Editor's note: Lori Barrett's Digital Corner is a regular column in Bicycle Retailer & Industry News magazine. This column ran in the February 2026 issue.
By Lori Barrett
Marketing departments have historically been the first and hardest hit when budget cuts come to the industry. As a former CEO explained it to me: The spends on a budget sheet are the only line items that you are essentially guaranteed to hit. And marketing can have some big items.
These days, the ability to tie revenue numbers to marketing expenses is a powerful tool. Performance marketing allows marketing departments to tie quantifiable results to the ongoing efforts at brand building. Today we’ll scratch the surface on how traditional and performance marketing work together, and finish with a little info on how to add performance marketing to your 2026 plans.
Let’s start by laying out some concepts: When we talk about traditional marketing, we are mostly talking about brand-building efforts like team sponsorships, podcast spots, and of course print magazine placement.
When we talk about performance marketing, we generally mean any marketing that is designed to be measured and executed against performance targets; for every dollar spent, there will be a tracked and quantifiable goal. As a self-professed data nerd and marketing enthusiast, performance marketing makes my heart go pitter-pat. The beauty of adding performance marketing to your brand activation plans is that it allows marketing departments to quantify the outcome of actions, giving measurable results to formerly squidgy spends.
Arguably, the most powerful way to use performance marketing is in combination with a traditional marketing campaign. I like to think of this as a full-funnel approach: Traditional marketing covers top-of-funnel, while performance marketing is more bottom-of-funnel. Said another way, traditional marketing generates and builds demand, while performance marketing allows you to capture as much of that demand as possible. Taken together, they amplify the impact of your marketing campaigns and allow you to assign them measurable results and revenue.
Here are a few ways that traditional and performance marketing work hand in hand:
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Proof of concept: customers see a brand on a race team and there’s already the feeling of trustworthiness when they encounter the ad online, allowing them to feel confident in making a purchase.
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Data feedback on what customers want from your brand. Performance marketing allows nearly real-time feedback on which brand messages resonate with customers, which audiences convert, even which geographic regions are most keen on the brand.
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Familiarity breeds efficiency: It stands to reason that a stronger baseline brand awareness leads to more streamlined results in cost-per-acquisition and conversion rates.
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Brand narrative to calls of action. While traditional marketing earns you a place in a customer’s mind; the performance element puts you in front of them when they are ready to make a purchase.
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Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). The beauty of the combined approach is that it can justify the expense of a marketing department. In my experience, the only challenge when presenting budget numbers to a board is explaining that the top-of-funnel actions — the traditional marketing — is necessary to have brand awareness and validation once a customer is ready to buy. I’ve found the most success when using ROAS to work backward and set my brand budget. If we’re hitting 5x ROAS then our performance marketing campaigns are profitable enough to justify their own existence and to comfortably cover the costs of some more traditional, harder-to-measure marketing efforts (which are directly or indirectly contributing to that 5x performance).
So what does an IBD do with all of this info? Performance marketing definitely veers away from software that can be managed in-house, since it typically uses tools like Google Adwords and Analytics, which get pretty deep in the specialty-knowledge weeds. That being said, there are digital consultancies that specialize in these areas, and they can quantify results and a positive return on investment. If you are considering the agency direction, I’d strongly advise you to engage an agency or individual who is deeply familiar with the bicycle industry and understands your brand’s position and customer base. From what I have seen, the bicycle industry is so specialized and the aforementioned tools are so specific that if there is a gap in understanding of your shop or brand’s position in the industry, the results can be fairly far off-base. (Ask me how I know.)
Seeing revenue as a factor of “I spend $1, I make $5,” is powerful. But if your business is not ready to assign that kind of consultancy budget to its marketing budget, you can hire a freelancer to set up and run your accounts. As with anything, your success will depend on the knowledge and skill of your hire, but if you outline simple metrics for success, the numbers will tell you the story of your efforts.
So where does that leave traditional marketing?
After going to Sea Otter, SBT GRVL and other marquee events, I’d say that traditional marketing is still alive and well. At the end of the day, while performance marketing is around to capture the money of a customer who’s ready to purchase, those customers still need to know who we are and feel like we’re in this business to serve their interests. While performance marketing campaigns can add to those efforts, it’s still a business built on brand trust
Lori Barrett was managing director of Rotor America for the last nine years.
