By Ben Cunningham, Media Director, IMA
In commission-led sectors (e.g. property, recruitment), marketing teams often gravitate toward short-term, bottom-of-funnel activity. After all, immediate results feel reassuring. But an overreliance on quick-win marketing eventually stalls without a sustained, scalable brand engine behind it.
The way to strike that balance is by using data more intelligently. Performance, brand, personal influence and AI-powered intelligence all work together to turn data from a reporting tool into an engine of business impact.
Performance marketing’s blind spot
When you’re measuring marketing success, it’s easy to focus on the metrics that provide instant feedback. Clicks, leads and attribution models give a sense of certainty, but they only capture a tiny slice of the customer journey.
They often miss pre-existing brand affinity, offline interactions or future demand creation. This leads to plateaus; results flatten even though the business is growing. Over-targeting in-market audiences can also cannibalise future demand pools. It’s great for early wins, but bad for sustained growth.
For sales-driven businesses, true effectiveness means balancing brand and performance instead of favouring one at the expense of the other.
When brand meets performance
Orlando Wood’s “left-brain/right-brain” framework helps illustrate the point. The left brain is functional and rational, the kind of messaging that responds to call-to-action prompts to drive immediate purchases. This is your performance strategies.
The right-brain creative is emotional, imaginative and responds to storytelling and building a gradual impression of a brand over time. These are your brand strategies.
Sales-driven industries tend to over-index on the left-brain strategies. It works in the short term but fails to build the long-term preference needed for sustainable success.
There needs be a balance which moves in-market customers towards sales while also building brand memory for future buyers. These become your two core groups: conversion targets and awareness targets.
The future of marketing in sales-led industries is not choosing between them but integrating both.
A strong example is Purplebricks, which has used campaigns like Commisery to call out the pain of high commissions. It boosted recognition and moved away from bottom-funnel performance tactics. One of the best parts of this campaign was the use of specific online and offline channels to target key audiences. Data is what helps decide which channels play which role.
Data as the engine, not the story
Getting accurate data is harder than ever. Fragmented journeys, privacy changes, cookie loss and limited PII make it tough to understand where customers are and whether they sit in the conversion or awareness group.
This is why balanced measurement frameworks matter. Click-only metrics don’t give the full picture.
Tools like Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) help quantify the impact of different channels on real business outcomes. Tracking brand metrics and share of search provides insight into where leads originate. And building strong first-party data sets is the foundation for smarter targeting.
Property investment company, JNG Capital, used a blend of data intelligence, AI, and human-led processes to create leads and brand awareness simultaneously.
The digital infrastructure gathered extensive data (social media, informative videos and an easy-to-use website) and worked alongside a lead generation strategy to drive results. The result was an uptick in sales and increased revenue for the business. A campaign like this may not be possible for every business, but it’s a great example of putting data collection into practice for sales success.
The goal is to let data spark creative strategy, rather than overwhelm it.
What to do about AI
We can’t talk about data without talking about AI. AI is essentially structured data at scale, and it’s becoming invaluable for tracking increasingly fragmented customer journeys to streamline performance marketing.
Beyond providing faster insight and automated optimisation, AI unlocks a bigger untapped opportunity: truly personalised mass messaging.
Instead of generic ‘personalisation,’ AI can help deliver bespoke creative to individuals at key milestones or life stages. This makes genuine 1:1 creative relevance scalable for the first time.
AI also supports with brand marketing too. When an AI-delivered message appears precisely when it’s needed, the brand builds trust with the consumer, whether that’s a manager looking to hire or newlyweds looking for their first home.
Of course, AI can only take us so far. It can drive leads, but it’s still sales teams who convert them.
Modern growth for sale-driven industries
The future belongs to businesses that combine data intelligence with brand-led creativity. When used well, data amplifies both trust and targeting, without bogging teams down in shallow click metrics.
Turning data into deals means weaving technology, creativity and human judgment together, not choosing between them. Sales-driven industries need to be smarter about how they use data to grow their businesses.
