The hottest new performance marketing strategy? Strong branding.
As professional services firms embrace performance marketing, a new reality is setting in: rising costs, declining engagement, murky attribution, and AI-generated noise are making it harder and more expensive to compete.
In this environment, the lever that can improve results across your entire funnel isn’t a campaign tweak. It’s your branding.
Brand isn’t just about building long-term equity (though that matters). It’s the multiplier that makes every part of your marketing engine better for your business. Marketers who get this aren’t choosing between brand and performance. They’re using brand to perform.
The rise—and limits—of performance marketing
Performance marketing took over for good reason. It’s easy to test, easy to track, and satisfies the pressure for clear ROI via tidy dashboards. But the landscape is shifting fast.
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are rising, while engagement rates continue to decline. (HubSpot State of Marketing)
- Attribution is murkier than ever thanks to cookie deprecation and privacy changes. (Think with Google)
- Search and organic strategies are increasingly choked out by genAI sludge. (Financial Times)
- Buying behavior is retreating to “dark social” and AI-powered search environments, far outside the reach of tracking pixels and CRMs. (The Verge)
As Vegenski explains in The Death of Traditional Attribution, as much as 80% of B2B buying activity happens off-platform. For professional services firms selling trust and expertise, this “invisible funnel” has always been where reputations are built and deals are made. Trust, expertise, and reputation drive decisions—and brand is how you communicate and reinforce all three.
Dazzled by the quantitative aspects of performance marketing’s shiny tools, marketers lost the branding thread for a minute. Now, the pendulum is swinging back.
The measurable case for brand
Strong branding doesn’t replace performance marketing. It makes it more efficient. When your brand is clear, differentiated, and consistent, you improve prospects’ mental availability, speed up buying decisions, and reduce friction across your sales and marketing teams.
And because performance marketing has pushed measurement sophistication forward, these effects are now more visible. Early signals like branded search volume, direct traffic, and time on site show how your market awareness and relevance are growing. These gains translate into real business outcomes: faster pipeline velocity, lower CAC trendlines, stronger lead quality, and better conversion rates.
Emerging research backs this up:
- LinkedIn’s B2B Institute shows that strong brands improve mental availability and purchasing ease, ultimately lowering CAC over time via conversion efficiency.
- Gartner found strategic rebrands can drive 10 – 20% increases in brand awareness and 10 – 15% improvements in win rates within the first year.
- Harvard Business Review found that 62% of companies actively measuring brand performance report stronger sales/marketing alignment and improved pipeline conversion.
At Thinkso, we see firsthand how brand investments compound for our clients. An investment firm tripled AUM within two years of us renaming and rebranding them; after a rebrand, a regional law firm sustained record-breaking revenue growth year-over-year for a decade and counting.
Building a brand that performs
What we call brand—your verbal and visual identity, messaging architecture, core digital presence, reputation, and brand voice—is not spend-dependent, but asset-based. And like any well-maintained asset, its value compounds.
Strong branding doesn’t just move the needle once, it moves it steadily. When paid campaigns end and conversations go offline, brand is what keeps you in the conversation.
So, what defines a strong, high-performing brand? A strong brand…
- Feels both immediate and enduring.
- Is grounded in clear, differentiated positioning that cuts through the noise.
- Shows up with visual and verbal consistency that makes your firm instantly recognizable, even in contexts you can’t control.
- Is powered by modular design and structured content systems that scale across every touchpoint, from pitch decks to podcast interviews—and supercharge AI use.
- And most importantly, it aligns every team—marketing, business development, leadership, product, HR—behind a unified, driving idea that becomes your competitive advantage.
That kind of brand doesn’t happen by luck or magic. It takes discipline, advocacy, and someone (whether internal or external) committed to keeping the brand flame burning across all the daily demands and deliverables.
Smart marketers know brand and performance aren’t in conflict, but complementary. If your marketing isn’t delivering like it used to, it’s worth asking whether your branding is doing its job.
Looking to strengthen your brand? For nearly 20 years, Thinkso has been helping firms clarify and operationalize their brands to drive real business outcomes.