Most small and mid-level growth companies should focus marketing efforts to generate leads into the sales funnel, rather than on brand marketing, especially if budget and personnel resources are limited to support marketing efforts. To be clear, brand marketing is not a quick solution to establish a company’s brand, to get media exposure, and bring in new business. Think about your favorite brands, such as Pepsi and Coke, or McDonald’s and Burger King. These big brand companies spent years of investment in creating marketing and advertising campaigns to make you care about their brands, which small companies don’t have the time or money to execute. Brand marketing is a long-term investment.
Newly invested Business to Business cloud-based companies should focus expanding their investments on new hires, new technologies, and marketing campaigns that focus on developing more leads to the top and middle of the sales funnel. By increasing leads and helping to support the sales team in moving the leads more quickly through the pipeline with better conversions in the short-term, will ensure the survival of the company and confidence into marketing. Once marketing can establish that it can help in creating leads and help in the bottom line of the company’s revenues, then confidence will be built to eventually allow marketing to test brand marketing programs.