Performance Marketing Vs. Growth Marketing: What’s the Difference?

PPerformance marketing focuses on measurable actions and results, while growth marketing takes a full-funnel approach to sustainable business growth. Learn the key differences, when to use each strategy, and how they can work together.

Key Takeaways

• Performance marketing focuses on measurable results like leads, sales, and conversions, while growth marketing targets sustainable growth across the customer journey.
• Performance marketing typically relies heavily on paid channels, while growth marketing can incorporate both paid and organic marketing tactics.
• The two strategies can work together: performance marketing can drive acquisition while growth marketing improves acquisition, engagement, and retention over time.
• The right mix depends on your goals, budget, business stage, and how quickly you need results.

Performance marketing and growth marketing share the same goal: growing a business. But they approach that goal in different ways.

Performance marketing prioritizes measurable actions and near-term results, such as leads, sales, and conversions. Growth marketing takes a broader approach, using ongoing testing and optimization to improve acquisition, engagement, retention, and long-term growth.

But these two strategies don’t only work in isolation. Many businesses use performance and growth marketing together at different stages of the customer journey.

Let’s break down performance marketing vs. growth marketing, their benefits, and how to determine the right mix for your business — with expert insights from our own SEM manager, Hannah Manson.

Performance marketing vs. growth marketing at a glance

	Performance marketing	Growth marketing
Time horizon	Short-term/Near-term	Long-term
Primary goal	Measurable actions and conversions	Sustainable, compounding growth
Funnel focus	Bottom of funnel (action)	Full-funnel (awareness through retention)
Common channels/tactics	PPC, paid social, affiliate, native ads	Paid and organic media, SEO, email, CRO, product/UX optimization
Key metrics	CPC, CPL, CPA, CAC	Organic traffic, engagement, retention, referrals
Best fit	Driving and optimizing measurable actions	Finding and scaling growth opportunities across the funnel

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing is a data-driven marketing approach in which campaigns are optimized around measurable actions and results, such as clicks, leads, sales, or other conversions.

As such, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns play a prominent role in performance marketing. Other common performance marketing channels include affiliate marketing, native advertising, paid social media advertising such as LinkedIn or Facebook ads, influencer partnerships, and search engine marketing.

Because it is driven by action, performance marketing campaigns rely heavily on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL), cost per action (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

These KPIs help marketers evaluate everything from lead generation to sales and determine whether their campaigns are effective.

Benefits of performance marketing

Regardless of the product or service a company provides, attracting new customers is critical to ongoing business growth and success. In this case, the benefits of performance marketing are hard to ignore:

Flexible, results-driven spending

Performance marketing gives advertisers greater control over where they allocate their budgets and which results they’re optimizing for.

The pay-as-you-go pricing model allows you to choose how much or how little of your ad spend to allocate toward a specific goal, and for how long.

If a campaign isn’t meeting expectations, performance data can help you identify problems and adjust your targeting, creative, bids, or budget.

This helps you control your advertising costs over time while enabling immediate results.

Easily trackable

This ties in with the first benefit. The ability to view key campaign metrics in real time means you know exactly how your return on investment (ROI) is being impacted by your online marketing efforts.

Campaign platforms provide detailed data on impressions, clicks, conversions, and other actions, making it easier to see whether campaigns are meeting expectations and where optimization may be needed.

Marketers can also use A/B testing to compare elements such as ad creative, messaging, and calls to action, then use performance data to continually refine campaigns.

Expand your reach

Performance marketing can also help businesses reach new audiences quickly.

With paid social platforms, affiliate networks, and PPC platforms such as Google Ads, marketers can target potential customers based on factors like their interests, demographics, search behavior, and intent.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a data-driven, full-funnel approach focused on finding and optimizing opportunities for sustainable business growth.

Rather than concentrating primarily on acquisition, growth marketers look across the entire marketing funnel and customer journey — from awareness and acquisition to engagement, retention, and referrals.

Note: Growth marketing is not the same thing as growth hacking, which is often described as experimenting with low-cost, innovative strategies, typically based on current trends, to quickly boost revenue and/or attract more customers.

Growth marketing can incorporate marketing tactics such as:

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Email marketing and automation
• Paid media
• Conversion rate optimization
• User experience and product optimization

The specific channel matters less than how marketers use testing and data to improve growth throughout the funnel.

This type of full-funnel marketing strategy uses ongoing experimentation to identify what drives growth, then applies those insights across channels and customer touchpoints.

That might include testing content, paid campaigns, email sequences, landing pages, offers, onboarding experiences, or retention strategies.

Benefits of growth marketing

When executed effectively, growth marketing can help businesses attract new customers, strengthen existing relationships, and improve retention over time.

What can growth marketing do for your business? Here are some top benefits:

Increase brand awareness

A growth marketing strategy is all about introducing people to your brand story, crafting your messaging, and spotlighting what makes you stand out in the industry.

This takes time, but these efforts can help your brand gain recognition and stay top of mind with potential customers.

Improve SEO

A smart growth marketing team understands that one of the best ways to improve your search ranking organically is by optimizing the content on your website. High-quality, up-to-date content is at the heart of a strong growth marketing campaign.

Strengthen customer relationships

For long-term growth (and to scale your business), you need to nurture relationships with your existing customer base, not just focus on acquisition.

Understanding customers’ needs and pain points can help you improve retention, reduce churn, increase customer lifetime value, and generate more referrals.

Performance marketing vs. growth marketing: Which should you choose?

You don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other. Performance marketing and growth marketing solve different problems, and many businesses benefit from using both.

“I don’t see performance and growth marketing as an either/or decision,” says Manson.

“Performance marketing helps capture and convert demand today, while growth marketing looks more broadly at how you can create, test, and scale new opportunities over time.”

She explains that could mean using paid search to capture high-intent demand while simultaneously testing new audiences, messaging, landing pages, channels, or offers.

The insights from those experiments can then improve your performance campaigns, while performance data helps determine where the next growth opportunity may be.

“The two strategies should continuously inform each other,” she adds. “They aren’t necessarily separate initiatives.”

Are you an established business with a sizable ad spend, looking to drive traffic, boost conversions, and generate more sales? Performance marketing may deserve a larger share of your strategy.

Paid traffic is a crucial component of performance marketing and requires a sufficient budget for success.

And because paid traffic platforms can get pretty technical, using them correctly (so that they actually increase your return on investment) requires a slightly higher skill set. It helps to have a dedicated marketer on staff, or room in your budget to outsource the job to an experienced performance marketing agency.

A startup or newer business still building awareness and working with a limited advertising budget may put more resources toward organic growth channels such as content and SEO.

But that doesn’t mean paid performance marketing is off the table. A targeted paid campaign can help a new business test messaging with its target audience, validate demand, and generate leads while longer-term channels gain traction.

The bottom line

Performance marketing and growth marketing aren’t competing strategies. Performance marketing tactics help businesses drive and measure specific actions, while growth marketing looks across the customer journey for opportunities to build sustainable growth.

The right choice depends on your goals, budget, and business stage.

By combining the immediate, measurable insights of performance marketing with a broader growth strategy, you can generate results now while continuing to improve how you attract and retain customers over time.

No matter where you are in your business journey, HawkSEM’s team of digital marketing experts has the experience and expertise to help you develop a winning performance marketing and growth marketing strategy.

We’ll help you craft one that will drive conversions, boost revenue, and increase customer retention. With the help of our proprietary marketing technology, ConversionIQ, our clients see an average of 4.5x greater ROI. Just imagine what we can do for your business. Get in touch today to learn more.

FAQs about performance marketing vs. growth marketing

Is performance marketing better than growth marketing?

Neither is “better,” but they solve different problems.

Performance marketing gets you fast, measurable conversions. Growth marketing takes a broader view of sustainable growth, including acquisition, engagement, and retention. Many businesses use both approaches together.

Can a business run performance marketing and growth marketing at the same time?

Yes. In fact, the two can complement each other.

Performance marketing can generate measurable acquisition and conversion results while growth marketing experiments across the funnel to improve acquisition, engagement, retention, and other drivers of long-term growth.

What’s the difference between growth marketing and growth hacking?

Growth hacking uses fast, low-cost, often trend-driven experiments to chase quick wins. Growth marketing takes a slower, more sustainable approach built on content, SEO, and long-term audience trust.

Which one should a new business focus on first?

It depends on the business model, budget, and goals. For example, an ecommerce brand, local service business, and SaaS company may have very different acquisition costs, sales cycles, and growth priorities.

“With a limited budget, I’d start with performance marketing and focus on the channels that are generating measurable business results,” says Manson.

“You don’t want to spread a small budget too thin across multiple platforms or objectives. Start with one or two channels where you can capture existing demand, establish what drives leads or sales, and build a strong foundation of conversion data.”

Manson adds that, once you know what’s working, you can scale from there and invest more intentionally in broader growth initiatives. “Usually my first recommendation is Google Ads search campaigns, and then I expand from there,” she says.

What metrics matter most for each strategy?

Performance marketers often track CPC, CPL, CPA, CAC, conversion rate, and ROAS. Growth marketers may track metrics across the entire customer journey, including acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, revenue, and referrals.

This article has been updated and was originally published in March 2023.