Beyond numbers: How marketing builds lasting connections

Marketing isn’t just about numbers and graphs – it’s about building professional relationships that last. For a marketing strategy to be successful, it’s not enough for it to focus on immediate sales: it needs to help you build a strong foundation for your business and its future.

Traditionally, most companies have treated marketing and performance marketing as two separate worlds: one focused on human emotion and visibility; the other on numbers and conversions.

But it’s not that simple. In reality, the two aren’t opposites at all – they’re each other’s most important ally. When perfectly aligned, they’re far more powerful than they are apart.

Read on to see how you can get your marketing efforts working together to boost your business and take both your customer connection and your bottom line to the next level.

How do brand and performance marketing interact?

Brand marketing and performance marketing can seem like completely different disciplines. But together, they can help you create an unbeatable marketing strategy that generates instant results and builds long-term growth.

What is brand marketing?

Brand marketing is about creating brand awareness and building trust in your company. It’s what helps you shape your brand’s personality and ensures that your prospects will recognise, remember and connect you with your brand – even if they’re not yet ready to buy.

It’s about:

• Shaping the public perception of your company
• Building trustworthiness and authenticity
• Creating a lasting connection with your target audience
• Setting yourself apart from your competitors

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing focuses on the concrete and measurable. It’s about targeting prospects who are ready to buy and getting them to convert through strong messaging and data-driven campaigns.

Here, the focus is on:

• Direct, measurable conversions
• Optimising marketing investments
• Exact tracking of results
• Immediate return on investment (ROI)

So why are they stronger together?

Many companies – especially in their early stages – focus almost exclusively on performance marketing because they want to drive growth and achieve fast results. It makes sense at first: they’re aiming to create demand and get new customers through platforms like Google and Meta.

However, if this approach isn’t supported by a strong brand strategy, it can quickly become a hindrance.

When most of their budget goes to performance channels, companies risk overlooking the importance of building a lasting relationship with their customers.

Initially, products and services may function as your company’s primary brand. But without a targeted effort to strengthen the brand’s position and values, you reach a point where growth levels off.

However, when you start balancing your marketing budget between brand and performance marketing, you’ll see a range of benefits:

• Brand marketing boosts performance marketing: When your customers already know and trust your brand, your performance campaigns will be far more effective – and your cost per click may even decrease.
• Performance marketing supports your brand: Fast conversions create the revenue necessary to finance your branding efforts.
• Flexibility in the growth stage: By adjusting the balance over time, you can adapt your strategy to where your business is in its growth journey.

If you only focus on short-term performance goals, you risk losing relevance in the long run. On the other hand, focusing exclusively on branding won’t create the results you need to maintain your growth. By combining the two, however, you can create a complete strategy that delivers immediate results and simultaneously secures your company’s future position in the market.

Market dynamics: The 5% vs the 95%

At one of the latest Pleo Beyond events in London, Pleo’s CMO, James Keating, presented an idea that might help you gain a fresh perspective on how you view marketing strategies.

The overall point is that at any given moment, only about 5% of your prospects are ready to buy. The remaining 95% are still in an earlier stage of the buyer’s journey.

For businesses, this means that a strategy focusing solely on ready-to-buy prospects risks overlooking the potential in engaging the 95% who represent the future growth of the company.

WatchJames Keating explain his thoughts on the 5% vs the 95%:

When targeting the 95% who aren’t yet ready to buy, branding is essential. Branding is about engaging those 95% and ensuring your company remains top of mind with them.

Once they start moving from ‘not ready’ to ‘ready to buy’, they’ll already have a relationship with your brand, which means they’ll choose you over your competitors. This is where branding makes a difference – it creates recognisability, fosters trust and builds lasting connections.

Branding and performance marketing shouldn’t be seen as ‘one or the other’: they’re stronger together. By engaging the 95%, you’ll ensure your brand is their first choice when they’re ready to buy. It’s a long-term strategy that makes your business more robust and creates a strong foundation for future growth.

So how do you engage the 95%? Here’s what you need to do:

1. Focus on storytelling and positioning:
   Create narratives that connect your target audience with your company’s mission and values. Stories engage and build an emotional connection that’ll make your brand more memorable.
2. Create value through relevant content:
   Invest in value-based content that informs, inspires and entertains. Share insightful blog posts, guides, videos or podcasts that solve problems or build interest with your prospects before they’re ready to buy.
3. Build a strong market category and position:
   Work strategically to own your market category. Position your business as an expert and trusted player in your industry. This builds trust and attracts prospects over time.
4. Budget for the long term:
   Make sure your marketing budget is balanced between performance and branding. Performance marketing gets results now, while branding builds the foundation to drive your future growth.

How to maximise your ROI across the sales funnel

To get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to work strategically with everything from data and insights to resource allocation. A well-thought-out approach to the sales funnel ensures that you engage customers at all stages – from those who are ready to buy to those who are still in the consideration phase.

Here’s how to maximise your ROI:

1. Use data to find the right balance:
   Start by analysing where your customers are in the buyer’s journey. Data can help you identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie in the sales funnel. For example, if you experience a large number of clicks at the top of the funnel, but your conversion rate drops at the bottom, this might indicate a lack of trust in your brand. With this in mind, you can allocate more resources to branding while still maintaining the performance campaigns that are paying off.
   Read more: ‘How data drives strategic and sustainable growth’
2. Optimise performance campaigns with branding insights:
   Let your branding strategy support your performance marketing. When your customers already know and trust your brand, they’re more likely to respond positively to your performance campaigns. Adjust your messaging to boost your brand story, and be consistent across channels. This won’t just make your campaigns more effective – it’ll also help shorten your sales cycle.
3. Reinvest revenue in future growth:
   Performance marketing can get you fast results that boost your cashflow. But instead of spending your revenue on further short-term goals, it’s a good idea to reinvest some of it into your branding. A stronger brand position helps you attract more customers affordably and efficiently, creating a sustainable growth cycle.

Keeping your focus balanced between data, branding and performance enables you to create a marketing machine that delivers instant results and strengthens your position long-term. By using insights to adjust your priorities and strategically reinvest as you go, you can maximise your ROI across the sales funnel – from the first click to the customer relationship that lasts.