigns align with your brand’s style, voice, message, and visual assets to promote brand recognition. Consistent visuals, messaging and concepts reinforce, not dilute, brand positioning.

Performance campaigns must visually and verbally align with broader brand guidelines to boost familiarity. Confusing or contradictory experiences dilute equity. The goal is orchestrating a cohesive system where disparate interactions build towards unified resonance. 

A potential buyer who is familiar with your brand through one platform should be able to recognise your brand immediately on another.

Ensure performance ads, landing pages and promotional content adopt sanctioned visual identity elements like logo, fonts, imagery style and graphical language. Equally reflect verbal tonality standards specifying voice, diction and messaging themes based on brand personality frameworks.

Marketing automation can help by creating a central repository and dynamically populating approved assets. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of maintaining consistency across multiple channels and platforms.

The mindset shift is from extracting sales to nurturing relationships - using performance techniques to identify and attract perfect customers again and again.

Injecting Science into the Art of Branding

To demonstrate credibility with executives, quantifying brand impact is crucial. The goal of ‘performance branding’ is to be able to optimise brand building by testing assumptions and guiding strategic spend. What combination of branding technique and performance marketing creates optimal lift?

Marketing teams can brainstorm ways to measure the ongoing growth of awareness, associations, and equity. Some examples of ways to do this include the following:

• Brand Sentiment: Use social listening and surveys to track positive, negative, and neutral mentions of your brand. This measures brand perception and indicates if marketing efforts are improving brand image.

• Brand Recognition: Conduct surveys and brand studies to quantify what percentage of your target audience is aware of or recognises your brand. Increased recognition shows brand awareness efforts are working.

• Search Traffic: Use analytics to track visits to your website that come from organic search engine results. More organic traffic indicates greater awareness and interest in your brand. Similarly, track branded searches.

• Social Engagement: Track actions like shares, comments, and likes on social posts about your brand. The number of interactions, as well as the depth of those interactions, signals growing brand awareness and fan base.

• Share of Voice: Measure what percentage of overall online conversations about your brand category are discussing your specific brand. A higher share of voice indicates greater brand dominance and awareness.

This also means tracking metrics that matter for enduring growth. Things like lifetime customer value, retention rates and customer satisfaction - leading indicators bolstering brand strength beyond immediate sales.

Feedback Loops and Adaptation

No successful marketing strategy exists in a vacuum, and one that successfully combines performance marketing and brand marketing is no exception. Ongoing data collection and measurement is a must. So is frequent analysis of that data.

Ongoing data analysis is key when it comes to assessing how current marketing efforts are going and how they stack up to past efforts. It’s also the best way to identify when something isn’t working as planned so that adjustments can be made as soon as possible.

Empower teams through data access and flexibility. Pipe real-time campaign data from across all channels into analytics dashboards for integrated analysis. Track unified KPIs showcasing contribution across areas to inform optimal resource allocation between short and long term efforts. Then enable rapid decisions based on protocols for iteration priorities, resourcing and mandate clarity across teams.

Developing this culture obsessed with measurement, adaptation and closing the loop provides an enduring competitive edge.

Tactical Approaches for Integration

A genuinely successful marketing strategy is only partly about getting those numbers up and keeping them up. When buyers expect personalised experiences and meaningful relationships with the brands they buy from, customer experience is everything.

Fortunately, experience is measurable!

Customised Strategies for Different Audiences

B2B audiences are not homogenous. And your existing and potential customers are busy people. They don’t want to waste their time on messages that aren’t relevant to them or their businesses. These days, marketing personalisation isn’t just what customers prefer. It’s the standard to measure up to. 

Branding and performance marketing programs should be tailored for customer segments based on their unique needs and the journeys to engage them. This helps you develop nuanced, effective messaging that really resonates with people and is relevant to their needs. 

Which segmentation ideas will work best depends on your company, goals, and industry. However, some examples include:

• A prospect’s seniority or role in the company.

• Where a customer is on their personal buyer’s journey.

• Which industry the customer belongs to.

• Which buyer persona or demographics the buyer fits.

• A buyer’s previous interactions with your brand or products

Content Marketing

Content is the thread connecting performance and brand building. With insight into pain points and decision motivators, marketing can craft campaigns that simultaneously educate, engage and convert audiences.

It’s also a solid avenue for successfully merging your performance marketing and brand marketing efforts. The same white paper or blog post can highlight thought leadership while generating leads. 

Relevant, valuable content speaks to customers wherever they are in their journey - from early research to final purchasing decisions. Use the data generated from interactions to continue to shape content that answers buyer questions and offers solutions.

Remember - consistency matters. Align topics, tone of voice, visuals and calls-to-action across assets. This builds familiarity while marketing automation and journey orchestration allows personalisation to different segments.

Digital and Social Media Strategies

Paid digital channels and social platforms enable B2B brands to have it both ways - branding market presence and driving measurable conversions simultaneously.

Campaigns raising awareness of market leadership or showcasing company values build equity. Retargeting visitors with personalised content keeps your brand top-of-mind. Social campaigns highlighting culture and purpose increase consideration while tailored lead gen ads convert high-intent contacts. Focus first on branding objectives when shaping narratives, then laser target key accounts and priority segments. 

Some tips for combining the two across multiple social media platforms include:

• Set specific goals, choosing metrics to track, and perpetually optimising your approach according to your findings.

• Leverage the unique connectedness of social media to engage target audiences and win their trust.

• Combine visuals, text, graphics, and more to create eye-catching posts that drive engagement and resonate with buyers in search of solutions.

• Employ social listening techniques to keep track of conversations surrounding your brand and products.

• Use social media and other digital channels to improve customer service, boost buyer satisfaction, and support your bottom line

Customer Journey Orchestration

Today B2B buyers go through an extensive decision journey while researching solutions for their business needs. Journey orchestration uses technology and co-ordination to offer personalised digital experiences and informed human conversations to guide audiences through that process. 

The goal is to connect with both minds and hearts at each touchpoint via coordinated experiences and real-time engagement. An orchestrated journey meets customers where they are. It builds an authentic brand connection through quality conversations and content relevance. It also moves decisions forward by capturing and nurturing interest with  data-driven offers matched to individual journeys.

The result: higher trust and conversions at lower acquisition costs, aligned around the individual. The tandem effects of emotionally aligned yet performance focused marketing.

Conclusion

These days, it’s not enough to simply choose your favourite between performance marketing and brand marketing. You need both approaches and to leverage each of them successfully for resonance and results.

Blending brand marketing's ability to foster emotional connections with performance marketing's data-driven outcomes provides a foundation for long-term customer equity and immediate growth.

This unified framework breaks down silos, enhances impact across channels, and future-proofs marketing.

Eager to explore how tighter integration of brand building and performance marketing can accelerate your B2B organisation's growth?

Don't leave sustainable results on the table. Let's start a rewarding partnership fusing creativity with measurable outcomes. Get in touch to find out how 1827 Marketing can help you to design and orchestrate integrated brand experiences optimised for customer value.