"Focus without funding": how to bring the brand back into the B2B budget

Elliott advised colleagues to understand marketing's place in the company's commercial ecosystem and to treat brand as part of an integrated strategy rather than in isolation — this will protect it from being 'sacrificed' during cost-cutting. "It's easy and defensible for the CFO to cut the marketing budget specifically. In the near term the impact on revenue is invisible, but over time revenue starts to erode," she warned. Her recommendation is leading indicators across the entire funnel as an early-warning system.

White urged against chasing a 60/40 brand-to-performance target split overnight. "Don't try to do too much, too boldly, too fast," he stressed. Elliott added that sometimes the best strategy is to "keep the light on" and launch small test-and-learn projects by segment, country or region. "Bring evidence and metrics — that's often the key to unlocking budget. When the CFO sees the commercial effect, marketing investment will be recognised as a driver of ROI X. Doing that in one fell swoop is very difficult," she said.

Channels: social media, events, influencers

The leading channel for B2B brand investment is social media (80.8%), followed by events (63.8%) and PR (62.7%). Elliott wondered whether marketers choose social media because of effectiveness or because of its "familiarity and measurability". "Social media is a useful distribution and reach channel, but execution often lacks strategy. B2B brands often publish content output rather than brand building," she noted.

She was surprised by the low interest in broad-reach channels — TV, out-of-home and radio: fewer than one in ten B2B marketers use them. "Being the only brand in a space is sometimes worth far more than being the fortieth or fiftieth in the feed," Elliott observed. White, for his part, called working through social media a "smart way" to invest across the entire funnel: "In B2B we have to tell complex stories. The stakeholder map is complex, so targeting is critical — and social media does this very well."

On events, Elliott recalled the experience of running more than 100 sponsorships, conferences and own events per year. The key to success is treating them as a "system": a single narrative linked to the content strategy, the right clients in the room, clear tasks for sales and ruthless follow-up tracking.

When working with influencers, B2B brands prefer employee ambassadors (19.8%) over big names (6.5%). "Employees can reach people your brand channels may not reach, at a lower cost and with greater trust," Elliott explained. In regulated industries, she advises involving compliance from the very beginning rather than at the approval stage, and creating content jointly with the authors.

LLMs as a "consistency test"

More than half of B2B marketers (56.3%) prioritise brand visibility in LLMs, and 54% invest in generative engine optimisation (GEO). White warned of the threat of "regression to the mean" if marketers drift too far from their distinctive positioning: "You can gain an advantage right now, but caution is needed to preserve differentiation."

For Elliott, appearing in LLM answers is the "ultimate consistency test": for machines to cite the brand, you need to "be genuinely famous among humans". "For years we've been banging on about the boring discipline of using the same distinctive assets everywhere. That consistency turns out to be the best GEO strategy," she noted. One of the companies she advises has launched monthly prompt audits: it tracks buyer questions, feeds them into the major models and records how the brand is represented in them.

White called LLMs an "acid test" of distinctiveness and consistency: "We're talking about relevance, consideration, trust, reputation — especially in B2B with its multi-stakeholder, long decision processes. We're not just talking about reach from advertising."

Emotional rationalism

Most B2B marketers (85.8%) consider emotional storytelling the key to effective brand building — second only to strong positioning and differentiation (88%). Elliott described the approach as "emotional rationalism": "Often the emotion you need to lean on is the emotion of decision risk. How do you radiate confidence? How do you provide reassurance? How do you think about reputation and trust?" White added that it's worth first defining the "emotional distinctiveness" at the core of the brand — this then frees marketers up for creative experiments.