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Marketing Strategy, Brand Marketing, Performance Marketing Chris Rechtsteiner Marketing Strategy, Brand Marketing, Performance Marketing Chris Rechtsteiner

Brand IS Performance: The Answer to SMB’s Marketing Budget Dilemma

SMB and growth-stage leaders face the same tension: you can’t do everything, so what truly moves the needle?

This piece lays out why brand is performance, how balanced investment boosts ROI, and how AI, testing, and sharper positioning create durable marketing effectiveness.

“With our budget, should we invest in brand or performance?”

“Can we justify brand when every dollar needs to prove short-term (immediate) ROI?”

Different clients, same root question: If we can’t do it all, what’s the smartest way to allocate our marketing spend?

The conundrum lies in a simple fact: It’s not a choice for SMBs and growth-stage organizations.

Brand is Performance. It’s what makes your clicks cheaper, your conversions faster, and your churn lower.

This isn’t opinion. The data validates this, too:

  • Effectiveness analysis shows that over-rotating toward pure performance reduces ROI over time, while a more balanced mix (around 40–60% brand spend) can lift ROI by 25–100%. (WARC, Analytic Partners, System 1, Prophet, Beta.ai)

  • Harvard Business Review is direct: Separating brand and performance “unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both.”

  • Studies across performance channels show that higher brand awareness directly increases ad CTR, branded search volume, and conversion efficiency, a multiplier effect performance dollars alone can’t create.

So, what does this mean? How should smart SMBs and growth-stage companies actually operate?

  • Use performance to test messages, offers, creative, and intent.

  • Use brand to create trust, memory, and meaning, the ingredients that make performance work better.

  • Use AI for efficiency, iteration, and insight, but never for the parts of your story that define who you are.

  • Understand that your “budget question” isn’t brand or performance. It’s brand + performance.

Your competitive edge won’t come from better targeting or more aggressive investment.

It’ll come from sharper positioning, aligned values, and deeper connection to your community.

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