Brand Marketing vs. Performance Marketing: Examples + Tips

Marketing teams are responsible for attracting new customers, engaging current ones, promoting products, and driving sales. Using the same approach for each of these varied tasks probably wouldn’t yield the best results. Instead, marketers define campaign goals and select the best strategy for each situation.

This often involves choosing between brand marketing and performance marketing—two approaches with separate goals and tactics. Learn about the differences between these two marketing strategies and how brands can use them together to achieve sustainable growth.

What is brand marketing?

Brand marketing revolves around awareness, identity, and storytelling. It focuses on shaping the public’s understanding of a brand and building customer relationships. Brand marketing campaigns prioritize long-term goals like overall brand health—not immediate sales. They’re often fun, surprising, and creative. 

Unlike performance marketing, which focuses on driving measurable, short-term actions like clicks, brand marketing aims to create emotional connections and long-term loyalty. Brand marketing is the marathon that ensures your audience remembers, prefers, and advocates for your brand long after a single campaign ends. By contrast, performance marketing is more of a sprint that revolves around racking up quick, easily quantifiable wins.

Brand marketing KPIs 

Measuring the effectiveness of brand marketing campaigns often requires a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. These are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) businesses use to evaluate brand marketing success:

• Brand awareness.Brand awareness assesses how familiar consumers are with your product by testing their ability to recognize or remember brand elements like logos, products, and colors. 

• Share of voice.Share of voice measures a brand’s prominence relative to its competitors by tracking mentions on social media platforms, in publications, and in other public forums, and comparing frequency.

• Net Promoter Score. A Net Promoter Score (NPS) represents the overall percentage of customers who would recommend your product or service to others. NPS is a broad customer satisfaction metric. 

• Brand sentiment. Measuring brand sentiment involves using tools like social listening and surveys to study the consumer’s overall opinion of your brand.

Brand marketing strategies 

Brand marketing initiatives aim to increase awareness and shape consumer perception. These are some strategies brands use to communicate their identity and capture attention:

• Content marketing. Sharing thoughtful, informative content helps position your brand as an authoritative voice. Content marketing, either on social media or a company blog, can deepen consumer relationships by providing additional opportunities to connect. 

• Experiential marketing. Pop-ups, live events, and other experiential marketing initiatives can forge meaningful connections with consumers and build goodwill. 

• Brand partnerships. Partnering with another brand, influencer, or celebrity can grant access to a new audience and communicate shared values. Partnerships expose each brand to the other’s customer base while also reinforcing their shared attributes.

• PR efforts. An effective public relations strategy can shape press coverage, influencing what consumers think about your brand. For instance, a beauty brand might partner with a major sustainability publication to announce a new product that supports earth-friendliness, shaping the public narrative around its values and mission.

• Sponsorships. Sponsoring an event, athlete, or charitable initiative can increase visibility and communicate brand values in environments that reflect your audience’s passions and values. For example, sponsoring a local marathon could connect your company with active, health-conscious consumers.

Examples of brand marketing 

Get inspired by real-world brand marketing examples. Here’s how three different companies have invested in brand building:

Lego World Play Day activation

In 2023, Lego installed a series of interactive play spaces around the world as part of its newly established holiday, World Play Day. This experiential marketing campaign targeted families. By creating an opportunity for parents and children to stop and play together for a moment, Lego associated fun memories with its brand forever.

Mercedes-Benz fashion sponsorships

Mercedes-Benz sponsors fashion weeks in New York City, Berlin, Madrid, and several other international cities. These sponsorships connect the Mercedes-Benz name to exclusive, luxury experiences and earn significant press exposure.

Heyday Canning pop-up shop

Heyday Canning, a canned food brand, hosted a Bean Swap event in which customers brought in cans of beans in exchange for a Heyday can. Heyday then donated the cans customers brought in to City Harvest, a food bank in New York City. The brand had a small marketing budget at the time and wanted to maximize relevance in the canned food aisle. “We wanted to … focus all the money on one thing that had the potential to cut through the noise and grow brand awareness,” cofounder Kat Kavner says on an episode of Shopify Masters. 

And cut through the noise they did. The brand’s TikTok videos related to the event garnered more than 230,000 views.

What is performance marketing? 

Performance marketing prioritizes immediate results: campaigns set concrete goals, such as increasing sales or generating leads, and aim to motivate direct consumer action. It relies heavily on precise targeting, measurable KPIs, and rapid iteration. You track and analyze every click, view, or conversion to optimize your strategy and spending in real time. 

By contrast, you can’t always quantify brand marketing in the short term. Instead of focusing on what drives a single purchase, it measures success through big-picture metrics like brand recall, sentiment, and customer lifetime value (CLV). While performance marketing captures consumers’ attention in the moment, brand marketing seeks to ensure a lasting impression has been made by the time the next buying decision comes around.

Performance marketing KPIs 

It’s important to keep track of your marketing budget and associated revenue. Common performance marketing metrics for measuring these include:

• Click-through rate (CTR). Click-through rate measures the percentage of users who click on a link in an ad or other piece of content after seeing it. A strong CTR shows that your messaging and creative elements are resonating with your target audience.

• Return on ad spend (ROAS). ROAS measures ad campaign efficacy by comparing money invested to revenue generated. You can apply it to specific campaigns or advertising and marketing efforts as a whole. It shows which campaigns are most profitable, allowing marketers to allocate budgets toward the ads that deliver the highest returns.

• Cost per click (CPC). CPC is the most common digital advertising pricing model. It measures campaign efficacy by looking at total cost relative to the total number of clicks (CPC) your campaign generates. This helps you understand how efficiently you’re spending and where to refine bidding or targeting strategies.

• Conversion rate. Conversion rate reflects the percentage of eligible consumers who completed a desired action. It’s a direct indicator of how well your campaign persuades users to take the next step, from signing up for a newsletter to completing a purchase.

Performance marketing strategies

Performance marketing focuses on direct consumer response. These are some of the marketing and advertising strategies businesses use to drive immediate results: 

• Paid search.Search engine marketing (SEM) is a performance-based advertising strategy that uses keyword targeting to serve ads to relevant users. Since it captures intent in real time, paid search is one of the most effective ways to reach high-intent buyers already in the decision-making phase.

• Social media advertising. With social media advertising, brands can use demographic and interest-based data to target specific audience segments. These campaigns are especially useful for testing messaging and creative formats quickly while driving clicks and conversions at scale.

• Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing involves using strategic partnerships with brands, influencers, or websites to drive sales or traffic. It’s performance-based—partners earn commissions only when they generate sales or leads—so it’s a cost-effective strategy for expanding reach without upfront ad spend risk.

Examples of performance marketing

See how different brands incorporate performance marketing content into their digital marketing strategies. Here are a few examples of measurable performance campaigns that inspire direct action:

Sponsored products results 

Activewear companies—including Hoka, Brooks, and Lululemon—use search engine marketing to promote their products in Google search results. These brands aim to drive conversions with product ads by targeting users who signal interest by searching for “running shoes.” Account owners can track advertisement success in Google Ads. Common sponsored product KPIs include cost per impression, click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion rate. 

Glossier affiliate marketing program 

Beauty brand Glossier uses affiliate marketing links to incentivize product promotion and drive additional sales. On YouTube, creator Matilda on Video shared a “glowy full face routine” video featuring Glossier products. She used the description box below the video to provide affiliate links to 18 different Glossier products, creating a direct, trackable path to purchase. 

Shoppable Instagram ads

Paid ads on Instagram Stories and Reels can include clickable links with clear CTAs. In this Aerie ad, the brand uses this feature to drive consumers directly to a product page with a Shop Now CTA. Common KPIs for shoppable Instagram ads include click-through rate and conversion rate.

How to choose a marketing strategy

Brands often use both brand and performance marketing strategies. While performance marketing helps reach immediate goals and generate revenue through targeted campaigns, brand marketing builds consumer trust and favorable sentiment, paving the way for sustainable growth. Combining brand marketing and performance marketing helps balance short-term wins with long-term success.

To know which approach to prioritize at any moment, ask yourself:

• What’s the business’s current priority? Brand marketing handles the emotional aspects of brand health to build deep, meaningful consumer relationships. It’s great if you’re looking to expand into new markets or claim more market share. Performance marketing strategies are more concerned with measurable, short-term results and can be an effective way to reach concrete, numerical targets like sales goals. 

• How much time do we have before we need to see results? If you have the stability to see a brand campaign through for a year or more, the benefits of long-term loyalty can outweigh the initial costs. If you need to demonstrate profitability to attract new investors quickly, a performance marketing campaign might better serve you. 

• What resources do we already have to support a new campaign? If you have a strong brand identity that few people know about, a unique pop-up or experiential event can make the most of your biggest asset. If your target audience cares less about brand values and more about getting a great deal, a targeted Google Ads campaign about affordability might be more effective. 

Over time, as your business grows and becomes more predictable, you can run both types of marketing strategies simultaneously.