Marketing has a Marketing Problem.

It’s self-inflicted. Mostly.

TLDR: Without sufficient brand, marketing has no ‘performance’.

Follow the logic. No one wants to waste money. Every B2B business wants new leads. Those new leads become new pipeline. New pipeline becomes new revenue. So, how about if we cut the fluff from all non pipeline producing budget line items? Just run the touchdown play over and over. If the question is spending on demand vs brand, “We want to win business. We are not trying to win awards for our creativity”. I couldn’t agree more.

Up to a point…

As a marketer, you should be there at the right time with the right offer to the right prospects when they start the search for a solution to their problem. That’s the essence of performance marketing—using your budget to efficiently attract, engage, and convert prospects into pipeline.

And there are some big, unstated assumptions with this logic.

1. Is your timing right? Not all ideal customer profiles are in market at the same time. Many businesses (like mine) have at least some seasonal component. Often though, the customer pain is not great enough until it is triggered, usually by a painful event or a note from the boss, to seek a solution. So repeatedly hammering people with “buy now” messages will work…but only on that subset of buyers who are in market right now for your offer. Still others have no budget remaining until they can reload at the beginning of their next fiscal year. What do you do about the 95% of people who meet your ideal customer criteria but who simply aren’t looking right now or cannot afford to look right now?
2. What’s your offsite experience? Buyer journeys rarely start with your site. More bluntly, there are more people OFF your site than ON your site. Chances are, people don’t even know you or that your amazing solution exists, especially if you are a startup. When the timing is right for them to begin a search for your painkiller, they ask around—from colleagues, online community forums, industry groups, tradeshows, industry analysts, consultants, online reviews, and yes…search engines. Your offsite appearance and reputation is profoundly tied to your success. The most important question in sales is, “What’s in it for me?”. The second most important question is, “Who else says so?”. Are your trust signals signaling trust?
3. What’s your onsite experience? Think of the proverbial dog that chases that parked car. What will it do now that it has caught it? Likewise, let’s assume your timing is right and your customer has found their way to your site. What does your customer experience once they are on your site? Is your site speed slow? Do you look suspiciously underfunded? Or do you look like a modern, vibrant company with stark raving fans that instills confidence?

Are your trust signals signaling trust?

Who would you sooner buy from, this company...?

?

Or this company?

In each of the sections above, I asked rhetorical questions about building your awareness and reputation with people before they need you and your solutions—and about reinforcing their confidence in trusting you with solving their pain. We often tell ourselves in business that we are more rational than ‘those’ consumers in their purchase decision-making. And yet we are those same consumers. The difference is for higher dollar enterprise software, we have buying teams with procurement checklists and ROI expectations. Those teams need to be shown the quantitative payoff of their decision and to be satisfied that they have minimized the stated and unstated risks of doing business with you and your previously unknown solution.

?Somewhere along the way, brand became a four-letter word

The term for all that awareness, reputation, trust, and confidence-building is ‘brand’. When we disparage brand, we damage demand. Companies that invest (enough, but not too much) in their brand enjoy a lower customer acquisition cost, higher conversion rates, and shorter sales cycles—music to the ears of any performance marketer. Somewhere along the way, brand became a four-letter word—likely the result of unaccountable marketers who were disconnected from sales. But we marketers should do a better job of marketing ‘brand’ as essential to performance marketing and pipeline building. The yin to your yang!

Be careful what you (or your performance marketers) wish for. If performance marketing wins too much of the budget battle vs their counterparts in brand, both marketing and sales suffer.