Why brand building is more important than sales.

It’s easy to get seduced by the siren song of sales. Especially in the digital age, when clicks can be measured and leads can be tracked. And when you’ve just started to grow your business, it might seem like sales are all that matter.

LinkedIn’s 2023 B2B Marketing Benchmark report showed that brands would rather spend their money on social media advertising than brand marketing, even though they realise its value to long-term growth.

There’s a problem with this, though. Sales activations bring short-term gains, but then sales return to the previous level almost as soon as the activation finishes. In the words of Peter Drucker, “Long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.”

And that’s where brand marketing comes in. By establishing trust and recognition with your audience, sales build more reliably. People rely on their emotions more than their rational mind most of the time, and if they’re not actually looking to buy something, they block out rational product messages. But emotional messages sneak in under the radar, in something Daniel Kahneman called ‘emotional priming’ - then when it comes to making a rational decision, the conscious mind just rubber-stamps what you’ve already decided. “You like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.”

The best way to grow a business is to combine brand marketing with sales promotion, as outlined by Les Binet and Peter Field in their study covering 30 years of marketing effectiveness data.

By combining short-term and long-term strategies, businesses can get a much bigger ROI than concentrating on sales alone: BCG’s research suggests that companies with strong brands show a 74% higher return on their brand marketing investment, and hold a 46% larger market share, than weaker brands.

The common wisdom is that the right ratio is about 60:40 - 60% of spend on brand building (LinkedIn & social media, sponsored content, thought leadership, content marketing and email marketing) and 40% on sales activation (Google, SEO, Google Ads, retargeting, value proposition, email marketing).

So think like a catamaran, and take a two-pronged approach that gives you more stability and speedier growth.