A common concern for brands is how to increase sales straight away while building a strong strategy for the future. You need immediate results to stay ahead, but you want to acquire them honestly and ethically. Without a solid investment in your brand reputation, you have to wonder how long it will last.
Marketing takes many forms nowadays, from content to influencer-focused to search engine or social media-based. Yet the goal is always to guide the user through the sales funnel towards a purchase or another conversion.
Over the last 20 years, performance marketing has become the most common approach to marketing, with some CEOs and executives feeling it has overshadowed the slower and steadier approach of brand marketing. For many in the industry, it feels like a tough choice between brand vs. performance marketing when it comes to making budget decisions.
In 2025, the marketing landscape continues to change. Rising ad costs and tighter privacy laws are making it necessary for marketers and brands to prioritise integrity. Brand-led marketing is undergoing a resurgence, with 37.52% of marketers prioritising customer experience.
If you’re trying to choose between performance vs. brand marketing to focus on, there’s good news. Instead of having to choose, you can easily integrate both into your approach. With an agency like Anchor Digital on your site, it’s a lot easier to do so.
This article is Anchor’s guide to brand building vs. performance marketing: what they are, key marketing strategies of each approach and how to balance both to see the results you want.
What Is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing is deeper than just selling products and services. Your brand is your company’s identity, an embodiment of the values and experiences you share with your customers. Brand marketing influences the public’s perception of you and helps you form deeper connections with your target demographics. Brand marketing on its own is a slow-burning approach. But when it comes to brand vs. performance marketing, combining the two increases your chances of success.
Brand marketing focuses on building your company’s image and reputation in order to generate long-term success. When you build the right connection with your customer base, they can come back time and time again. Although it can take a long time—years, even—to see lasting success from brand marketing, the results are usually worth it in the end.
Key Brand Marketing Strategies
- Craft a compelling brand narrative that resonates with your customers' values and fosters deeper connections with them.
- Use content marketing to humanise your brand and convey your message. Blogs, videos, social media posts and other forms of content build your brand reputation and help you appear more trustworthy and credible to your target audience.
- Build a brand awareness strategy. Brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your business and how well they recognise it. Building a positive perception of your business helps boost the value of your brand.
What Is Performance Marketing?
‘Performance’ is the key word in this results-driven form of marketing. Performance marketing focuses on quick improvements and measurable results, so it’s no surprise that it’s become the dominant marketing strategy over the last couple of decades. Although performance marketing is essential, it’s best to aim for a combination of performance vs. brand marketing in your own approach.
Performance marketing is a form of marketing that involves paying only when a specific action is achieved, such as a click or a sale. Performance marketing is geared towards increasing your return on investment (ROI) and delivering outcomes that are easy to measure and track.
Key Performance Marketing Strategies
- The most common kind of performance marketing is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The PPC approach requires businesses to only pay when somebody clicks one of their ads. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are two of the most well-known and widely used examples. PPC is a cost-effective strategy that offers a high ROI, provided you employ techniques such as bidding on relevant keywords and enhancing your landing page quality.
- Affiliate marketing involves collaborating with influential businesses or individuals to expand your reach. In this performance-based approach, you earn a commission on the sale of products and services you promote. This model allows rising brands, content creators, bloggers, etc., to benefit from working with one another. In 2025, affiliate marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
- Data plays a pivotal role in performance marketing. Analysing metrics like CTR and conversion rates can help you tweak your strategy until you have your approach down pat.
Tips on Balancing Brand vs. Performance Marketing
The idea of brand vs. performance marketing as a zero-sum game is a false equivalence. Both approaches can and frequently do work together to create a well-balanced strategy.
Here are some tips for striking the right balance between increasing your results and building longevity:
Balance your budget
A good rule of thumb is to allocate 60% of your budget to brand marketing and 40% to performance and direct response campaigns. But as always, your individual circumstances make a difference. If you’re a new company, focusing more on performance in the early stages can help you progress. Brands with smaller marketing budgets can also benefit from prioritising performance marketing. For luxury brands that rely on their emotional connection for business, a split of 70% brand and 30% performance marketing is more effective.
Balance your growth model
A 60% brand and 40% performance marketing mix can also help keep your growth strategy realistic and sustainable. You can enhance your sales efforts to maintain your existing level while attracting new customers, ultimately boosting your overall revenue.
Spread your marketing goals across different timelines
Diversify your marketing strategy by setting different objectives with varying timelines in mind. A mix of short and long-term strategies allows you to sow seeds in the future through consistent value-driven messaging, while still reaping immediate revenue.
Launch integrated and aligned campaigns
The right campaigns can provide the best of both worlds, achieving results with performance-based marketing while still building the brand name. This holistic marketing approach combines the best of content and data-driven strategy with an often omnichannel approach.
A Synergy of Marketing Strategies with Anchor
If you’re stuck on the right strategy to grow your business, you don’t have to choose between brand vs. performance marketing. Anchor Digital takes an integrated approach to marketing campaigns, ensuring you achieve the results you need in the short term while building the credibility necessary for long-term business success.
If you need help building your brand identity, Anchor can help you develop a clear, consistent and powerful one. As a branding agency, we’ve helped many businesses define themselves and find the right tone of voice and visual elements to communicate with their target audiences the way they want. We can design a great logo and other memorable brand assets to go with it.
You only get one chance to make an impression, and our performance marketing services will ensure you don’t miss the chance to make a good one. The performance strategies we focus on include search engine optimisation (SEO) and PPC management.
To learn more about our synergistic marketing, please call 1300 971 392, email info@anchordigital.com.au, or contact the Anchor team online.
