Build a B2B Marketing Strategy Around Brand and Bookings
B2B marketing attribution pushes teams to chase what they can track. I get why. Marketers want to prove they matter. Executives want numbers to back up every decision. But almost nobody asks what that obsession is costing the business.
I’ve been on both sides. At Directive, I spent $275,000 a month on LinkedIn ads slinging gift cards for intro calls. I understand direct response. We’ve built a lot of our business on performance marketing.
But when every dollar has to tie back to an MQL, brand gets left behind. You end up pouring money into channels that claim credit for demand, while starving the work that actually creates it.
The Problem With Chasing Perfect Attribution
Attribution models assign credit to marketing touchpoints. The problem is when that model decides where every dollar goes.
Brand ads, videos, community sponsorships, and top-of-funnel content rarely give you a straight line from impression to closed deal. That makes them tough to defend when finance wants to know what every campaign delivered.
So you keep funding the campaigns with the cleanest reporting. Meanwhile, you’re not spending enough to tell your audience why they should care.
That’s the gap I see in B2B demand gen. Companies spend big to capture interest, but they don’t invest enough in building awareness or preference. Then they wonder why growth stalls.
You can keep tweaking your attribution model. But a prettier report won’t fix a strategy that isn’t creating enough demand.
Why We Paused Our Gift Card Motion
Pausing our gift card motion was one of the hardest decisions I’ve made.
Those campaigns drove a lot of Directive’s revenue. This was a major part of how we generated business for our performance division. Turning it off meant walking away from something we knew how to run and measure.
We shifted into brand ads, videos, and top-of-funnel content. I knew we couldn’t tie every dollar back to revenue. I also knew that would make it harder to keep the budget when the pressure to prove ROI hit.
But we asked a different question. What if marketing’s real job was to drive total bookings?
We went from $5 million in new business in Q1 to almost $8 million in Q3, during the middle of summer.
Growing bookings is part of the equation. Turning that growth into profit is what helps increase your agency’s valuation.
We have a great team, strong positioning, and great clients. Those things matter. But we also changed our internal go-to-market motion and gave ourselves room to invest in things we couldn’t directly attribute.
Where We Moved the Budget
Directive has a real internal go-to-market engine. When we made this shift, we had six full-time marketers and four in sales, all backed by a real budget.
We moved the vast majority of our capital toward:
- Meta advertising.
- Connected TV.
- Community sponsorships.
- Newsletter sponsorships.
- Webinars.
We also invested in brand videos and top-of-funnel marketing that helped our audience understand who we are and why they should work with us. That becomes even more important when you’re adding new services. Your buyers need to know what else you can help them solve.
We still run Google Ads. We still run LinkedIn ads. We still use direct response.
The brand vs. performance marketing conversation gets too abstract. We’re just making a practical budget decision. Keep capturing the demand that’s already there, but put more into building the demand you want next quarter.
Organic search and LLMs help us capture in-market interest. Brand marketing gives people a reason to look for us in the first place.
Get Finance Aligned Around Bookings
You can’t make this shift if marketing, leadership, and finance measure success differently.
If the exec team wants brand growth but finance needs direct attribution for every campaign, you’ll end up right back where you started. The easiest campaigns to measure will keep winning the budget.
Get everyone aligned on the business outcome. Marketing needs to drive bookings.
My operating standard is simple. If bookings are going up, marketing is working. If bookings are going down, we need to fix it.
That changes what you prioritize. Now you can focus on increasing average order value, moving the brand upmarket, and lowering customer acquisition cost. You can build demand gen around the business you actually want.
The conversation shifts. Are we growing? Are we winning the right customers? Are we making it easier for buyers to choose us?
Build the Brand Buyers Want to Choose
I think the B2B winners will be the companies with strong brands, LLM visibility, and real buyer preference.
Being discoverable matters. Giving people a reason to want to work with you matters just as much. Then you need a sales process that turns that interest into signed business.
Invest in explaining what you do and why your audience should care. Build your direct traffic. Improve your visibility across LLMs. Keep investing in top-of-funnel ads while you keep capturing demand through organic search and AI discovery.
If you’re an agency owner, look at where your budget actually goes. Are you building future demand, or just asking the same performance campaigns to carry every quarter?
Connect with me on LinkedIn or explore Agency Academy’s coaching offers to help you build your agency’s growth strategy.
