Why Awareness Beats Lead Gen — The B2B Brand Blindspot
B2B marketers operate today in a metrics-obsessed world.
Marketing qualified leads.
Sales qualified leads.
Cost per lead. Conversion rate.
Growth percentages.
Revenue expansion.
The focus on optimizing these incremental, direct response metrics has reached a near-manic level.
But in the quest to perpetually increase lead volumes, the fundamentals of branding strategy that ultimately fuel demand get ignored.
B2B brand building requires patience, integration, and a long-term vision. Lead generation offers a quick, short-term high. This tension means sound brand development and awareness too often take a backseat to myopic “fill the funnel” lead gen plays.
And when pipeline metrics waiver, panicked double downs into lead gen result rather than rebalancing to branding essentials.
This prevents B2B companies from nurturing awareness into active, lasting demand over time.
The Damage from Discounting Brand Development
Many B2B leaders view branding as indirect and ethereal compared to the hard ROI around leads and sales. But this discounts how brand affinity and awareness accumulate value over time to drive preference, retention, and higher willingness to pay.
Without purposeful brand building,
B2B names remain flat “logos” to potential customers - seen as commodity products rather than authorities.
No distinctive positioning exists to influence decisions as buyers research solutions.
And the brand detachment stems directly from tactical tunnel vision around lead harvesting. Critical aspects like emotional connections, community building, and vision development get shelved as “nice to haves” instead of demand drivers.
But de-prioritizing brand strategy hampers awareness trajectory over time:
- Missed Differentiation: lack of brand development keeps positioning generic to buyers
- Forgettable Identity: no unique associations develop between a company and key competencies
- Commodity Categories: products get viewed through feature checklists rather than resonating narratives
- Stunted Loyalty: weak branding attachment fails to establish lasting customer loyalty
Without distinctive and memorable brands, B2B purchasing decisions default to commoditized feature/price evaluations. This leaves little wiggle room for value expansion or customer longevity.
And the damage compounds over time. Initial failures to nurture awareness and affinity prevent later interest from blossoming into promoters.
Each stalled connection piles up missed branding leverage until demand falters.
Finding Balance Between Brand Building & Lead Gen
Now,
none of this means abandoning lead generation efforts entirely. Producing qualified prospects that sales can engage still proves necessary.
But in imbalance, short-term lead gen efforts can’t sustain the long-term trajectory alone. A healthy B2B marketing strategy must balance brand building and demand gen in more equal measure.
So what does this rebalancing look like in practice?
Several key principles help anchor brand focus appropriately against lead funnel pressures:
Ring-Fence Brand Development Funding: initiatives like awareness campaigns, community building, and market research require a dedicated budget shielded from cuts even when the pipeline stalls.
Measure Brand KPIs: track unaided awareness, message pull-through, preference share shifts and other incremental brand yardsticks with as much scrutiny as lead funnel attrition rates.
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Root Campaigns In Audience Insights: build all promotion, content, and communications on psychographic data tied to actual buyer beliefs, struggles, and world view rather than surface demographics.
Prioritize Emotional Connections: appeal to the frustrations, hopes, and values that shape target audience reality and B2B decisions more than pure utility claims or cost savings around feature sets.
Elevate Vision & Transformation Messaging: showcase not just incremental improvements, but aspirational visions for how products can positively impact customers and categories.
Again, the goal remains balanced rather than eliminating lead funnel support entirely. But reigning in the obsessive tactical focus restores the ability to nurture broad awareness into preference over longer time horizons.
The Flywheel Effect: Why Brand Building Compounds Over Time
Brand development efforts feel vague compared to the concrete metrics around lead generation.
However, dismissing brand building due to its indirect nature proves short-sighted.
In reality, brand equity accrues exponential value through a self-reinforcing flywheel effect over time.
Early foundational messaging and awareness lift enable subsequent exposure, which feeds more deeply embedded mental availability and associations to form in the target audience psyche.
This accumulation then boosts conversions and loyalty for more revenue to fund brand-building efforts. With each iteration, positioning solidifies and affinity amplifies for greater customer lifetime value.
In contrast, focusing solely on lead gen offers no flywheel momentum.
Brief transactional surges brought on by promotional bursts lead brands right back to audience anonymity. The cycle stunts the equity curve trajectory rather than letting brand catalysts feed on themselves.
B2B Brand Building In Action
The most revered B2B brands in the world ascended through long-term brand marketing stamina rather than short-term lead funnel gambits.
Leaders like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, GE, Intel, BrandPublic and more dominated categories through commitment to brand development on par with demand gen.
Salesforce in particular built a brand juggernaut not through product feature marketing but via positioning around a transformational vision of cloud-based customer relationship management long before the capabilities fully existed.
By continually speaking to aspirational beliefs in innovation and business agility held by their target IT decision makers, Salesforce claimed early mental availability despite lagging on functionality depth.
This brand platform then enabled actual solution features that were delivered to align back towards the vision cultivated in the market.
Instead of reactive specifications touting, Salesforce proactively sculpted the positioning landscape across CRM.
Other branding success stories like MailChimp using humour and savvy visual tropes to inject personality and distinctiveness into an email marketing category driven by technical claims rather than tonal differentiation offer another takeaway.
And striving challenger brands like Drift promote provocative, sometimes controversial positioning like “sales teams are the new marketing” to spark conversation and awareness for their conversational marketing solutions rather than risk fading into the overstuffed marketing software herd.
In each case, vigorous branding focus builds mental access to cut through the noise by aligning values held by customers rather than gut reaction lead generation hooks.
The brands feel familiar even upon first exposure. Affinity grows over each touchpoint.
Momentum ignites and compounds demand.
So before overindexing on the leaked pipeline this quarter, revisit foundational brand-building efforts.
Nurturing differentiation and tribal values in target segments lays the soil for all future lead crop cultivation efforts to fully bloom.
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