This split made sense 20 years ago, but now actively hurts business.

Brand marketing is traditionally focused on awareness, perception, and long-term value through storytelling and emotional connection. Performance marketing, on the other hand, emphasizes immediate, measurable outcomes: conversions, attribution, and direct ROI. 

These fundamental differences also extend to how these teams function in an organization. Brand and performance teams report to different leaders, operate different budgets, and are measured against opposing goals. But this siloed approach comes with hidden costs — missed opportunities, duplicated efforts, and campaigns that excel in one area while falling short in another. However, successful marketing requires brand impact and performance results working in harmony. 

The hidden costs of marketing silos

Customers don't experience your organizational structure — they experience your brand. But organizational silos often lead to visible brand inconsistencies that erode trust, personalization opportunities, and conversion potential. For instance, a prospect might receive competing messages across channels because teams haven’t coordinated their targeting. 

Today's customer journeys are non-linear and span multiple touchpoints across weeks or months. When brand and performance teams operate separately, they can't optimize for these non-linear paths. Brand teams can’t track who saw their messaging, and performance teams drive traffic to experiences that don’t align with brand messaging. 

Constant handoffs between teams create compromises and delays. Competitors with unified teams launch campaigns faster and convert more customers, while you might experience missed revenue targets, longer sales cycles, and reduced customer lifetime value. 

The impact extends beyond metrics to team effectiveness and culture. When brand and performance operate separately, marketers struggle to connect their work to business outcomes and feel limited by narrow specializations rather than developing multiple skillsets.

Common barriers to unifying marketing teams

Even for teams that want to integrate performance and brand marketing teams, they need to overcome several barriers:

• Organizational structure: Brand and performance teams usually operate on separate budgets and are measured against separate success metrics. This results in teams that have different vocabularies, priorities, and working styles.
• Different measurement approaches: Performance marketing relies on direct attribution models that track specific actions to specific touchpoints, whereas brand measurements focus on long-term indicators like awareness studies, sentiment tracking, and brand health metrics. This mismatch makes it difficult to align teams on shared success metrics and can lead to conflict over budget allocation. ‍
• Technical infrastructure: The technical infrastructure often reinforces these silos. Brand teams use different analytics platforms than performance teams, creating data silos. Customer data lives in separate systems with incompatible definitions and reporting structures, making it difficult to align on a common KPI or problem. Even when teams want to share insights, the data doesn't connect.

How to break down silos

With conviction and clear strategies, you can unify your marketing operations. Here are some tips to breaking down silos:

Create shared successes with objectives and metrics

The foundation of unified marketing starts with developing KPIs that capture brand and performance impact, rather than forcing teams to compete for credit. Instead of measuring brand awareness and conversion rates separately, track how brand interactions influence conversion quality and customer lifetime value. Everyone should be moving in the same direction with progress being tracked on all fronts. Performance campaigns should be evaluated for their brand impact, and brand campaigns should receive credit for downstream conversions.

Teams need shared goals and dashboards that show how brand and performance activities work together in the short and long term, making collaboration visible and valuable. Set up regular cross-departmental planning sessions and campaign post-mortems to celebrate successes together and reflect on what you can improve. 

Integrate cross-functional processes and restructure team dynamics

Organizational alignment means nothing without process changes that make collaboration the default rather than the exception. This requires workflows that require teams to integrate, rather than hoping they will choose to. A good place to start is integrated campaign planning that involves both teams when developing brand concepts and performance strategies. 

Rather than handing projects between teams, create blended teams or working groups with members from both brand and performance functions. These teams share responsibility for outcomes and develop working relationships beyond individual campaigns.

Align technology to enable rather than fragment teams

Technology infrastructure should support unified workflows. This doesn't mean replacing all tools, but instead integrating existing data and systems. With unified customer data platforms, teams can see the complete customer journey and make better decisions about messaging, timing, and channel efforts. 

The most successful organizations adopt platforms that support brand storytelling and performance optimization. Instead of integrating separate tools, they choose solutions where collaborating is natural rather than forced.

How Webflow unifies teams and helps solve organizational challenges

With Webflow, teams can work in one platform for multiple marketing needs. Brand marketers can build visually stunning, narrative-rich experiences using the same system that performance marketers use for conversion-optimized landing pages. 

• Breaking down technical barriers between teams: The integrated CMS in Webflow supports both long-form brand content and performance-focused copy without requiring different workflows or approval processes. Brand updates automatically appear on performance pages, and performance optimizations maintain consistent branding. 
• Enabling rapid experimentation across brand and performance: Webflow's visual development environment means brand marketers can build and modify experiences directly without waiting for developer resources, and performance marketers can create testing variations without going through lengthy approval processes. Real-time collaboration features enable both teams to work on the same projects simultaneously. 
• Streamlining workflow from concept to conversion: Webflow's design-to-launch process eliminates traditional handoff friction by enabling direct implementation of design concepts. The integrated SEO and performance optimization tools ensure that brand experiences don't sacrifice discoverability for aesthetics, while performance pages don't sacrifice brand quality for conversion optimization. These considerations get built into the workflow rather than addressed as afterthoughts. 

Why marketing unity can't wait

Organizations trapped in silos simply can't compete effectively in this environment. While they coordinate handoffs and navigate internal friction, competitors with unified teams launch campaigns faster and prove marketing's total business impact rather than defending separate metrics. The question is whether your organization will lead this transformation or spend years catching up to competitors who moved first.

Platforms like Webflow make it practical and scalable to unify brand and performance operations without sacrificing the specialized capabilities each function requires. 

Ready to break down your marketing silos? Get started with Webflow to unify your brand and performance marketing teams.