Why We Chose Brand When Everyone Else Chased Leads

For a long time, B2B marketing has focused on the bottom of the funnel, where lead numbers and form fills run the show. It’s where the powers that be want your budgets to go, and they’re dead wrong for it.

The big shift

In early 2024, we made a very deliberate decision to change our marketing strategy at Basis. We chose to invest much more heavily in brand, especially through creative storytelling, and shifted nearly 80 percent of our marketing budget toward awareness media.

Yes, 80 percent.

That investment included channels like CTV, digital out-of-home, hyperlocal display, direct mail, and industry events. These are places where we could show up more immersively and meet our ICPs where they already were, instead of only when they were actively researching vendors.

We knew going in that there would be a trade-off. If you pull budget out of lower-funnel tactics, you’re going to see fewer inbound leads. And we did. Lead volume dropped by almost 40 percent year over year.

However, lead quality improved significantly: our conversion rate increased by nearly 45%, indicating stronger alignment with our target audience and greater potential for pipeline impact.  

Comparing 2025 to 2023, the year prior to our strategy change, we saw a 59% increase in inbound marketing-generated pipeline dollars, a 62% increase in marketing-generated revenue, and a 28% increase in average deal size for closed-won opportunities driven by marketing efforts.

Turns out that all it took for us to improve our performance metrics was spending less money on them. Funny, that.

Now, nobody should think that we started investing in the top of the funnel without intending to improve revenue. What surprised us, however, was the immediacy. Brand and awareness are typically treated as part of the long game, which can be true, but that long game might actually be much shorter than you currently think.

Brand matters more than B2B admits

Most B2B buyers are not in-market at any given moment. When they do enter the market, they come packing preferences and opinions. That means that if you’re not in the initial consideration set when your buying committee comes together to choose a new vendor, you simply won’t be picked.

The truth is that through repeated exposure, buyers inherently trust some companies more than others, no matter how much marketers like to harp on B2B buyers being purely “rational” actors. Your best whitepaper and demo won’t change that. 

But admitting that brand strongly influences pipeline also means you have to put more effort into attribution and accepting that results won’t come through in “real time.” It’s work, and it’s not easy, which can be off-putting.

This may be a good moment to acknowledge that we’re also operating in a pretty uncertain environment. Economic pressure, political pressure, cultural pressure, you name it. Instinct, understandably, tells many to pull back, play it safe, and focus only on what feels immediately measurable.

However, it's the brands that stay visible during uncertain times that come out stronger on the other side. Maybe even the ones that come out at all. When attention is cheaper, and your competition is quieter, the impressions you make last longer and hit harder. After all, people want something to orient by.

Get it right: research, creative, targeting, and measurement

Shifting your advertising strategy away from the bottom of the funnel doesn’t mean you should loosen up on data-driven rigor. At Basis, we commissioned a survey of our ICP buyers to understand how we ranked on awareness, favorability, and perception within our competitive set. We learned that we were competing with massive names like Google and Amazon, and that we weren’t, in fact, ranking well.

It was clear we weren’t going to win by outspending. To us, the data affirmed that we would have to win by being more memorable and by shifting our marketing spend accordingly.

Most B2B advertising tends to look very similar. Clean, professional, safe, but also forgettable. Wanting to stand out led to our “Golden Age” campaign. It wasn’t a rebrand; we didn’t change our logo or colors, but we did change how we told our story.

The creative leaned into nostalgia and emotion. It focused on the impact of the product, not just the features, and was specifically designed to feel different enough that people actually remembered us. We also made sure it showed up consistently in places that matter to our audience, because brand building doesn’t mean mass reach, just intentional reach.

Lastly, we made sure not to stop measuring. Had things dropped off downstream, we would have noticed and known where it came from. Instead, pipeline and conversion metrics picked up, and we were able to point to what was driving those wins.

All that said, you do need to take that initial leap of faith. The alternative, which I see many marketers fall into, is optimizing endlessly for lead volume while slowly starving the top of the funnel. That works for a while. Then it doesn’t.

Time to hit restart

Performance marketing still has a role in the B2B space, so I’m not saying you should abandon it. But you should stop treating it as the entire strategy.

Brand feeds performance; it always has. Marketers understood this intuitively for decades, only to collectively forget once digital started dominating boardroom discussions. I’d suggest you don’t forget again. With our latest numbers speaking so clearly, I certainly won’t.