Brand Marketers and Performance Marketers Work Better Together

Elisa currently works as an Enterprise AE at Liftoff, helping companies meet performance goals through programmatic marketing. Previous to her role at Liftoff, she worked at both iHeartMedia & Entercom on their sales teams, helping to design and execute brand and performance marketing campaigns for various companies across the nation.

Brand marketers and performance marketers are two powerful departments, crucial to the growth of a company and, unfortunately, can sometimes be at odds with each other if not managed properly. Brand marketing success is often measured by brand recognition amongst consumers. In contrast, performance marketers measure success by looking at hard metrics such as revenue generated amongst others. While brand recognition and performance metrics might not seem to overlap, by working together, brand and performance marketers can help improve the success of both teams.

Coordinate brand and performance marketing campaigns for maximum effect

Brand recognition often creates a higher likelihood that consumers will make purchases, download your app or use your services. When a brand remains relatively unknown, performance marketing campaigns can fluctuate in both cost and outcome. A great tip to bridge the gap between the brand marketing team and performance marketing team is to hold a quarterly planning session. Brand marketers should come prepared with their marketing plan including run dates, target geos and any other details specific to the anticipated target consumer. Performance marketers should be prepared to make adjustments to their plans to better align with the brand campaigns. If performance marketers leverage the timing and strategy of the branding team, performance campaigns will run more efficiently.

Learning is better together

Performance marketers have insight into your most engaged consumers, especially on mobile. This can help validate brand team assumptions as true, false, or partially true. If you as a performance marketer understand the specific demographics of the power consumers who engage with your products/services, it can meaningfully impact your brand strategy.

An easy way to gather these data points is to ask performance marketers to provide metrics on the highest performing campaigns within the previous quarter, including demographics such as age and gender, geographic location, and other commonalities amongst engaged users. Asking performance marketers questions about their results will give brand marketers insight into who your branding should be targeting as well as potential audience segments you should target.

Grow organic performance as a team

Organic performance grows when consumers are familiar with your brand. Performance marketers can test this by measuring the organic performance of app installs, web traffic, purchases, etc. during an active branding campaign. It is important to limit this measurement to the geographic locations where the brand marketing campaigns are running. To backtrack, take the calendar of brand marketing campaigns and compare your performance campaign results against the times when brand marketing is running vs not running. You’ll often see a lift in performance you might have otherwise missed. As for brand marketers, you can ask the performance marketing team for their insights on organic growth in order to test the effectiveness of your ongoing campaigns.

Not every company has both brand and performance marketing teams, but for those who do, many are missing out on lower cost marketing campaigns, in depth metric tracking, and working together to drive organic growth. I encourage your marketing teams to partner with each other and build relationships to make both of your jobs easier!