You can't do marketing without branding. Period.

Increasingly, I am working with a lot of skeptical clients. It’s my own fault - I decided that lawyers, people in finance, and healthcare professionals could be good clients for me. And they are, but selling to them has its own special twist.

What I could have anticipated, but didn’t really think through, is that these are skeptical, analytical people. They’re not super trusting. They like to see proof and evidence to understand value. They’re not big on leaps of faith. They’re also smart and driven and don’t take bullshit. I like them.

But this mindset has implications for how I sell my services. They want to see proof of the value of what I do. Sometimes, this is easier said than done.

• When it comes to marketing, where I’m always measuring outcomes, this is ok. I like to have the numbers and show the evidence.

• When it comes to brand work, particularly brand strategy, communicating the value of what I do to a potential client is harder.

By brand strategy, I mean the essential work of identifying who you are, who your audience is, what they want from you, and what makes you special to them. Super standard, never changes.

Why is the value of brand strategy hard to talk about?

It’s hard because:

1. I can’t show you what I did for someone else: I can’t show you someone else’s brand strategy deck. That’s their secret sauce. I did once redact a deck and sent it to a client with just the headings so they would feel comfortable. This helps people who like tangibility.

2. I don’t really have numbers on the difference between a strong brand and a weak brand when it comes to the bottom line. There are brand measurement tools out there, but they tend to only be used by the big boys and are very expensive. But I know from working with clients that having a strong brand foundation makes the marketing and sales work. It starts showing up in the quality and quantity of leads, and hopefully, a shorter sales cycle. You start to attract more of the right kind of clients for you, because they understand clearly what work you do, and who you do it for. The sales conversations become easier because your clients are ready to work with you, and you can clearly articulate why they should. You start to stand out in a sea of sameness. It’s a force multiplier, not a stand-alone tactic.

3. The opportunity cost is hard to articulate, and people don’t believe it. But you’ll feel it when the phone stops ringing, though, and then it’s a more painful hole to dig yourself out of. The most self-defeating thing I see is when people don’t want to invest in branding or marketing because they don’t have cash flow, because the phones have stopped ringing. That’s your sign that the killer is inside the house; the problem is you. If you were investing heavily in short-term tactics (digital ads, technical SEO, etc.) without a strong foundation, when the game changes (as it just did with AI), you’re going to come unstuck.

Marketing changes all the time, and right now it’s changing really fast. And I don’t see it slowing down any time soon. One approach to riding this roller coaster is to keep switching up your tactics - i.e., what’s the latest way to game Google? Those hacks work for a little while, until the next shift, and you’re on the back foot.

The long game of marketing

My approach is less exciting (less dopamine, more serotonin). I want my clients to have a super solid brand strategy foundation so that when things inevitably shift, it all still works. That’s not to say we don’t pivot specific marketing tactics, but we’re building on rock, not sand. To use a house building analogy - we may build with brick rather than timber frame, but that house still needs a foundation.

How AI is changing marketing

And that’s something super applicable right now. Ironically, AIs navigate the online space more like people than Google bots. They are looking for consistency across the internet. They are looking for real human feedback about businesses and credibility from authoritative sources. They’re looking for genuine, unique expertise and perspectives - not just the same slop being produced by everyone else. They aren’t just robots looking for which websites have the most links; your site’s links actually have to have value.

Selfishly, I love how AI search is changing the game. Because it plays into how I believe we should have been doing marketing all along. You actually have to walk the talk, consistently. You can’t game the system so easily. You have to put in the hard slog of showing up in the right places, saying the right thing, over and over again. Again, it’s boring, and it never ends. But it’s what you have to do. So if you aren’t super clear on who you are, who your audience is, and what you should be saying to them, how are you going to stay the distance? Because business is a marathon, not a sprint, and so is marketing.

Can't Prove the ROI of Brand Strategy? It Doesn't Matter

Ultimately, I won’t do marketing without a strong brand foundation. Mainly because without it, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I can’t select the appropriate marketing strategies if I don’t know who your audience is and where they spend their time. I don’t know what content to create if I don’t know what they want to hear from you. I don’t know what messages to put out there if I don’t know what makes you special. It’s throwing spaghetti at a wall. With a brand strategy in place, everything makes sense strategically, ties together effectively, and we know what’s working and what’s not in our marketing.

So if you want me to prove the value of brand strategy to you with empirical numbers, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you understand how to build a house, you’ll get it.