Halvor leads Scale & Impact at Frontkom and works daily with B2B companies looking to grow digitally. This is what he sees going wrong most often in digital marketing budgets.
It is a question I get regularly: should we prioritise brand or performance? And the answer is that the question itself is the problem. The two are not alternatives. They depend on each other.
What happens when you run performance without brand
You pay for clicks from people who do not know you. Conversion rates are low because trust is absent. Cost per lead rises each quarter. You optimise the ads, test new copy, change the landing page. Things improve marginally, but the root problem does not go away.
The problem is not the ad. It is that nobody knows who you are before they click. And in B2B, where buying cycles are long and decisions carry risk, trust is everything.
What happens when you run brand without performance
You build awareness without conversion. People recognise you, perhaps even like what they see, but there is no clear path from interest to action. Brand building without a performance layer to capture the demand you create is like planting crops and never harvesting.
How they work together in practice
Brand works long-term to build recognition and position. Performance works short-term to convert existing demand. The best organisations use brand to fill the top of the funnel and make performance work cheaper and more efficiently at the bottom.
In concrete terms: LinkedIn content and thought leadership build familiarity over time. Retargeting and search advertising capture those who already know you and are in buying mode. The combination produces lower customer acquisition cost and higher conversion rates.
Three concrete actions you can take now
Measure both separately. Set KPIs for brand (awareness, sentiment, direct traffic) and performance (leads, conversion rate, CAC) independently. Without separate goals, brand will always be deprioritised because it is harder to quantify.
Use content as the bridge. Blog posts, webinars and case studies do both simultaneously. They build authority and awareness, and they can be amplified with paid distribution to reach new audiences.
Retarget those who engage. Those who read your blog posts, watch your videos and attend your webinars are warm leads. They already know you. Retargeting them with a specific CTA is far cheaper and more effective than trying to convert cold visitors.
Performance marketing is the engine. Brand is the fuel. You need both to get where you are going.
Would you like a review of your current digital marketing mix and where the concrete improvement opportunities are? Get in touch with Halvor for a no-obligation conversation.
