Brand vs Performance Marketing: How to Align for Full-Funnel Success

Often, marketers treat brand vs performance marketing as separate paths. Brand marketing builds affinity and visibility, while performance focuses on conversions, clicks, and cost-efficiency. At Coegi, our mission is to show that neither strategy stands alone and that real success comes from linking both to your business goals.

Understanding the Divide…and the Bridge

A Forbes piece explains it well:

“Brand marketing encourages customers to raise their hands. Performance marketing makes it as easy as possible for a customer to get your product into their hand after they raise it.”

Brand campaigns lay the groundwork – awareness, trust, emotion. Performance campaigns follow through with sales, leads, and measurable actions. But when used together, they tell a full brand story that matters to all business stakeholders.

Holding Brand Campaigns Accountable

Traditionally, branding is seen as a soft investment. But CFOs and CEOs increasingly expect clear ROI from every dollar spent. One McKinsey study found that using consumer insights from early stages can improve marketing efficiency by up to 30% and generate up to 10% more top-line growth – all without increasing your budget.

That said, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. To keep brand efforts accountable, you need:

• Clearly defined marketing objectives – know what goals marketing will be accountable for and what actions you want your audience to take
• Measurement frameworks tied to business outcomes – Use past campaigns, industry data, or lift studies.
• A feedback loop between upper and lower funnel campaigns – Understand how each touchpoint supports conversions.
  

Holding brand efforts to these standards makes them just as results-oriented as performance marketing.

Achieving Full-Funnel Integration

MarketingProfs highlights this dynamic nicely:

“Brand-driven insight is your truth – the WHY behind all that you do. The performance marketing is your plan put into action – the HOW and WHAT of manifesting that truth.”

That means:

• Extract insights from performance campaigns to inform your messaging and creative tone at the top of funnel
• Leverage brand voice to build trust before driving actions like click-throughs and conversions
• Align budgets and media strategies to optimize timing, reach, and sequence for the customer journey

Case Study with Bread & Butter Wines

Coegi’s campaign for Bread & Butter Wines demonstrated how integrating brand and performance marketing can drive both awareness and sales. By using persona-driven targeting and an omnichannel approach – pairing emotional storytelling on channels like CTV with conversion-focused tactics on Instacart and paid search – we created a unified, results-driven strategy. This approach led to a 10.6% lift in ad recall and 32% YoY Instacart sales growth, proving that brand and performance efforts are more powerful when executed together.

Ultimately, combining creative strategy with precise measurement helped strengthen the brand while delivering actionable ROI.

What’s Your Next Move?

Ready to put brand vs performance marketing to work as an integrated strategy? Start by mapping your customer journey, aligning metrics at each stage, and ensuring every campaign supports both awareness and conversion goals. Coegi would love to support – fill out the contact us form to set up a discovery session. 

Learn More:

• How to Drive Full Funnel Advertising Results With Amazon
• Advanced Marketing Measurement and Modeling 101