The age-old debate between brand and performance marketing has frustrated marketers for years. Many of us have resisted choosing between long-term brand building and measurable results, recognizing that this binary mentality is fundamentally flawed.

Today's B2B landscape calls for a unified approach that harnesses the strength of both disciplines. Buyers' journeys are becoming longer by the day, and it seems like new B2B brands enter the scene more frequently than that.

The brands that thrive in this environment are the ones that build lasting relationships while driving short-term action. With an integrated strategy, you don't just balance your priorities — you're able to create a situation where your brand equity directly amplifies performance metrics!

Today we'll look at a framework for how to move beyond the outdated way of thinking and start to do what we call "brand-led performance marketing." This marketing strategy uses brand-building activities as a foundation for pipeline-driving campaigns. It's the best of both worlds!

Let's talk a little about the distinct roles of brand and performance initiatives so we can understand how they come together.

The focus of brand marketing is to create long-term equity. Brand-building efforts seek to build emotional connections with your target audience, as well as trust, brand recognition, and brand loyalty.

Brand marketing is all about getting what we call "Mindshare" — that valuable real estate in your potential customer's mind so that you are the automatic first choice when they're ready to buy.

Core metrics:

• Brand recall
• Share of voice
• Audience sentiment
• Mindshare

Performance marketing, on the other hand, aims for specific, immediate results through targeted campaigns. Performance marketers are tasked with capturing existing demand and converting intent signals to tangible revenue.

Core metrics:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Click-through rate (CTR)

Instead of pitting these two areas against each other, the modern approach recognizes these aren't opposing forces, but complementary ones. Even B2C giants like Nike have had to realize that performance-only just doesn't work in the long run.

Strong brand value actually lowers your CPA costs and boosts the efficiency of performance-oriented campaigns. People already know and trust you, so they're more likely to convert.

Similarly, performance marketing provides valuable feedback to inform your brand strategy, like which messages resonate with people and who's engaging with content. This can help you refine your existing brand messaging and content marketing strategy.

Over-reliance on performance marketing can create frustrating plateaus, where you find yourself unable to generate new demand or stand out in a crowded market. Because you haven't built the necessary relationships with your audience, you're fighting for a super-small segment of active buyers and ignoring the 95% of your audience that isn't actively shopping right now.

The brand-only trap is equally problematic. Pure brand marketing can lead to great brand awareness but still fail to create actual business results. Without performance elements to capture and convert your audience's interest, even the most engaging brand campaigns are all buzz, no bottom dollar.

Buyers form opinions long before they're going to buy; that's why Mindshare matters. But when they are ready to buy, they need clear pathways to move them along.

We love the Binet and Field 60/40 principle as a rule of thumb: Optimal budgets allocate 60% toward long-term brand building and 40% toward short-term results. This framework acknowledges that sustained growth requires BOTH brand and performance!

Here's how to implement a unified approach that builds brand equity while driving solid results:

Move beyond static, one-way presentations. Instead, create fully-branded, TV-show-like digital events that captivate your audience (there's the brand building piece) while using interactive tools like polls, Q&A, and CTAs to capture valuable engagement data (and there's the performance!).

Goldcast's platform is engineered to provide Netflix-level, bingeable experiences. You get unmatched branding control, full customization, and engagement features designed to keep your audience coming back for more. After an event ends, you can also share your engagement data with sales to enable them to further personalize their follow-ups.

You can't think of webinars as "one and done" now — every webinar is actually the foundation for dozens of performance-driving pieces of other content. Once you host your event in Goldcast (or upload your recording to Content Lab), it becomes social clips, blog posts, email marketing campaigns, and more … within seconds.

Repurposing extends the life and impact of your initial investment, allowing you to do more with less and ensuring that people encounter your message, no matter what platform they hang out on.

Let's face it: As much as you might want to, you'll never be able to connect 1:1 with every single one of your prospects.

But do you know what can do that? That's right: Video is the way to build emotional connections at scale. It's perfect for capturing the attention you need to build Mindshare, while simultaneously enabling your team to track granular user behaviors that signal intent.

This video superpower makes it the ideal medium for brand-led performance marketing campaigns. You're able to invest in your long-term brand equity and collect real-time data on prospect behavior to feed to your sales team.

For an integrated strategy to work, you have to get rid of fragmented workflows. Ideally, your event creation, content amplification, and reporting and analytics all live in the same system, providing a holistic view of the entire customer journey. This also ensures that nothing falls through the cracks.

Choose a tool like Goldcast that can integrate with your CRM, MAP, and other frequently-used systems so you can access all the important data around your customer journeys and empower sales to close the deal. With Goldcast, your sales team gets real-time alerts on event activities — letting them know who the hottest leads are, minute to minute. That's some pretty priceless info!

The greatest hurdle in brand-led performance is determining measurable outcomes.

Traditional attribution models don't work when brand activities take time to influence conversions. The old-school attribution tends to treat brand and performance as siloed, separate entities, when of course we know they're anything but.

With a unified approach, everyone is aware that brand engagement leads to performance outcomes. Instead of pitting the two against each other, you can instead track how brand-building work creates the conditions for more traditional metrics to happen.

Track deep behavioral data from brand efforts; this would include things like length of attendance (aka how long people stay at your events), poll responses, resources downloaded, CTA clicks, etc. This engagement data serves as a powerful, data-driven predictor of sales readiness.

The key is to move beyond vanity metrics to think about the depth of someone's engagement with your company. Someone who attends multiple webinars, is highly engaged in each session, and shares your takeaways on social media is sending a very strong intent signal — regardless of what their traditional lead score would be.

"Mindshare velocity" refers to how quickly immersive, video-led experiences convert attention to tangible business impact. This brand-led KPI represents the entire journey, from emotional connection to measurable intent.

In order to track this, you'll need a platform that integrates with your CRMs so you can prove clear attribution and show how digital events and video-led digital marketing efforts are influencing revenue.

Be sure to analyze performance across many events and campaigns. That way, you have a good handle on which topics, formats, and speakers are resonating with your audience. This allows you to optimize future efforts; for example, if you've got a speaker that people seem to go wild for, consider booking them for a regular spot or a series.

ThoughtSpot has a small demand gen team that's positioned under revenue marketing; everything they do must lead to revenue. They're fully committed to using video-forward content to drive their brand and performance goals — check out this recent video from their LinkedIn page:

The team partnered with Goldcast to scale ThoughtSpot's flagship event Beyond and drive pipeline, and here's what happened:

• Seamless brand experience, from start to finish
• 1,140 virtual registrants with a 50% show rate (plus 911 IRL attendees)
• 1,000+ leads generated
• 644 MQLs
• 357 SALs
• 17 meetings booked
• 11 opportunities created
• $1.56M pipeline created
• $4.27M pipeline influenced

WIth this event, ThoughtSpot effectively proved that creating compelling brand experiences does lead to pipeline!

Are you on board with this unified approach? If so, it's time to give Goldcast a whirl.

With Goldcast, you're able to create high-quality, on-brand video experiences. Then, when they're over, use AI to instantly repurpose them into dozens of other assets. This solves for any content efficiency challenges you're facing and allows you to show up everywhere your audience hangs out.

Plus, Goldcast captures deep engagement data and syncs right up with your CRM. As a result, you have complete access to all of the tools that illustrate true pipeline impact.

Demo Goldcast or Content Lab today, and start building Mindshare so you're on people's minds when they're ready to buy!