The ROI of brand building: Why investing in your brand pays off

These days, it can feel like brand building gets a raw deal. Out there in the crowded B2B landscape, performance marketing can often steal the spotlight, upstaging brand-building activities when these are often the real key to long-term growth.  

The trouble is, while performance campaigns are great for driving immediate results, it’s brand that underpins lasting commercial growth. Too many people spend untold resources on complex programs desperately trying to find the 5% of people who are in-market at any given moment, and convert them. That’s not a growth strategy, it’s an optimisation strategy.  

That’s not to say performance marketing isn’t important – its role within a broad customer acquisition strategy is clear – but it’s your brand that plays into the human psychology behind how B2B buyers make decisions, targeting 100% of your audience to become a familiar and memorable brand. Planting a seed in the potential buyer’s mind that will grow to make your business the go-to choice once they’re ready to purchase. Generally, people think of up to three brands when beginning a strategic B2B purchasing journey, and the data shows that the majority of the time it’s one of these brands that tends to win.  

So how do you move towards becoming one of the three? What ensures you are front-of-mind and on that initial shortlist? What exactly are brand-building marketing activities and why are they so important? How should you budget for them – and most crucially – how do you measure their success?  

Let’s break it down…

What are brand-building marketing activities?

We’re simply talking about activities primarily focused on creating a strong, memorable presence in the mind of your target audience – one that resonates emotionally as well as rationally. Such activities will not be directly tied to short-term sales. Instead, they’ll be crucial for building brand recognition, familiarity, trust, and loyalty, over time and naturally bring more people through your door over the long-term. 

This means blending clear positioning and high-impact creative ideas that grab attention with go-to-market strategies that amplify their reach, sustain engagement, and leave a lasting impression. While digital media remains central to brand-building campaigns, traditional channels such as out-of-home, sponsorships, events, print, and even TV extend visibility and deliver significant impact, remaining highly relevant even in B2B contexts. 

• In short, brand building is about making your brand relevant and unforgettable, and not about driving immediate customer transactions.

Why is an unforgettable brand important?

In any B2B market, building equity into your brand is essential for long-term growth. Brand-building campaigns enhance: 

1. Brand recall: ensuring your brand is one of the first that comes to mind when a need arises. 
2. Trust and credibility: building a perception of familiarity, reliability and quality. 
3. Market leadership: positioning your brand as a leading option within your niche (even if it isn’t!) 

Together, these enhancements can move your business from being just another option, to the brand that’s top-of-mind and the default choice. Even in a highly competitive market, the stronger your brand presence, the more likely prospects are, psychologically, to favour your offering first. It’s about affecting the way audiences subconsciously feel about you, as well as what they think about you.  

How much should I invest in brand-building?

There’s always a need to balance strategy, creative and media spend. Obviously, budgets differ from business to business. Much will depend on your growth targets, revenues, and general appetite for investing in marketing. Plus, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to know that generally, the more you spend relative to your competition, the greater your brand impact and share of voice in the market (the two critical components that underpin growth).  

However, when it comes to brand building, there is a basic formula for finding the right budget balance between creative development and media spend. 

The best practice ratio for brand building campaigns:

• 60-70% media spend: to ensure your message reaches as many people as possible in the most effective formats that bring the best out in your creative. 
• 30-40% creative spend: to ensure that the underlying positioning, creative idea and messages are captivating, influential, and memorable. 

And here’s why this ratio works:

• Brand-building campaigns: since the whole point is to make a lasting impact, investing more in out-and-out creativity (or creative quality) to achieve this is crucial. There’s a lot of noise in the B2B landscape, so your positioning needs to be spot on and the creative needs to be unignorable
• Maximising the effectiveness of media spend: To optimise the effectiveness of your media spend, creative investment is essential. An integrated media strategy is pointless if the messaging and creative isn’t up to scratch—no matter how advanced your targeting, it won’t deliver meaningful results. 
• Longevity and reusability: If your creative assets have a long shelf life, investing more in brand content upfront means you can continue to benefit from them over the long-term, enhancing the value and return that you receive for the original investment in creativity.  
• There’s oodles of research on this subject, but it all points to adopting a balanced approach to maximise both reach and creative effectiveness when allocating budgets. One prime example comes from a BCG and Google report, this revealed that over time, mature brand-driven strategies yield significantly higher return on marketing investment (ROMI), compared to purely performance-driven efforts. As does every other study conducted on this subject.  

In contrast, short-term performance marketing campaigns usually lean towards 80% – 90% media spend, as the goal is less about creative impact and more about identifying businesses that are already in-market, and converting them efficiently. However, this is an optimisation strategy, not a growth strategy – one of the biggest misconceptions in B2B marketing. Importantly, demand generation and performance marketing activity will always be most effective when there is existing, strong brand familiarity and credibility to build upon. 

What does positive ROMI look like when investing in brand?

Measuring the return on marketing investment from brand-building activities is notoriously challenging. That’s because the effects are felt over the long-term and less instantly than lower-funnel tactics. Unlike performance marketing, where conversions and revenue are directly trackable, brand-building impacts are often perceptual, gradual, and compounding. And while brand campaigns undoubtedly enhance the effectiveness of performance tactics, this impact is often mistakenly credited to lower-funnel communication optimisations. 

However, below are some of the methods and metrics you should employ to measure success, and gauge whether you’re making an impression or not. 

• Brand awareness:
  • Branded search volume: see how many people are searching for your brand. You can do this with traditional tools that analyse Google searches, but there are also emerging tools like Chatbeat that measure how effectively you appear for AI searches.
  • Share of voice: monitor your brand’s presence relative to competitors, which is a very clear indicator of increasing market share when SOV is higher that SOM.
  • Social listening: monitor your social media channels for mentions of your brand, or when someone offers feedback.
• Brand engagement:
  • Website traffic and engagement: monitor changes in organic and direct visit trend data and how long visitors are spending on your site
  • Content interactions: track how audiences engage with brand-focused content on social media and your website.
• Brand demand:
  • Attributable leads: look for growth in leads, particularly in acquisition trends that surpass previous benchmarks, as these are strong indicators of success. This could result directly from the campaign or reflect a general uptick in new leads attributable to brand-building efforts.
  • Influenced pipeline: benchmark your historical pipeline volume so you can identify a fuller sales funnel compared to before brand-building activities began, clearly linking it to heightened brand awareness.
  • Attributed revenue: Similarly, benchmark historical revenue data to identify any upward trends that can be attributed to the initiation of brand activities.

While it’s possible to directly link some leads and sales conversions to brand-building campaigns using traditional analytics, the real power of brand-driven growth shines when you visualise the results. Try plotting commercial trend data on graphs and overlaying the initiation of brand activity—you’ll be amazed at what you see! 

What is a reasonable expected return?

In the world of B2B, the decision-making process can be longer and more complex than in B2C. So your brand-building campaign should aim for a positive, long-term ROMI with a model that combines brand awareness, brand engagement, and brand demand metrics. Trend data is core to this and best way to prove ROI. The reality is, building brand relationships and nurturing prospects takes time. 

The good news, however, is that commitment to a long-term investment in brand building has a compounding effect. In other words, by establishing a strong and consistent brand presence, you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of any future media spend, ultimately leading to higher levels of in-market impact. In short, as brand equity rises, the cost of acquiring new customers reduces, and existing customers become more loyal, further improving ROMI over time. 

What is the compounding effect of brand investment?

Building brands is like planting seeds: you’ll see nothing overnight, but careful watering and nurturing will result in strong, sustained growth. Likewise, the more you invest in creating awareness and positive associations now, the stronger and more enduring your brand will become. Over time, this will bloom into: 

• Increased conversion rates: customers are more likely to choose familiar, trusted brands. 
• Lower cost per acquisition (CPA): the marketing spend needed to win business will be smaller. 
• Greater media efficiency: campaigns now perform better because audiences are already aware and positively predisposed. 
• Easier sales conversations: by creating familiarity and trust in the brand, you make it easier for sales teams to convert more prospects into customers and shorten sales cycles.

Investing in brand building has been proven to significantly enhance ROMI over time – and there are many notable studies supporting this. Here’s some further reading that could help:​ 

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Google’s Joint Survey: this found that companies with advanced brand marketing capabilities experienced a ROMI increase of approximately 46% compared to less mature counterparts. ​BCG Global 

Kantar and WARC’s Research on Creative Quality: a report that showed high-quality, creative ads can generate over four times more profit than less creative ads, underscoring the financial benefits of investing in strong brand-building initiatives. ​Kantar 

The Multiplier Effect Report: according to this, integrating brand and performance marketing can boost ROI by 25% to 100%, with an average increase of 90%. The report recommends allocating 40-60% of marketing budgets to brand marketing to achieve this balance. ​The Australian 

Collectively, these studies (which are just a small selection) deliver a powerful demonstration of the way a strategic investment in brand building could not only enhance you market presence, but also lead to measurable financial benefits.