Branding vs Performance Marketing: Which Befits Your Business?

What Is Branding?

A Brand is the perceived image, stature, and visibility of your company in the eyes of your customers. It is the consumer's perception of your products and services to them.
A brand may be able to answer the following questions :

• To whom do you want to sell your offerings?
• Do you get to know your way around their habits, problems, and preferences?
• Do you know where you can reach them?
• Is there anything missing in the market that you can provide for?

A brand name clearly distinguishes you from others. It is more than a logo, trademark, name, or color. Branding gives you an identity and elicits emotions and feelings in people once they hear your name or think about you. It is the sense of who you are and how your services hit home with your customers. To retain existing customers and build a loyal customer base, you need that towering image of yours.

Brand Building is for a long haul, and it may take several weeks, months, or years to create a moniker for you in the market. It demands you to invest a reasonable amount of time, money, or effort in building your brand and forging relationships with your customers. Email follow-ups, face-to-face meetings, and continued social media marketing efforts help customers to gravitate toward your brand. Branding ensures that your customers are fully sated in every touchpoint of their journey and drawn back to you on any occasion.

To connect emotionally with customers, well-crafted stories and creative elements are necessary. A proverbial brand will have a compelling story and definite SMART goals to measure its success. The Unique Value Proposition of your products and services helps to align customers with your brand image, and a robust social media presence will further bolster your brand.

The usage of analytical tools helps you to stand in good stead, and it helps to evaluate how your branding efforts are going in quantifiable terms. Advertising campaigns, promotional strategies, and tactics enhance brand equity. A company with fortified brand equity is well-positioned in the industry and attains long-term success.

Hiring Influencers or Agencies accrue benefits for your brand and augments your exposure levels. Besides this, promulgating your products through advertisements, social media campaigns, radio, TV, Podcasts, and webinars will keep you in the running.

The more your brand carries its weight, the increased engagement levels and faster sign-ups will occur. With the elevated image of your brand, there will be less need to test new products in the market. It very well goes into an equation for sticking longer to that brand.

But the larger question at the top of our mind is : "Is brand marketing a better fit than performance marketing for your marketing mix "?

Marketers and App Developers view branding and performance marketing differently, so we must dissect each separately to determine which is ideal for a company.

The Primacy Of Brand Marketing In Your Business

The more you punctuate the burnishing image of your brand, the more upper hand you have in the marketing business. The utility of your brand is what makes it stand the test of time. One may stand tall when using or recommending the services of an established brand. A brand that anticipates the customers needs well in advance and takes prompt actions to fulfill them is more bankable. Undoubtedly, everyone wishes to permeate the presence of renowned brands in every aspect of their daily lives, whether tangible or intangible.

Singular brand names remain etched in customers' memory, especially when they are the horse in the race. It helps them to associate themselves with the brand in a better way and recommend it to others.

Who wants to go and apply heuristic techniques always? One looks to get hooked to a product for a considerable time which must end their endless search for different products by providing them the marked results. Sometimes, one may like to continue using the reverential brand forever. It may happen when a celebrity or an influencer is promoting the same. It is the icing on the cake in an era when customers will increasingly look for celebrity-endorsed products.

Brand Management software in the markets gives you a real sense of your campaigns by monitoring, managing, and measuring your brand’s health and performance. The brand management software provides a holistic, customizable, scalable, and user-friendly interface. It manages the creation and nurturing of a brand's identity and reputation. Brand Management Software engages in the execution of brand strategy by keeping brand guidelines consistent across several channels and automating workflows.

Now we look into the broader picture of Performance Marketing before drawing any conclusion, which is better of these two and benefits our business.

What is Performance Marketing?

Performance Marketing is online marketing where advertisers pay affiliates a fixed sum of the amount after a sale, lead or click. Performance Marketing is a short-term result-oriented marketing tactic, unlike brand marketing which relies on long-term relationship building and achieving long-term gains. We predicate the whole idea of performance marketing on sales, leads, or clicks. Performance Marketing reflects the strain of marketing as something that maximizes return on investment in a short time.

As consumers get more digitally savvy, they are looking for something that can provide them with quick returns through online activity. Hence Performance Metrics come to their disposal.

It is a lower funnel where customers buy products or services immediately. On the other hand, branding stands on top of the funnel that builds relationships over a protracted period rather than a quick purchase.

Key Performance Indicators like CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), CPL(Cost Per Leads), CPM (Cost Per Impression), CPS (Cost Per Sales), etc., to track, analyze, measure, and optimize the success of your campaigns are elemental and do the heavy lifting for you in performance marketing.

Performance marketing is associated with data-driven channels like Banner Display Ads, Native Advertising, Content Marketing, Social Media, Search Engine Marketing, etc. These channels help significantly in making new connections with newer sets of audiences and also to hard-to-reach audiences.

Does this mean brand marketing becoming redundant and going into oblivion? Many direct-to-consumer brands in today’s climate have begun to develop a penchant for performance marketing while placing branding on the back burner. However, there are significant repercussions from prioritizing one strategy over the other.

With this keynote, it is time to barrelling through Performance Marketing benefits and to see how they fare for our marketing business.

Performance Marketing Make The World Go Round

In the wake of economic uncertainty, the realization of immediate gains is firmly grounded on Performance Marketing. KPIs play a remarkable role in measuring and deciding the outcomes of campaigns. With performance marketing, quick results are evident since it is laser-focused and deals with targeted customers.

Performance Marketing aims to target those customers who have shown dalliance with your product or those who have hung up on your products. It makes them take up on your products and leads to aggregate sales in a shorter time frame.

A riveting story can help to close in on the customers towards your brand and result in purchases. Dashboards also visualize the results of our campaigns and help in prudent decision-making by selecting the correct data to meet your objectives. They are available for easy viewing and present information in a digestible fashion.

In Performance Marketing, you can track the real-time performance of your campaigns or offers and customize them based on traffic patterns at any time. By focusing on the specific locations, devices, or demographics where campaigns perform well, one can target them accordingly.

Performance Marketing Software meets your over-arching needs and provides precise results. This software enables marketers to automate repetitive tasks like invoice generation, email campaigns, and data collection from all your marketing and advertising platforms. Tracking and Attribution have been made simple like never before by managing the varying nature of traffic reasonably well. One can launch profitable campaigns with a bang through proper performance attributions. With fraudulent activities on the loose, there is a need for top-notch anti-fraud protection software that can contain fraud. Fraudulent activities impact everyone, starting from publishers to consumers. Its ripple effects are far-reaching and sneaky fraudsters manipulate website cookies to masquerade them as conversions. These ad frauds are depleting your budgets and costing you a fortune by resulting in reputational damage. Hence, we use high-end performance software to rein in these frauds.

Analytics and interactive dashboards built into this software analyze and monitor metrics across multiple channels, identifying growth opportunities and forecasting risks.

In addition, one can easily customize, categorize, and share reports with colleagues, stakeholders, or investors by using this software.

It is not the case that Brand Marketing and Brand Marketing software are bells and whistles. These essentially fulfill the bone-deep requirement of your business, and neither Performance Marketing nor Performance Marketing software can undermine them.

The Synergy of Branding and Performance Marketing

Deciding which one to choose out of Brand Marketing and Performance Marketing for the success of your business is like walking a tightrope. Both are interconnected, and you need a balanced and layered approach to conclude which befits your business Both provide fodder for the marketing business. It is hard to comment on which one alone fulfills the long-term growth of your business.

While pivoting your efforts on Performance Marketing can ramp up short conversions, however, without incorporating branding elements into it can adversely affect your business. The fallout of your business will be less engagement, less reach, less representation in the market, and hence less expansion of your business. Brand underscores the business vision and projects your values to the broader audience, and lack of it, it results in repercussions for your business.

Few people have the discretion to combine long-term brand reputation and short-term acquisition channels. that are trackable and measurable as well. By weaving both the performance marketing channels like Banner Display Ads, Native Advertising, Content Marketing, Social Media, and Search Engine Marketing and branding channels like Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Word-of-mouth MarketingInfluencer Marketing, Content Marketing, Public Relations (PR), Partnership Marketing, Community Building, into existing marketing strategy can maximize the performance of marketing campaign.

As per an online study, a 60:40 ratio is ideal for making the most out of these two tactics, that is, 60% usage of brand building and 40% of performance marketing campaigns.

Leveraging Performance Marketing Tactics in Offer18

Several industries employ performance marketing, including e-commerce, real estate, retail, gaming, financial, manufacturing, legal, and marketing. Often brands make use of third-party networks or agencies to accelerate their businesses. However, you can use in-house performance marketing software to manage all commissions, sales, leads, and reporting-related campaign attributes. It will reduce the dependency on third-party platforms and save an additional cost.

Offer18 is specialized in the Performance Marketing area and uses its performance marketing software to manage all the above criteria. It has continuously evolved to support its customers in achieving their performance marketing goals, helping them build valuable partnerships, and ramping up their business profitability.

Offer18 is well-positioned to fuel the growth of your performance marketing programs with an assurance of value-driven, reliable, and trustworthy outcomes. Offer18 is an award-winning performance marketing platform that helps affiliates, advertisers, and ad networks track, optimize and measure the performance of their networks.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that in an evolving sector like Marketing, both Branding and Performance Marketing activities are the alpha and omega for the business. Building long-term relationships must act in congruence with short-term targeted campaigns.

Both Branding and Performance Marketing strategies at any time complement each other and provide an immersive experience to the consumers.

Branding taking precedence over Performance Marketing or keeping branding on the backseat both scenarios are unjustified as both of these are equally important for the sustenance of marketing business.

Neither of these strategies can single-handedly maximize revenue or increase market share. An omnichannel experience requires exceeding customer expectations, driving results with less economic implications, building a robust professional identity, and long-standing loyalty, which means, both these strategies should co-exist.

You can switch between any of these on a timely basis based on your business needs. One requires a more concrete and measurable or trackable realm of performance marketing in parallel with empathizing with audiences individually to build credibility. It is when branding also comes into the picture with its persuasive storytelling principle and making personal connections with customers.

So, which one of these befits your business?

The answer is both, based on your needs in a time-to-time manner.