From Fluff to Funnel: Why Brand Advertising Deserves a Second Look

For years, brand advertising in B2B marketing has been caught in an identity crisis. On one hand, brand is universally acknowledged as the long-term engine of trust, preference, and market awareness. On the other hand, it’s been notoriously hard to measure, leading many performance-driven marketers to view brand spend with skepticism, especially when pipeline pressure mounts.

As go-to-market (GTM) teams are pushed to do more with less, the question isn’t whether brand matters—it’s whether it can prove its value.

The B2B Brand Dilemma

In most B2B orgs, the brand lives in the shadows of performance. Why? Because performance metrics are immediate. You run a campaign, get clicks, generate form fills, and see the return within a quarter.

Brand, however, operates on a different timescale. It builds mental availability and recall. It seeds trust. It’s the reason a buyer types your company name into Google instead of “best CRM for enterprises.” But when budget reviews come around, sentiment scores and impression counts often don’t hold up in front of the CFO.

This disconnect has created a dangerous tradeoff: B2B teams either invest in brand and struggle to prove impact, or over-index on performance and sacrifice long-term growth.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The New Buying Journey Is Brand-Led

Today’s B2B buyer is self-educating, self-guided, and self-paced. They’re consuming content across LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, peer review sites, and more, often before filling out a form.

In this fragmented landscape, brand is no longer a top-of-funnel luxury. It’s often the first touch and sometimes, the only one before a hand-raiser emerges. The idea of clean, sequential buyer journeys (first email → whitepaper → demo) is outdated. Buyers binge content, lurk anonymously, return through “direct” traffic, and convert on their terms. What moved them? That funny video? That founder podcast? That third retargeting touch? You won’t know if you’re not looking at the full picture.

Why Traditional Attribution Falls Short

Most attribution models are designed for performance campaigns, not brand. First-touch, last-touch, and even linear multi-touch models reward what’s easiest to measure: form fills, clicks, and UTMs. They miss non-click interactions, dark social engagement, and brand-led impressions that nudge a buyer forward—but don’t show up in CRM.

That’s why brand often gets undervalued. If you’re only tracking direct response, you're rewarding the closer, not the influencer. It’s like giving the assist zero credit in a game-winning goal.

Measuring Brand Like a Performance Channel

The good news: measuring brand’s impact is no longer impossible. With the right tools and approach, you can start tying brand campaigns to real pipeline outcomes. Here’s how forward-looking GTM teams are doing it:

1. Outcome-first measurement: Start with meetings booked or opportunities created, then work backwards to analyze all touchpoints.
2. Funnel-stage correlation: Track how brand campaign exposures influence movement across funnel stages, not just the initial touch.
3. Incrementality testing: Use holdout groups to isolate the impact of brand impressions on conversion lift.
4. Integrated data sources: Merge ad platform data with CRM, website behavior, and sales activity for a full-funnel view.

Brand campaigns aren’t just about impressions anymore—it’s about how those impressions change behavior across the journey.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s say you’re running a LinkedIn brand campaign focused on thought leadership content. Traditionally, you might measure success via reach or engagement rate. But a full-funnel approach asks deeper questions:

• Do accounts exposed to this content show increased engagement on your site?
• Are SDRs booking more meetings with those exposed audiences?
• Is your “direct traffic” converting at higher rates after the campaign?

These are signals of brand lift, and when combined, they form a story that’s both strategic and CFO-friendly.

What RevSure Enables

At RevSure, we believe brand and performance shouldn’t be in conflict—they should be connected. Our platform helps GTM teams unify their data to understand how every campaign, brand, or performance is influencing revenue outcomes. With RevSure, marketers can:

• Track brand engagement across social platforms, paid media, and website visits
• Attribute movement across funnel stages to brand impressions and content exposure
• Compare conversion rates between brand-exposed and unexposed cohorts
• Understand which brand efforts are accelerating the pipeline, not just generating buzz

This makes brand advertising a measurable part of pipeline growth—not a wildcard.

A Real-World Example

Take Daniel Henderson, Head of Digital at Glean. He recently shared on LinkedIn how his mindset around brand campaigns changed after analyzing their true impact, not just impressions or clicks, but how they influenced the pipeline.

Using RevSure, his team found that leads who engaged with their LinkedIn brand campaigns converted at 10x the rate. “Direct” traffic wasn’t as direct as it seemed—many of those visitors had been primed by brand content. Daniel’s takeaway was clear: brand wasn’t just influencing awareness—it was accelerating revenue. And once he could track it, he wanted to do more of it.

A New Era of Brand-Driven Performance

Brand campaigns don’t need to be a leap of faith anymore. With the right analytics infrastructure, you can make branding a strategic, measurable part of your GTM engine.

This shift is bigger than just marketing—it’s about aligning how we measure value across the buyer journey. It’s about giving brand the credit it deserves and the scrutiny it needs. When GTM teams can see the full picture, decisions get sharper:

• Budget allocation becomes outcome-driven.
• Campaign planning blends awareness and conversion strategies.
• Sales and marketing alignment improves because everyone sees the same funnel.

Final Thoughts

Brand isn’t soft. It’s just been hard to measure—until now. The teams that win the next decade of B2B marketing will be those who learn to harness brand as a performance lever. Not by guessing, but by tracking, testing, and tying brand to business impact.

It’s time to move past the false choice between brand and performance. You need both. And when measured correctly, they don’t just coexist—they amplify each other.

So if you’ve written off brand as unaccountable, revisit the funnel. The impact is likely there—you just need the right lens to see it. RevSure gives you that lens.

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