Why Growth-Stage Companies Keep Underestimating the Impact of Brand Awareness

Your brand budget is usually the first thing that gets cut. Not because it doesn’t work, just because it’s harder to defend. Demand generation produces metrics almost immediately, whereas brand is hard to measure. The problem is that demand gen and brand should not be seen in opposition with different goals. Brand fuels demand. Understanding the impact of brand awareness on pipeline, deal size, and win rate is what separates companies that invest wisely from those that continue to treat it as optional.

Most marketing leaders already know they should invest more in brand. They don’t underinvest because they disagree with the research. They underinvest because they’re judged on quarterly pipeline, not what happens 12 to 18 months from now.

That’s why so many growth-stage B2B companies end up spending 60 to 80% of their marketing budget chasing the same small group of buyers who are actively in market.

If you read the first article in this series, you’ll remember the key finding: buyers usually create a shortlist before they ever speak to a salesperson. And they buy from that list 95% of the time. If your company isn’t already familiar to the buyer, you’re ignored.

Brand awareness means being the company buyers think of first before a formal evaluation begins.

The Benchmark Almost Everyone Knows But Ignores

Les Binet and Peter Field spent years analyzing marketing effectiveness. Their original recommendation – allocating 60% of marketing investment to brand building and 40% to activation – became one of the most influential ideas in modern marketing.

That research focused largely on consumer brands. When they later partnered with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, they found that B2B companies should lean more heavily toward activation, but still invest far more in brand than most do today. Their research pointed to an optimal split of roughly 46% brand and 54% lead gen.

Early-stage startups still finding product-market fit should prioritize demand generation. They are fighting for survival. But as soon as possible, certainly at Series B and beyond, they need to lift their eyes to the horizon and think longer term. While marketers know this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of brand as something they’ll get to once the pipeline problems are solved. The problem is that pipeline issues are never solved, often because of underinvestment in the brand! 

Activation captures demand that already exists. Brand creates demand that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

Most Growth Companies Don’t Spend Enough On Brand

LinkedIn’s B2B benchmark puts brand spend at around 30% of total marketing budget, but that includes large enterprises with mature marketing organizations. Among venture-backed technology companies, brand awareness budget often accounts for 10-20%. Remember, the target is roughly 46%.

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimate that only around 5% of buyers are actively in market at any given time. That stat gets bandied about, but even if it is five times that, companies are directing the majority of their budget toward the smallest part of the market. When that happens, demand generation gets more expensive every quarter. And that means you need more budget to generate those leads, which can lead to a vicious cycle siphoning away brand investment. 

6sense’s 2025 Marketing Spend Report shows demand generation received the largest budget increases in B2B, specifically because the results are immediate and easy to measure. The gap is widening.

Meanwhile, future buyers spend months, sometimes years, becoming familiar with competitors they’ve seen repeatedly while your company stays largely invisible.

Brand doesn’t compete with demand generation. It makes demand generation more effective because buyers are measurably more likely to respond to outreach from companies they already recognize.

A Strong Brand Can Increase Deal Value

The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report of 3,500 decision-makers shows brand changing the commercial terms of the deals you win, not just whether you’re considered.

• 60% of B2B decision-makers say they’ll pay a premium to work with organizations that produce strong thought leadership.
• 86% say they’d invite a company to an RFP based on thought leadership alone.
  
• 70% of C-suite leaders say a competitor’s thought leadership made them question whether to keep working with their current supplier.

Brand isn’t just how you get on the shortlist. It’s how competitors knock you off the list.

The Real Problem Is Incentives

Most CMOs understand the long-term value of brand investment. Unfortunately, the payoff often arrives after they’re gone.

Forrester found that B2B marketing leaders have the shortest average tenure of any business model category. Spencer Stuart’s 2025 research puts the cross-industry CMO figure at around 28 months, the shortest-lived C-suite role of all. In growth-stage B2B tech, it often runs even shorter. We’ve all seen that firsthand – many have lived it!

Brand investment can take 12 to 18 months before its full impact becomes visible. Prioritizing programs that show results this quarter isn’t a failure of judgment. CMOs aren’t planning to swap jobs every 18-24 months; they are just under huge pressure, so investing accordingly.

6sense’s analysis found that companies under financial pressure (which is everyone these days) cut the brand awareness budget disproportionately relative to demand spend. A weaker brand makes future pipeline harder to generate, creating more budget pressure. 

Brand Is Harder to Measure, Not Impossible

The argument against brand is usually just because it is hard to measure. But the signals are there.

Share of search is one of the strongest. Research from Les Binet and the IPA found that a company’s share of branded searches within its category predicted its market share with 83% accuracy, and that changes in search share preceded revenue shifts by months. Track it monthly and you have an early warning signal before the market share consequences arrive.

First-touch and assisted conversion analysis can map brand touchpoints back to eventual deals – the press article that brought someone to your website six months before they requested a demo, the podcast the buying committee mentioned on the discovery call. Attribution is never clean, but that kind of directional evidence can help build a credible case for investment.

GEO visibility is probably the most pressing new metric for AI companies right now. 6sense’s 2025 research found that 94% of B2B buyers use large language models at some point in their purchase journey. We’ve written about how to measure brand awareness in more detail here.

Making the Business Case

“We need more awareness” is not a financial argument, but the cost of lost opportunity is. If your close rate from inbound leads where the buyer already knows your name is materially higher than from cold outreach (and it almost always is), the revenue value of that recognition at scale is calculable.

Insight Partners’ 2025 B2B Pipeline Generation Survey found that 76% of business leaders say strong brand awareness positively impacts pipeline, ranking just behind AI tools as the top growth factor. The Edelman research adds a pricing dimension: 60% of decision-makers will pay a premium to work with a brand they already trust.

There’s a strong link between brand and pipeline, and quantifying the impact of brand awareness on deal value is how you turn “we need more awareness” into a number a CFO will approve. 

The Bottom Line

The Binet and Field research is a benchmark, not a rule. But it points to a consistent mistake. Growth-stage tech companies are allocating 10 to 20% of their marketing budget to brand, even though the evidence suggests it should be closer to 46%.

Companies that invest in their brand are building recognition with the 95% of buyers who aren’t in market yet. By the time those buyers are ready to evaluate, their shortlists are already forming, and companies they’ve never heard of aren’t on them.

You can keep optimizing for the 5% that are ready to buy today. Or you can start building preference with the 95% who aren’t, and see the full impact of brand awareness on your pipeline, deal size, and growth over the next 12 to 18 months.

For help building brand awareness through PR, SEO/GEO, paid media and social media – please reach out to us here.