Brand vs. Performance: The Tug-of-War Killing Your Marketing. A HIPAA-Compliant Playbook for Success

Ah, the age-old battle: Brand Marketing vs. Performance Marketing. A rivalry as pointless as arguing whether coffee or sleep is better for productivity. (A BIG obvious LeDuh here: you need both.) Yet, I recently had a front-row seat to this tragicomedy, where yet again, two marketing leaders, one obsessed with brand, the other fixated on performance, locked horns in a never-ending debate.

Guess what? Neither of them won. Because neither of them had a damn clue. 

The False Dichotomy of Brand vs. Performance

One side believed that brand alone would solve everything, you know, just vibes and awareness without much concern for actual conversion. The other was all about performance, demanding every dollar be directly attributed to a sale, like some kind of digital coupon-clipping addiction.

The result? A dysfunctional strategy that went nowhere fast.

• Brand without performance is a beautifully designed billboard placed right in front of the ideal audience: hoping, just hoping, that someone remembers the name long enough to type it into a search engine if they remember and finally enter the funnel.

• Performance without brand is a glorified coupon, great for a one-time transaction, but easily forgotten. In today’s world, people are always looking for a deal, and they’ll go with any solution that meets their needs at the right price. Without brand affinity, they have zero reason to choose you again.

I cannot express this any more clearly: Both are equally useless if you actually care about long-term success.

Enter the Missing Piece: Demand Generation

The real problem? They ignored the bridge between the two: Demand Generation.

Demand marketing is what makes performance work more efficiently and brand work more measurably. It’s the connective tissue, creating real audience engagement, warming up leads, and driving people through the funnel, not just to the top or straight to a one-time appointment.

When done right, it builds trust, nurtures relationships, and ultimately increases LTV (lifetime value) and customer advocacy, the holy grails of sustainable business growth.

But Wait! What About the Demand Gen Purists?

Ah yes, the Demand Gen Purists. So adorable. You know these folks, the marketers who think brand is fluff and performance is too transactional, but demand generation alone is the magic bullet. They live and die by mid-funnel engagement, obsessing over lead scoring, MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, and nurture workflows like they’re the ultimate cheat code.

Here’s the problem: Demand gen without brand is like fishing without bait, and demand gen without performance is like fishing without a net.

• Without brand marketing, your demand gen efforts are screaming into the void. Who’s going to engage with your webinars, whitepapers, or nurture sequences if they’ve never even heard of you? Demand only works when there’s existing awareness and credibility.

• Without performance marketing, demand gen efforts stall out before the finish line. You’ve warmed up leads, but now what? If there’s no strong call-to-action, no retargeting, and no conversion-focused tactics, all you’ve done is educate your audience, for someone else’s benefit.

The Reality Check for Demand Gen Purists

Brand → Demand → Performance (and of course engagement to ensure advocacy) isn’t a buffet where you pick one. It’s a sequence. Brand builds the emotional connection, demand warms them up, and performance closes the deal. Then keeps you top of mind with further engagement.

If you’re a demand gen purist who refuses to acknowledge brand or performance marketing, congrats, you’re generating interest for competitors who know how to actually convert leads into customers.

Know Your Audience: Insights-Driven Marketing That Meets People Where They Are

Ok, so this could be step one of this playbook, but this work should be done no matter what type of playbook you’re initiating. So, before I get into the full-funnel mechanics, let’s get one thing straight and I cannot express this enough: If you don’t deeply understand your audience, none of this matters.

One of the biggest mistakes I see? Companies assume where their audience spends time based on intuition or other clients/companies they’ve worked for instead of using data to meet them where they actually are. In B2B2C models, this gets even trickier because you're not just dealing with LinkedIn-scrolling professionals; you’re also targeting consumers who might be researching solutions in very different places.

Audience Insights That Matter

• B2B buyers → They live on LinkedIn, industry events, Slack communities, and thought leadership hubs.

• B2C consumers → They’re on Google, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and niche forums where they ask peers for recommendations.

• Both → Expect personalized, relevant engagement. If you're not showing up where they search, learn, and discuss, you're already behind. PUT IN THE WORK!

If all you’re doing is running LinkedIn campaigns because "that’s where our industry is", congrats, you’re only reaching part of your audience and leaving money on the table. A true insights-driven marketing approach means knowing:

• Where your audience actually hangs out (B2B ≠ just LinkedIn, B2C ≠ just Facebook)

• What messages resonate at each stage of their journey

• What content formats do they prefer (blogs? video? interactive tools?)

Now, let’s see how this plays out in a full-funnel marketing strategy with a case study. 

Case Study: Transforming Marketing Performance with a Full-Funnel Strategy, Optimized Martech Stack, and HIPAA Compliance

Background

A mid-sized B2B2C healthcare tech company struggled with marketing alignment. Certain leadership and agency resources prioritized brand marketing with big creative campaigns, while the revenue team focused purely on performance marketing, demanding measurable, short-term ROI.

The result? A fragmented strategy that:

• Generated brand awareness, but failed to drive conversions. WRONG!

• Poured money into performance marketing without proper lead nurturing. NOPE!

• Lacked demand generation to connect brand awareness to sales. WHOOPS!

• Faced compliance risks due to handling patient data in marketing workflows. HORRIBLE!

To fix this, the team was advised to implement a full-funnel strategy using an optimized martech stack, all while ensuring HIPAA compliance and data security in the process.

The Solution: Implementing a Full-Funnel Strategy with the Right Martech Stack & HIPAA-Compliant Data Practices

Step 1: Gathering Insights with Secure Data Handling

(Martech stack products mentioned are examples, please do your own research and choose products that fit within your culture, business objectives, process and budget.)

Conduct a HIPAA-compliant data audit using:

• CRM & Data Warehousing: e.g. Salesforce Health Cloud (HIPAA-compliant CRM) to centralize and securely store patient and prospect data.

• Data Enrichment & Intent Signals: Products like 6sense & RB2B, ensuring that only de-identified and compliant data was used for targeting.

• Customer Data Platforms (CDP): Segment to unify customer interactions while maintaining strict data governance rules.

HIPAA Compliance Measures Taken:

• Ensure no Protected Health Information (PHI) is exposed in marketing workflows.

• Use de-identified and aggregated data for targeting.

• Apply role-based access controls (RBAC) to limit data visibility to only necessary teams.

For those folks who are new to this, let’s break this down so that you can understand the rest of the steps: 

Step 2: HIPAA Compliance Measures Taken (And How to Execute Them)

Ensure No PHI is Exposed in Marketing Workflows

What This Means: PHI includes any data that can be used to identify a patient (e.g., names, email addresses tied to health conditions, medical records, or insurance info). You absolutely cannot use PHI in ad targeting, remarketing, or email workflows. Your general counsel or CTO/CIO will get miffed at you, or worse, you end up as a lead story on Fierce, Beckers, WSJ you name the pub, you’ll be a headline. 

How to Execute:

• Use anonymized, non-PHI data in marketing platforms (e.g., behavior-based audiences, industry-based segments).

• Never upload email lists that contain patient information to ad platforms (e.g., Meta, Google Ads).

• Ensure form fills or chatbots don’t request health-specific data, stick to business details like company name, job title, or general interests.

Use De-Identified and Aggregated Data for Targeting

What This Means: Instead of targeting individuals based on their specific health conditions, use data that has been stripped of personal identifiers and grouped into segments.

How to Execute:

B2B Example: Use platforms like 6sense, RB2B, and Clearbit to identify companies in healthcare looking for solutions rather than targeting specific professionals by name or email.
B2C Example: Use contextual targeting (e.g., running ads on fitness and wellness websites) instead of retargeting people based on past health-related searches.

Set up cohort-based remarketing instead of one-to-one targeting.

• Don’t retarget “people who visited our telehealth page.”

• Do retarget “users who engaged with owned digital wellness content.”

Apply Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) to Limit Data Visibility to Only Necessary Teams

What This Means: Not every marketer, sales rep, or agency partner should have access to sensitive customer data, even in a HIPAA-compliant CRM. RBAC restricts access based on roles and responsibilities.

How to Execute:

• Set role-based permissions in your CRM, CDP, and marketing platforms (e.g., Salesforce Health Cloud, HubSpot, Segment - whatever works for your culture and budget).

• Ensure only compliance-approved team members can access PHI, and marketing teams only see aggregated insights.

• Regularly audit access logs to make sure unauthorized users don’t have entry into protected data.

HIPAA Compliance Final Takeaway 

By anonymizing data, avoiding PHI in marketing workflows, and using access controls, you can run highly effective demand gen, performance, and brand marketing, without violating HIPAA.

Want a simple rule of thumb? If you wouldn’t want your personal health data used this way, don’t use it in your campaigns. Empathy people. Empathy. 

Ok, now that we know how to execute safely - let’s move onto the next step. 

Step 3: Building Demand with a HIPAA-Compliant Martech Stack

To bridge the gap between brand awareness and conversion, we implemented demand generation powered by the right tools and data privacy safeguards.

Brand Marketing (Top of Funnel): Creating Awareness with Secure Data Practices

Key Tools: HubSpot CMS, LinkedIn Ads, Google Display Network

• Use products like HubSpot CMS (with HIPAA compliance settings) for publishing thought leadership content.

• Leverage platforms like LinkedIn Ads & Google Display Network with custom audience segmentation, only targeting professionals and never using PHI in ad targeting.

HIPAA Compliance Steps:

• Ensure no PHI was used in ad targeting.

• Guarantee web tracking was configured with HIPAA-compliant settings, ensuring sensitive user behavior wasn’t stored.

Demand Generation (Middle of Funnel): Nurturing Interest Securely

Key Tools: Marketo (HIPAA-compliant setup), Drift AI Chat, Zoom Webinars

• Marketo automation nurtured leads with encrypted and secure email workflows.

• Drift AI chatbots engaged visitors without collecting PHI, ensuring compliance while qualifying leads.

HIPAA Compliance Steps:

• Marketing automation workflows need to be configured to exclude PHI and rely on hashed, anonymized user IDs.

Performance Marketing (Bottom of Funnel): Driving Conversion & Advocacy (While Staying Secure)

 Key Tools: Google Ads, Facebook Retargeting, Twilio (HIPAA-compliant SMS), Friendbuy (referral program)

• Google & Facebook retargeting campaigns were structured with privacy-compliant audience lists.

• Twilio SMS notifications (HIPAA-compliant setup) reminded prospects about demos and free trials without exposing health details.

HIPAA Compliance Steps:

• No remarketing to patients based on health conditions.

• Secure SMS & email reminders followed HIPAA encryption protocols.

Innovative Approach: Insight-to-Impact Engineering (with Data Security)

Adopt a privacy-first, data-driven approach to maximize marketing efficiency while keeping data safe:

How Insight-to-Impact Marketing DevOps/ImpactOps Works (with Security in Mind)

BTW: Marketing DevOps/ImpactOps is the full-funnel, insight-driven, automation-powered approach that scales marketing while keeping compliance, security, and efficiency at the forefront.

• Data-driven segmentation: Use HIPAA-compliant AI to target enterprise buyers instead of individuals.

• Automated, secure workflows: Apply role-based access controls (RBAC) to prevent unauthorized data exposure.

• Cross-functional security oversight: Involve legal & compliance teams in marketing data governance policies.

Potential Results: Insight-to-Impact in Action

50% increase in MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, without violating HIPAA compliance.
30% decrease in Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by leveraging demand gen instead of over-reliance on ads.
100% HIPAA-compliant marketing workflows, reducing legal risk while maximizing engagement.

By integrating brand, demand, and performance marketing with the right martech stack and HIPAA safeguards, you can build a sustainable, secure growth engine for your B2B2C healthcare organization. 

Key Takeaways: How to Apply This to Your Business

Scaling marketing while staying compliant isn’t optional, it’s the standard. A privacy-first, full-funnel strategy that integrates brand, demand, and performance is the only way to drive sustainable growth.

Newsflash: If you’re only choosing one part of the marketing equation, you’re setting yourself up for a hell of a time succeeding.

• Brand builds trust.

• Demand creates momentum.

• Performance drives action.

Ignore any piece of the puzzle, and you’re leaving money, and opportunity, on the table. Marketing DevOps ensures it all works together.

So, are you ready to build a smarter, scalable, and compliant marketing engine? Let’s go!