Why your performance marketing isn’t working
Marketing can be a tricky business, rife with big fancy words and complex data comparisons. Behind all the technobabble it’s surprisingly simple, writes Lucy Lomas of Luma Marketing.
If you’re a business owner or board director in property, construction, or professional services, you almost certainly didn’t go into business to be a marketer. But you should at least know a bit about how to make your marketing work. Today, we’re going to break down the important relationship between your performance marketing and your brand.
Understanding this relationship gives you the tools to decide what to track and the wisdom to turn that insight into strategies that help you reach your goals.
What is performance marketing?
Performance marketing is a data-driven approach that focuses on measurable actions and results.
That’s a mouthful isn’t it? Basically, it just means you track the impact of your marketing efforts. Success is judged against clear metrics such as clicks, leads, or conversions. It’s immediate and tactical, allowing you to be responsive.
Is it working? No? Ok, let’s pivot. It is? Let’s continue or do more of it. You launch, you measure, you refine, you repeat.
This makes performance marketing a valuable tool for testing propositions, generating pipeline, and understanding which messages resonate in real time. It shows what’s working and where spend is driving a return.
But it isn’t the full picture. It tells you what’s happening, but not why your organisation is communicating, or where you want those communications to take you. For that, you need to connect performance marketing with a broader brand and business strategy.
The bigger picture of brand marketing
Brand marketing works alongside performance marketing to deliver success.
It’s long-term and about consistency, cadence, character, and market position. It’s more than your logo or colour palette. It’s your identity, your purpose, and the reason your business exists.
It’s the bit that doesn’t change, even when everything else does. It’s the heart and soul of your business.
When you get your brand right, everything else starts to make sense. Your messaging is clearer. Your audience knows what to expect. Your team knows what they’re working towards. And the stats across all your marketing metrics perform better.
Start with strategy, then measure
Before you dive into metrics, take a step back.
What’s our vision?
What’s our mission?
What’s our purpose?
Call it what you like, just make sure you’ve got one. Without it, you’ll end up chasing numbers that don’t move your business forward. A spike in clicks or a flurry of leads might look good on a dashboard, but if those people aren’t the right fit, you’ve just burned budget.
Your strategy will give you a “why” that provides context. It’s the filter that tells you which opportunities to pursue and which to ignore. It aligns your team so everyone is pulling in the same direction. And it makes performance marketing more powerful because you’re not just tracking activity, you’re measuring progress towards something bigger.
How brand and performance work together
Think of them as two sides of the same coin:
In tandem: A construction consultancy defines its brand around “making the complex simple.” Their performance campaigns test clear, jargon-free messaging. The ads perform betterbetter, and the leads already understand what the business is about, so conversion rates rise.
Performance without brand: A professional services firm pumps money into LinkedIn ads offering “free consultations.” They get plenty of enquiries, but hardly any convert. Why? Because the firm hasn’t clarified what makes them different, so prospects see no reason to choose them.
When your brand is clear, performance marketing becomes the proof point. It shows whether your story resonates in the real world. Without the brand, performance marketing is just noise.
So what should you do?
Start with your brand. Define it. Own it. Make sure everyone in your business understands it. Then build your marketing around it.
Use performance marketing to test, learn, and grow, but always in service of your brand. Because your brand is the anchor. Performance marketing is the sail. One without the other leaves you stuck or lost. Together, they’ll take you where you want to go.