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Last week, someone asked me what kind of marketing I was going to focus on for clients: brand or growth marketing. The question intrigued me and honestly, I had a hard time answering.
More and more, I’ve heard marketers bucketing these ideas of “brand marketing” (awareness, not easily trackable) and “growth marketing” (easily measured tactics that show direct attribution to leads) into separate camps.
“Which one should we focus on?”
“We don’t have the budget to do brand marketing!”
“Should we separate growth and brand marketing into separate functions?”
👆Just a few of the phrases I’ve heard thrown around recently.
For reference, here’s how these two camps are generally organized:
And here’s the crux of the issue: Startup founders (and hey, even savvy marketers) have stars in their eyes as they talk about so-called “growth” marketing. And it makes sense – even the name is more appealing. We all want growth, right? That’s the entire point of marketing.
But here’s the problem: Growth marketing isn’t fully successful without brand marketing. Growth is not this neat little box you can deposit your money into and get leads at the same clip every time. Trust me, we all wish that was true. But growth and brand marketing are inextricably tied together. You can’t be fully efficient in one without the other.
Two years ago, I turned off paid campaigns on LinkedIn for the company I was marketing. The cost per lead was too high, and we weren’t seeing the efficiency gains we wanted. We kept ads running on Google Pay-per-click, though, because those were performing well.
Within a month of turning off the ads on LinkedIn, we saw a drop in not only our organic leads but also the leads we were seeing come through Google.
I saw this happen again last year for a different client. As we pulled back the budget on paid campaigns, we saw organic fall dramatically.
And the reverse happens, too. For another client, as we focused more on SEO optimization, something tied to what is defined as “brand” marketing, we saw our paid campaign results improve significantly.
If brand and growth were two unique facets to marketing, then changes like this wouldn’t have an affect on the other. But they do.
If you are considering whether to invest in driving inbound leads through quality content on your website OR running an ad campaign with a PDF download, you are thinking about it wrong. You need both. (As a pro-tip here, DO BOTH – add the content to your website for organic traffic, then also package it up and use it as a lead magnet via paid channels.)
You need to invest in brand to generate trust, awareness, and amplify your paid efforts. This kind of marketing can’t be bought – your competition can’t outbid you on your owned brand efforts. And brand is a very real competitive edge for many startups. These efforts take time and bandwidth, but are foundational to any marketing strategy.
On the other hand, you also need to invest in growth marketing if you want to accelerate your brand efforts and find more scalable lead generation methods. I am sure there are a few exceptions out there, but in my experience, brand alone cannot sustain growth.
So let’s stop pitting these two efforts against each other. They’re like peanut butter and jelly: you don’t quite have a sandwich without both.
