Conversion Marketing: What It Means and How to Use It to Drive Campaign Performance

Every marketing campaign ultimately has one goal in mind: conversions.

Arriving at one often involves a combination of brand marketing and performance marketing to build interest, drive action, and deliver results.

Historically, both strategies have existed at opposite ends of the marketing funnel, with brand marketers focused on building awareness and long-term brand equity and performance marketers focused on driving lead generation, customer acquisition, and revenue.

Conversion marketing emphasizes the need to do both.

Although most commonly associated with optimizing websites, landing pages, and user experiences to increase conversion rates, conversion marketing is increasingly used to describe a holistic, end-to-end approach that bridges brand and performance marketing to move prospects seamlessly across the entire customer journey from awareness to conversion.

In this article, we’ll explore what conversion marketing is, how it’s evolving, and how to use it to increase customer engagement and drive growth through every stage of the marketing funnel.

What Is Conversion Marketing?

Conversion marketing is a digital marketing strategy focused on getting users to perform a specific action. What that action is depends on the goal of your campaign, whether that’s encouraging users to click on an ad, sign up for a webinar, download a guide, request a demo, or purchase a product or service.

Ultimately, the purpose of conversion marketing is to grow the percentage of users who perform these actions by optimizing your marketing efforts at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

For example, in long, more nuanced sales cycles, like B2B, users may encounter and complete various touchpoints and conversions—both early on and late in the sales process—as they move through the funnel. Conversion marketing ensures each interaction is optimized to guide users toward the next step, ultimately leading to a final conversion.

Types of Marketing Conversions

Here’s a quick breakdown of the two different types of conversions you may find across marketing campaigns:

Performance Marketing Conversions

At its core, performance marketing focuses on achieving specific, measurable outcomes such as sales, leads, or clicks. As such, performance marketing conversions are typically associated with purchases, form submissions, downloads, or any other action that directly contributes to pipeline growth or new revenue.

Brand Marketing Conversions

Many marketers overlook the role brand marketing plays in driving conversions, but recognizing this connection can help you rethink and build more effective marketing campaigns. 

The goal of brand marketing is to build awareness, recall, and affinity by capturing an audience’s attention and forming a connection, with conversions often taking the form of direct engagement, increased traffic, and other interactions that signal brand interest.

While performance marketing conversions are often quantifiable and directly tied to revenue, brand marketing conversions can be more subjective and focused on brand recognition and recall. 

Conversion marketing bridges the gap, generating awareness, engagement, and long-term growth.

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel

Now that we’ve broken down the different types of conversions, let’s look at how to use conversion marketing to attract, nurture, and convert customers through each stage of the marketing funnel.

Funnel Stage	Objective	Action
Awareness	Build brand recognition and reach new audiences.	Use programmatic display, video, and other upper-funnel channels—like social media advertising, connected TV (CTV), and digital out-of-home—to capture attention and increase visibility.
Consideration	Nurture and move users toward conversion.	Utilize retargeting, dynamic creative optimization (DCO), and contextual targeting to deliver relevant messaging, reinforce brand credibility, and increase engagement.
Decision	Drive conversions and maximize efficiency.	Personalize content based on user behaviour, offer limited-time deals, and optimize landing pages to remove friction and improve conversion rates.
Retention	Build loyalty and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).	Use 1st-party data, loyalty programs, and automated re-engagement campaigns to encourage repeat purchases, reduce churn, and strengthen brand affinity.

Key Metrics and KPIs for Measuring Conversion Marketing

Measuring conversion marketing involves tracking a variety of metrics and KPIs across different stages of the marketing funnel. Here are some key metrics you should monitor to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns:

• Reach: The number of people exposed to your ad.
• Impressions: The number of times your ads or content are viewed by users.
• Lead Volume: The amount of new leads generated by your campaign.
• Cost Per Lead: The cost of acquiring each lead.
• Click-Through Rate: Measures the overall effectiveness of your ads or content in driving clicks.
• Cost Per Click: The cost of each click on your ads.
• Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of visitors who take a desired action (for example, signing up for a newsletter or requesting a demo).
• Customer Acquisition Cost: The cost of acquiring each customer.
• Return on Ad Spend: Measures how much revenue is earned for every dollar spent on advertising.
• CLV: The total amount of money a customer is likely to spend with your business or brand over time.

Additionally, marketers can track landing page bounce rates to identify friction points, which traffic sources (for example, organic search, digital advertising, and email marketing) drive the highest-quality conversions, and churn rate to assess retention and long-term customer value.

Essential Technologies for Conversion Marketing

To succeed in conversion marketing, marketers must rely on a mix of adtech and martech tools that focus on both brand and performance efforts to enhance targeting, personalization, and optimization across the entire customer journey.

Here are some key tools and technologies that can help:

• Programmatic Advertising Platforms: Software like StackAdapt provides multi-channel advertising capabilities and advanced targeting that can help brands reach audiences across various touchpoints, improving marketing efficiency and increasing the likelihood of a conversion.
• Marketing Automation Platforms: Automation tools allow marketers to streamline lead nurturing, trigger personalized messaging based on user behaviour, and optimize campaigns to deliver higher conversion rates.
• Analytics and Reporting Tools: Data and analytics platforms help marketers gain insights into website traffic, audience engagement, and conversion rates, which marketers can leverage to refine audience segmentation and improve campaign performance.
• Email Marketing Tools: Email marketing platforms let marketers automate, segment, and personalize campaigns with tailored messaging and creatives to improve engagement and conversion rates.

The ongoing convergence of martech and adtech is especially beneficial for conversion marketing.

For example, a B2B marketer promoting enterprise software could use a demand-side platform to serve programmatic display ads to decision-makers at a company that is actively researching solutions. 

Let’s say a prospect clicks on an ad and submits their contact information to download an industry report but never schedules a demo. An email marketing platform could then trigger a personalized follow-up sequence that shares additional resources—such as case studies or a webinar invite—that would be relevant to their use case, nudging them toward the next step. 

Meanwhile, marketers could use retargeting campaigns on different programmatic channels, such as CTV, to keep the brand top of mind as the prospect moves through the buying process.

In doing so, marketers can ensure consistent, personalized messaging across touchpoints, guiding prospects from initial interest to conversion.

Conversion Marketing Best Practices

To run successful conversion marketing campaigns, marketers must strategically use data, creativity, and customer insights to optimize the user experience across the entire funnel. 

Here are a few best practices that can help you attract the right audiences, remove friction, and improve performance at every stage of their buying journey:

Use Data to Segment and Personalize

Knowing what resonates with your audience is key to any successful marketing campaign. Create detailed buyer personas based on your audience’s demographics, psychographics, and online behaviour to help tailor your conversion marketing efforts. 

Craft Compelling Content and Messaging

Develop messaging that clearly communicates your brand’s unique value and encourages immediate action. Use direct, concise copy and clear calls-to-action in your ad creatives and on your website to capture attention and encourage customers to take the next step.

Use AI to Generate and Test Creatives at Scale

Generative AI is reshaping ad creation and can do everything from adjusting messaging based on user intent to tailoring visuals for different audience segments. Use AI to quickly produce creative variants and DCO to test which combinations drive the strongest response at scale.

Offer a Seamless User Experience on Websites and Landing Pages

If the final step of your marketing campaign involves directing users to a landing page or website before they convert, that experience should reinforce your key value propositions and make it easy to act. Ensure your website and landing pages are streamlined with minimal distractions by using tools like heatmaps and other usability testing platforms to optimize the user experience and remove friction.

Nurture and Retarget Prospective Customers

With most marketing campaigns, it’s unlikely that prospective customers will convert after a single interaction. Use email marketing and retargeting campaigns to re-engage users who have shown interest in your brand, nurture them with relevant content, and guide them toward conversion.

Test and Continuously Improve

Let data guide your decision-making. Regularly conduct A/B testing on ad creatives, landing pages, and messaging to identify what works best for your audience. Monitor campaign performance and make adjustments that help nudge prospects closer to conversion.

Putting Conversion Marketing in Motion

It’s never been easier for marketers to reach audiences and yet harder to get them to convert.

According to a 2024 study, brands spent 13.2% more on digital advertising in 2024 than they did the year prior but still experienced a 6.1% year-over-year decline in conversions—underscoring the increasing need for a more connected, end-to-end approach to teams’ marketing strategies.

The software you use and the partners you work with play a major role in closing that gap.

Want to learn how we’re helping marketers deliver results throughout the entire customer journey? Reach out to learn more about StackAdapt.

Conversion Marketing FAQS