B2B Startups: Ignore Brand Awareness and Content Strategy at Your Peril

Let's talk about brand.

I took the train to Manhattan on Monday and, despite it being 5:38 a.m. and not yet caffeinated, all I could think about is how brand awareness is STILL one of the most MISUNDERSTOOD YET IMPORTANT factors that drive B2B revenue generation.

To quote the brilliant Tom Wentworth : "Brand awareness is the REAL demand generation."

So then, why are companies still myopically focused on quantifiable lead data that isn't even representative of the customer journey? It is an absolutely misnomer that money spent on brand dollars or content generation not measured in your CRM are "wasted" and don't have a direct impact on sales. In fact, that thought process is a business killer. Sometimes you simply will not know where a lead originated—and that is okay if you are meeting your attraction goals and converting leads into truly qualified opportunities (and that part depends on how good your sales team is, not how good your content is).

With today's buying behavior, e.g. the behavior we've had since about 2022, inbound is more important than ever. I go as far as to call it "outside in" marketing because buyers are in their own private communities where they talk about what tools they are curious about, what they tried, what sucks, and what solved their problems. Yet, so many businesses still lead with pre-COVID buyer journey and demand gen models and measurements or do comparative pipeline splits across sales, marketing, and channel. Why? There's no good answer.

To influence those community conversations is science and art melded together with a mixture that includes public relations, podcasting, earned and paid digital, content syndication, earned content strategies, influencer relations, and so on. Sure, some aspects of those you can relate back to your conversion metrics (not necessarily at the time they cause conversion) but many of them you cannot—and you don't need to. You can absolutely look for trends in your engagement when certain types of programs run to see if you get "vanity metrics" (website visits, social media followers or likes), but WHEN A BRAND AWARENESS PROGRAM HITS IS NOT NECESSARILY INDICATIVE OF WHEN YOU SEE RESULTS. Yes, I yelled.

For example, you're the CxO of a startup. You now have clearly defined lead stages and sales stages. Your team, or your integrated marketing agency, should do an audit of all of the assets you have that range from educational to pragmatic application of your solution. Make sure all stages are covered and produce new content where there are gaps. Sometimes you do this as your programs are running because you can't wait for content. Some of those will be produced as website hub pages or one-pagers; some will be placed earned media by your PR agency; some will be developed by your product marketing team.

Then you're going to think about your buyer personas AND your influencers at your ideal customer profile (ICP) companies, and determine which of those assets are going to be used to attract each of them into your system for nurturing, which are going to turn them into qualified leads, which are going to turn them into qualified opportunities, and which will drive them to close (again, the latter two rely on the prowess of your sales team).

So, adding to that example, let's use PR. You get a fantastic writeup in a dream publication. Your first inclination might be to post it to social and then to your site and share it about. Maybe do one email.

Wrong. Well, not wrong, just not enough.

Any PR you receive, if you're working strategically and have the resources, should be treated as a sales tool. Analyze the content: does it appeal to an influencer or buying decision maker? Should you tailor an email about it differently for each audience? Is it now part of a sequence or drip campaign that only sets it loose when a prospect takes a certain action based on where they are in stages? Is your sales team enabled to use it as they see fit in conversations at certain points with prospects? Answer to all of that should be yes. And, there's much more I didn't list.

And, that's simply ONE example of why we run into data measurement problems with brand awareness. With many brand assets I mentioned earlier, you don't know when someone might stumble across it; or if you've tailored how you use it, you don't know when a known prospect will read it. Or, if your sales team is using it manually in their nurture or making their business case to help close a deal with a prospect, it's not going to show up in your CRM. And even if you have it set as nurture and you can see a click-through in your CRM, you don't know when or if it was part of the decision process, so your conversion timelines are going to be askew. As a CMO, I stopped even looking at a lot of this because it did not matter, but we still hit our marketing goals.

As a self-proclaimed marketing ops data nerd I could go on for hours on this topic, and as that data nerd this was a hard pill to swallow, trust me. I want to make sure the primary takeaway is this: when considering where to invest your dollars to grow your business, make brand awareness and content strategy a priority, and don't hinder your own success by chopping yourself off at the knees because it doesn't show in your CRM. I promise you, with all of my heart, if you do it that way (the right way) you will flourish. If you do it the old way... you could still succeed, but you'll definitely leave money on the table.

I'm part of a panel at #CyberMarketingCon with Charles Gold , Cameron (Cami) R. and the aforementioned Tom Wentworth on "Why Marketing Leaders Succeed or Fail" and I guarantee this topic will come up. Details here: https://www.cybermarketingconference.com/