Brand drives long-term growth & short-term sales

Brand drives long-term growth & short-term sales

Here’s a question most businesses ask: “Should we focus on short-term sales or long-term brand building?”

And the answer? The vast majority of times its ‘short-term sales.’

But it’s the wrong question to ask in the first place. Because a business constantly needs sales. Not just now – the short-term – but also in the future (there’s always the future!) – the long term. So it’s a bit like asking whether you should breathe in or out. You need to do both.

The most effective marketing strategies don’t pit brand and performance against each other – they utilise both, creating a joined up, coherent approach, building for now and the future. Performance captures current demand (but it does so in a small pool). Brand lays the groundwork for future demand, and increases the size of the pool performance fishes in. Ignore brand, and performance struggles.

Brand isn’t a long-term luxury – it supports the now as well

Let’s say you’ve got your sales target to hit this quarter. So you create a campaign – ads (social probably), emails, maybe PPC. Probably offering an incentive to encourage trial (already fighting on price), book a demo, that kind of thing.

But you haven’t been investing steadily and consistently in your brand, so out in the marketplace you’ve been drowned out by competitors, people don’t have much of a reason to choose you, and your name just doesn’t command any kind of pull.

Now imagine running that exact same activity if:

• Your audience already knows your name
• They’ve seen your message over time, not just once, and it’s starting to stick
• They know what you stand for and like how you show up, consistently
• They understand where you add value, and you’ve earned some trust in advance

Think that campaign would perform better?

Yep, me too.

And that’s what the power of a strong, consistent brand can do – even in the short term. Your brand is what wins over your audience, so your sales efforts don’t start cold each time.

As Byron Sharp writes in ‘How Brands Grow’, mental availability – the probability that a buyer will spontaneously recall a brand in a future buying situation – is key to being chosen.

His central point is that consumers generally choose brands that most easily come to mind, especially in moments called Category Entry Points (CEPs) – those occasions that trigger consideration or purchase.

Inherently, humans don’t like friction. We don’t like working for something if we don’t need to. So rather than exhaustively researching every opportunity every time we have a need, we go to our first search engine – our brain – and ask ourselves the question ‘who provides what I need?’

And it’s those brands that have created memory structures lodged in our brains that come to mind first. So off we go looking for them.

If that’s not you and you don’t make the short-list, forget it. You’ve just reduced your chance of making a sale in the already small pool of current demand.

Why do so many SMEs overlook this?

Mainly because brand building doesn’t deliver that instant hit businesses impatiently demand.

Short-term performance marketing gives you fast, visible wins: clicks, leads, conversions. It’s addictive – especially for SMEs under pressure to prove ROI quickly.

Brand on the other hand can feel slow, harder to track, less tangible. And often misunderstood by those businesses that don’t recognise its value as a competitive advantage that elevates you above features, specification & price, in turn distancing you from your competitors.

And it’s the vendors selling ‘Martech Stacks’ that provide ‘real time reporting dashboards’ that are the winners – they’ve sucked all of us in.

So when budgets are tight, brand marketing is often the first thing to go. But that’s a costly mistake – because brand is about shaping how people actually think and feel about your business. And that has a direct line to sales, loyalty, and growth.

Brand makes your activation work harder

Every campaign you run performs better when people:

• Know who you are
• Understand what you do
• Believe what you say

That’s especially true in B2B, where trust, credibility and reputation play a huge role because of considerations such as long lead times, the number of internal decision makers involved, high ticket price, fixed term agreements.

Brand shortens the path to purchase by removing doubt and building familiarity, making decisions easier – ‘no one ever got sacked for buying IBM’ as the saying goes

As Jon Lombardo & Peter Weinberg put it (when they were still at the LinkedIn B2B Institute I think):

“You can’t harvest what you haven’t planted.”

Brand is the planting. Activation through performance marketing is the harvest.

Brand lifts you out of the price war

When customers know your story, what you stand for, and what you can do for them – they feel something about your business. And they stop shopping purely on price. You’re no longer just a commodity. Which means:

• Fewer objections
• Shorter sales cycles
• Higher margins

Brand isn’t fluff. It’s a sales multiplier.

So, what’s the right balance?

Les Binet & Peter Field – two of the UK’s top marketing effectiveness researchers (I know you knew that) – suggest brands aim for:

• 60% brand building (emotional, consistent, memory building)
• 40% activation (buy now, sales-focused messaging)

Now, they acknowledge that figure can vary from sector to sector, from B2C to B2B, and we shouldn’t take it as a rigid split. But most SMEs flip that. Many put the vast majority of their effort (and therefore budget) into performance. And can be left wondering why each quarter can feel like starting from zero again.

Why? Because performance marketing offers a quick hit. You can run a paid ad, see a spike in traffic, and feel like progress is being made. The feedback loop is short and satisfying. It looks like momentum. But once that activity ends, the spike disappears and sales return to pre campaign levels.

With little or no brand foundation in place – no familiarity, no trust, no emotional connection – performance tactics have to work a lot harder. Each campaign can feel like you’re reinventing the wheel. You’re constantly fighting for attention, often at a higher cost per lead, and the leads you generate are less loyal.

Campaigns burn out faster, response rates dip, and cost per acquisition creeps up over time.

Without consistent brand investment, you’re not building anything lasting. You aren’t increasing the size of the pool of people who know about you, want what you sell, and remember you when they need it.

You’re just furiously spinning plates in the hope that next month’s tactic will land better than the last. It’s not sustainable – and it’s one of the biggest reasons small businesses stagnate rather than grow.

Need to rebalance?

You can’t just endlessly chase buyers. You have to build belief before they’re ready to act. And that’s the difference between marketing that spikes… and marketing that scales.

If you’re stuck on the short-term treadmill, brand is your long-term fix. It builds momentum. It makes selling easier. And it works consistently in the background, even when you’re not running a sales activation campaign.

Don’t wait until buyers are ready. Be the brand they already believe in. Brand drives long-term growth & short-term sales

If you’re not sure where to start, let’s chat. And let’s start building a brand that sells.