The marketing landscape is shifting thanks to rising ad costs, evolving consumer behaviors and stricter privacy laws. Together, these factors are forcing marketers to pivot to brand integrity in 2025.
The challenge is that you still have to deliver short-term gains to demonstrate a clear impact on revenue.
So, how do you strike the right balance between chasing shorter-term wins with performance marketing campaigns and investing in longer-term brand-building strategies?
Creating a data-informed, holistic marketing approach can help you boost brand value and keep the conversions rolling in.
Why do businesses value performance marketing over brand marketing?
The debate around performance marketing versus brand marketing stems from the fact that brand marketing is typically harder to measure.
For performance marketing, the key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you almost immediate feedback on your campaigns are metrics like return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), cost per acquisition (CPA) and your sales conversion rates.
But for brand marketing, you’re looking at longer-term uplift metrics like awareness, brand sentiment and net promoter score (NPS). While important, these metrics can’t be tied to revenue growth as easily as performance marketing can.
Performance metrics are more tightly linked to a company's bottom line. As a result, favoring mid-funnel advertising with a focus on immediate conversions is a natural fit for most businesses. And brand marketing gets put on the back burner.
However, by balancing both, there’s a lot to gain. You just have to figure out how to meet your short-term goals so you can invest in long-term brand-building.
You can do this by taking a more holistic approach to measurement. Instead of measuring marketing ROI or ROAS at an ad campaign or channel level, you should be measuring the overall effectiveness of your marketing with the marketing efficiency ratio (MER) and measurement triangulation.
What do brand and performance marketing have in common?
Before we get into the how, one critical thing to keep in mind is that in both brand marketing and performance marketing, the role of creativity is fundamental. The goal is to find the right storytelling method to meet your bottom-line objectives while brand-building. Compelling creative helps improve performance marketing outcomes, like click-through rate (CTR), while also building loyalty.
As humans, we tend to approach things in absolutes, but things are much more complex and interconnected. This is why thinking of brand marketing versus performance marketing is the wrong way to think about advertising.
Balance is the key here — not absolutes.
It should not be one competing with the other for resources. Rather, both brand and performance marketing play an important role in sustainable growth. The job of the modern marketer is to find the right mix.
What happens if you focus on performance for too long?
There is an assumption that performance marketing means fast returns and branding takes time to generate tangible results. But the reality is much more nuanced.
Brand marketing can see fast results too, but in contrast to the quick peaks of performance marketing, the effects of brand marketing often have a longer burn.
Most companies start by putting all of their energy into performance marketing tactics to get early growth, but if you rely on it too long, your results will eventually start to plateau.
You can then get stuck on this plateau chasing down your increasing CPA and sinking ROAS.
The performance plateau happens after your initial growth from your traditional mix starts to slow.
What’s required here is a balance of always-on performance marketing and expanded brand strategies that come with a longer-term vision.
Gone are the days of “slot machine marketing” where you could put $1 into Facebook Ads and reliably get $1.80 back.
While this means your job is that much harder than it was a few years ago, you might be surprised to find that a more balanced approach can bring consistency back to your results and lead to more sustainable growth.
How much should you spend on performance vs brand marketing?
When it comes to absolutes in balancing your mix, the short answer is close to a 60/40 split. That’s according to Research from Noa Consulting and the Swedish marketers association Sveriges Annonsörer.
They showed that the optimal balance was to spend between 40% and 70% on brand-building and the remainder on activation campaigns.
This also aligns with the research from Peter Field and Les Binet in their book “The Long and Short of It.” They found that 60-40 is the best split (60% on brand, 40% on direct response or performance marketing campaigns).
But as with everything marketing and data-related, this isn’t quite the whole story. While this might be a good baseline to build from, there’s a little more to it.
What does the perfect brand vs performance balance depend on?
Striking the right balance between brand and performance marketing depends on things like:
Your company age
You can usually work with performance marketing strategies for a limited time. While you might see an early surge, at some point, you’ll see that adding more spend to your performance campaigns won't drive many incremental sales and could even blow out your ROAS.
This is when you reach the point of diminishing returns and start panicking. In response, one option is to retreat to the strategies that seemed to work in the past, even if they may not be effective in the current situation. Another, perhaps more forward-thinking approach, is to step back and reevaluate your strategy, considering a more holistic and comprehensive way to address your marketing efforts.
Your marketing budget
Your budget also plays a role. Smaller budgets tend to favor performance marketing for measurable ROI, while larger budgets allow room for both brand-building and performance tactics.
Your sales cycle length
Long sales cycles (like we often see in B2B) benefit from longer-term brand-building with gentler touchpoints to stay memorable.
Shorter cycles (like e-commerce and digital products) often benefit more from performance marketing to drive quick sales. But this doesn’t mean that a brand campaign isn’t important if you’re on a shorter sales cycle.
Your target audience’s preferences
What does your target audience value more? A company selling eco-friendly water bottles is likely to have an audience that values brand integrity more than low prices.
If your audience values brand loyalty or emotional connections, brand marketing is essential as performance marketing will feel disruptive and even somewhat cold.
On the other hand, price-sensitive customers usually respond better to direct-response, performance-focused ads.
Your growth plans
For aggressive, short-term growth, performance-based marketing will hit the mark, but remember, only for a limited time. For long-term brand equity, a balance with more brand marketing will go the extra mile to lift your sales as your performance plateau kicks in.
Getting off the performance plateau
So, you’re already on the plateau. How do you get off?
Embrace a fresh perspective
Brands that successfully overcome growth plateaus often begin by re-evaluating their beliefs on how marketing drives growth.
This can mean unlearning what you know from past practices and adopting fresh approaches. It means bringing an experimental mindset to the table, something that incrementality testing can help with.
Adidas shifted from heavily digital performance campaigns to a balance with brand-building after seeing its brand equity erode. This type of shift requires collective buy-in from leadership and a business culture that understands ethical marketing in the age of AI is becoming more important to consumers than ever.
Understand your untapped audience
While you’re focused on your existing customers, it’s easy to overlook those who don’t currently use your products or services or occasional customers who hold significant growth potential.
For instance, Samsung took to Reddit to convert Apple’s audience away from “the orchard” and to bring fence-sitters “into the fold” when marketing their new foldable phone.
Samsung targeted their non-users in a tongue-in-cheek campaign to lift brand sentiment.
The results speak for themselves: an eight-point increase in brand favorability and a 17-point increase in purchase intent. Imagine following this kind of campaign with a quick one-two-punch conversion campaign.
It’s this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that improves brand lift and conversions over time.
Put your brand values on display
As ethical marketing continues to trend, sharing your brand values helps align you with your ideal audience. Patagonia, for instance, keeps its audience focused on sustainability with its Worn Wear initiative, which is a partnership between Patagonia, eBay and customers to promote the sale and reuse of worn items.
By emphasizing sustainability in this brand marketing campaign, Patagonia deepens loyalty among existing customers and attracts new eco-conscious consumers who value brand integrity and purpose over price.
Create a balanced growth model
A sustainable growth model should balance both your short-term sales goals and long-term brand-building. Gousto, the meal-kit brand, realized they relied too much on paid ads to win business.
The company shifted to a 60% brand, 40% performance marketing mix to create a more sustainable revenue stream, ultimately allowing them to avoid the sales plateau entirely while creating a large pool of freshly primed future customers.
Levering down your performance budget and slowly ramping up your brand approach can help you build a stronger brand presence step-by-step without halting any immediate (successful) sales efforts.
Calculate your balance with triangulation for a more sustainable 2025
So, how do you calculate the right mix for your brand? Well, finding the right balance won’t be as simple as just throwing a number at the wall and seeing what sticks. You need to dig in a little deeper and determine what brand/performance balance is going to work best. This can take some calculating.
Using advanced (but not difficult) triangulation tools such as marketing mix modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution (MTA) and incrementality testing is an effective way to determine the best media mix for your brand.
This combination is known as measurement triangulation. Here’s how it works:
Use MMM for high-level spend insights
- Start with MMM to analyze historical spend data across Google Ads, Facebook and YouTube. Identify which channels drive conversions or boost brand awareness.
- For example, Google Ads may deliver high ROAS while YouTube excels at building brand recognition.
- Next, use MTA (multi-touch attribution) to refine these insights. MMM also shows diminishing returns, like Facebook ads losing ROAS beyond a certain spend. Use this to reallocate budgets.
- Shift excess Facebook spend into brand-building on platforms like YouTube or display ads.
The goal is clear: optimize every channel for maximum impact and smarter spending.
Connect the dots with MTA
Now we need to capture the user journey points:
- With MTA, identify the role each touchpoint plays in driving conversions. For example, you might find that YouTube ads initiate journeys while retargeting on Facebook closes them.
- Multi-touch attribution helps you understand the sequential contribution of each channel across the funnel. At the same time, MMM shows you the diminishing point of returns so you can evaluate the level of returns against their importance in the customer journey.
- Use MTA’s channel weights to separate brand-driven touchpoints from direct-response ones.
If MTA shows that users exposed to both YouTube (brand) and Facebook retargeting ads (performance marketing) have higher conversion rates, this shows you that combining brand marketing and performance marketing in a specific sequence improves results.
Design incremental holdout tests to measure lift
Next, you’ll want to test brand versus performance measures against each other.
- Choose a test group exposed to both brand (e.g., YouTube) and performance ads (e.g., Facebook retargeting) and a control group receiving only performance ads.
- Measure incremental lift in brand engagement (e.g., brand search traffic) and conversions to understand the combined impact of brand and performance.
- You can then use these tests to evaluate the MTA and MMM data you’ve already captured and test your data conclusions.
- For example, if MTA shows that brand ads lead to downstream conversions, you can validate this with incremental testing by measuring if brand-exposed users engage more with performance ads later.
Triangulate your findings to adjust budget allocation
- Combine your MMM, MTA and incremental test data to get a holistic overview of your brand versus performance mix.
- Use MMM insights to guide the overall brand versus performance split, with MTA and incrementality tests refining how channels should be weighted within each category.
- For example, if MMM suggests a 60/40 brand-to-performance split, MTA and incremental results might direct you to allocate more of the brand budget to YouTube, and more of the performance budget to search, to support downstream conversions (or top-of-funnel awareness).
- If you want to go the extra mile to calculate your balance, you can also simulate budget allocation shifts and run budget scenarios based on triangulated findings.
- For example, if MTA suggests YouTube brand ads initiate conversions that are later captured by Facebook retargeting, test the impact of a larger YouTube allocation.
- Use MMM to forecast the likely effect on overall ROAS and conversion volume so you have reliable benchmarks to test your actual results against.
This triangulated process of historical review, real-time metrics and testing will help you determine the exact mix that’s right for your brand without the guesswork.
Triangulation points the way to sustainable growth
While it might seem like a lot of work initially, taking the time to calculate the ideal split for your brand ensures that you’re not leaving anything to chance or wasting your budget where it doesn’t belong.
Plus, using a Data Hub to aggregate this data for you leaves you room to draw your data conclusions without the mental load.
Run your tests all in one place and find the short-term changes that could bring you long-term gains. Get off of the performance plateau once and for all with a single source of truth that works for your marketing.