Orchestrating B2B Marketing for Customer-Centric Business Impact

Marketing leaders face intense pressure to drive business value amid disruption and budget constraints. Gartner recently held marketing Symposium/Xpo2025 Conference, so we thought it would be helpful to look a their conclusions and supporting resources. According to Gartner, we are in an era of “disruption and tightening budgets” where exceeding expectations requires “unlocking greater efficiency and effectiveness to drive growth and enhance cross-functional collaboration”. Marketing budgets have recently contracted (shrinking by an average of 15% in 2024), even as companies expect marketing to contribute more to growth. In fact, B2B firms now invest about 8.4% of company revenue in marketing (vs. 5.7% in B2C), underscoring the onus on marketers to maximize ROI and prove their impact on the enterprise. “Amid market volatility and a rapid pace of change, the expectations placed on CMOs and their teams are not easing,” notes Matt Moorut, Gartner’s Marketing Symposium 2025 chair.

To meet these high expectations, B2B CMOs must become transformative business leaders, aligning every marketing activity, channel, and team effort to delivering customer experiences that drive tangible outcomes. Successful CMOs are elevating their role in the C-suite and embracing change to amplify marketing’s impact. By “leveraging emerging technologies to amplify marketers’ strengths,” they “achieve profitable growth and showcase the importance of marketing”. How can you do the same? At the 2025 Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, six key focus areas (“tracks”) emerged as crucial for aligning B2B marketing with customer experience and business results. Below, we explore each of these six strategies with insights from Gartner and practical tips for senior B2B marketers in professional services, technology, and other complex industries.

1. Lead Ahead of the Curve to Drive Business Value

The first imperative is to lead the marketing function as a strategic business driver – anticipating trends, fostering innovation, and collaborating across the organization. Strong marketing leaders “encourage effective collaboration and innovation, which produces better results and in turn attracts and retains top talent”. This means energizing your team and even your agency partners to push the envelope. Rather than reacting to change, aim to lead change: for example, by championing new ideas (AI-driven campaigns, creative go-to-market strategies) that give your firm a competitive edge.

Crucially, leading ahead of the curve requires tight alignment with enterprise goals and the C-suite. CEOs heading into 2025 prioritize growth above all (cited by 56% of CEOs), followed by technology innovation (42%). As CMO, you should make these same priorities your north star. Bridge the gap between marketing and the business by ensuring your plans explicitly support the CEO’s agenda for revenue growth, digital transformation, and profitability. In practice, this might involve collaborating with product and sales leaders on growth initiatives or investing in marketing technology that improves efficiency. It also means speaking the language of the C-suite. Only 45% of CMOs say that aligning marketing plans to shared business goals is the most important activity for driving outcomes – even though this alignment is exactly what CEOs and CFOs expect. As one Gartner director notes, “45% of CMOs say aligning on shared business goals is crucial for driving outcomes, yet less than half [of CMOs] were personally involved [in that alignment] last year.” The takeaway: make it a priority to embed yourself and your team in enterprise-level planning, so that marketing is viewed as a co-owner of business strategy rather than a support function.

Another aspect of leading ahead is proving marketing’s value in business terms. Many marketing leaders still struggle here – only 52% of senior marketing leaders can demonstrate marketing’s value and get credit for its contributions. This credibility gap can be closed by shifting your focus to business outcomes (pipeline, revenue, customer lifetime value) instead of just marketing activities. Ensure you are regularly communicating marketing’s impact to other executives. (Notably, only about 35% of CMOs regularly communicate marketing’s business impact to senior stakeholders today, indicating plenty of room for improvement.) By translating marketing results into the metrics the C-suite cares about – growth, ROI, efficiency – you establish marketing as an indispensable driver of value. For instance, if marketing influenced $X in pipeline or improved customer retention by Y%, quantify and publicize that impact internally. Gartner’s CMO Value Playbook emphasizes connecting marketing to outcomes that matter across the C-suite, rather than just reporting campaign KPIs.

Pro Tip: Invest in your leadership skills and your team’s strategic acumen. Encourage ongoing learning in areas like data analytics, AI, and change management. By building a team comfortable with change and new technology, you better position marketing to lead organizational innovation. Also, don’t shy away from visionary initiatives. For example, experimenting with emerging channels or spearheading a thought leadership program can signal marketing’s role as a forward-looking leader. (For more on marketing’s evolving role in building a future-ready organization, see “The Growing Role of B2B Marketing in Building a Future-Ready Organisation.”)

Internally, cultivate cross-functional collaboration. Strong leaders break down silos – aligning marketing with sales, product, HR, and finance. Regular interdepartmental meetings and joint projects (e.g. co-owning a customer experience initiative with your service delivery team) ensure marketing is plugged into all parts of the business. This collaborative approach not only improves results (since everyone is rowing in the same direction) but also increases marketing’s credibility internally. When other functions view marketing as a partner that drives business value, it’s easier to secure buy-in for your initiatives. In short, leadership ahead of the curve means being proactive, strategic, and well-aligned: stepping up as a business leader first and a marketing leader second. Successful CMOs “raise their leadership profile in the C-suite” and act as “transformative leaders” enabling their teams to drive improved performance.

(Related Reading: Boost your strategic leadership with our guide on balancing agility and planning in marketing – see Fast Thinking and Strategic Planning in B2B Marketing: How to Strike the Right Balance from 1827 Marketing.)

2. Develop and Deliver a Measurable Marketing Strategy

Even the most inspiring marketing vision won’t gain traction unless it’s translated into a clear, measurable strategy. The second key is to ground your marketing strategy in data and defined outcomes, so that you can prove its effectiveness and adjust as needed. Developing and executing a future-proof marketing strategy is more challenging than ever, as the role of marketing keeps evolving and expanding. New expectations demand an “effective value proposition” from marketing, and success requires “improving the connections among strategy, operations and analytics.” In practice, this means your marketing plan must tightly link to business goals (as discussed above), outline specific initiatives/tactics, and establish metrics to gauge progress.

Start with strategic planning discipline. Rather than a once-a-year exercise, treat strategic planning as a dynamic, ongoing process, ensuring that your big-picture plans translate into operational action and near-term results. One way to do this is by using a structured planning template. For example, Gartner provides a one-page Marketing Strategic Plan template to capture your strategy and align it to enterprise goals. Such frameworks prompt you to verify the business context (mission, goals), set clear marketing objectives, and map initiatives to those objectives. Research shows many marketing leaders could improve here: while aligning on business goals is deemed critical, in reality less than half of CMOs actively participated in strategic alignment last year. Make sure you and your leadership team are deeply involved in the corporate planning cycle – it will pay dividends when you need executive support for marketing investments.

A measurable strategy also requires choosing the right KPIs and analytics. It’s not enough to track dozens of metrics; you need to focus on those that demonstrate marketing’s contribution to business outcomes. According to Gartner research, only 17% of marketing leaders feel “very confident” in their ability to prove marketing’s impact on the business– a sign that many are either using the wrong metrics or not communicating them well. To boost confidence, shift from vanity metrics to “metrics that matter.” Gartner suggests a disciplined framework balancing leading indicators, lagging indicators, and operational metrics.

• Leading metrics predict future impact (e.g. brand preference lift, early pipeline volume).

• Lagging metrics prove past performance (e.g. revenue from marketing-generated leads, marketing-attributed deals).

• Operational metrics inform in-flight optimizations (e.g. email open rates, website traffic by source).

By combining these, you can monitor short-term execution while keeping sight of ultimate business results. Crucially, tailor your metrics reporting to your audience. Gartner advises that CMOs present growth, return, and efficiency metrics to the CEO/CFO, while keeping more granular stats for the marketing team’s internal use. For instance, the CMO might report that “Marketing’s lead generation efforts contributed $5M in pipeline last quarter at a 3:1 ROI” to the board, but discuss email click-through rates only within the team. This ensures executives hear a clear value story without getting lost in the weeds, thus reinforcing marketing’s strategic importance.

It’s also wise to invest in marketing measurement capabilities – tools, talent, and processes – because the payoff can be significant. Organizations with high marketing measurement maturity “achieve up to $4 in value for every $1 invested in analytics and performance tracking.” In other words, a robust analytics function doesn’t just generate reports – it actively improves marketing ROI and business outcomes (by identifying what works and what doesn’t, so you can reallocate resources intelligently). Consider upgrading your marketing dashboards, attribution models, or hiring an analytics lead if you haven’t yet. Technologies like marketing performance management software or even AI-driven analytics tools can surface insights faster, helping you fine-tune strategy in near real-time.

Finally, make agility part of your strategy execution. A measurable marketing plan isn’t a static document; it should be revisited and adjusted as data rolls in or market conditions change. Many CMOs have been forced to pivot plans due to economic swings or emerging trends. The most successful treat the strategic plan as a living roadmap – they hold quarterly (or even monthly) check-ins to review metrics against targets and decide if course-corrections are needed. This agile approach ensures you deliver the strategy, not just develop it. As Gartner’s research suggests, converting strategy into action requires linking it with operations and being willing to re-allocate budget dynamically.

In sum, your marketing strategy must be both aligned and accountable. Align it tightly to business goals and make every major initiative traceable to an outcome the CEO cares about. And hold it accountable by defining success metrics at the outset and tracking them religiously. This will earn you credibility and the flexibility to double-down on what’s working. As one 1827 Marketing article puts it, focusing on growth by measuring what matters creates a virtuous cycle – you get the evidence to justify marketing investments that drive even more growth (see How B2B Marketers Can Focus on Growth by Measuring What Matters. and for a comprehensive planning guide, read The Complete Guide to Effective B2B Marketing Planning.)

3. Deliver Growth and Loyalty With Powerful Customer Experiences

Driving business value isn’t just about internal alignment and plans – it ultimately hinges on the customer experiences you deliver. The third mandate is to elevate your customer experience (CX) to fuel both growth and loyalty. As Gartner bluntly states, “the customer is rapidly evolving, and their loyalty is no longer guaranteed.” Marketers must “elevate customer understanding to drive broader value” and cultivate “organizationwide customer centricity to drive long-term customer loyalty.” In other words, a superior product alone won’t keep B2B customers around; you need to continually delight them with relevant, valuable experiences across their lifecycle.

What does “powerful” customer experience look like in B2B? It starts with deep customer insight. Invest in understanding your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points through data and research. Analyze customer feedback, conduct interviews, map out their journeys. This insight should inform personalized content and interactions at every touchpoint. Increasingly, AI and analytics tools can help by sifting through customer data to find patterns (e.g. which content a certain persona engages with, or which factors correlate with account growth). Gartner notes that emerging technologies – from AI to real-time data platforms – enable marketers to harness productivity and elevate customer experiences. For example, AI can be used to dynamically personalize web experiences or to proactively identify customers at risk of churn so you can intervene. By using these tools, B2B marketers can treat each customer or account in a more tailored way, delivering the right message at the right time on the right channel.

Critically, customer experience isn’t limited to the marketing or sales phase – it spans the entire customer lifecycle. Gartner advocates a “Buy/Own/Advocate” framework for customer journey management, which reminds us that the job isn’t done when the contract is signed. After the buy phase, the own phase (customer service, onboarding, product usage) and advocate phase (renewals, referrals) are just as important. Strong brands “aren't merely better at acquiring customers; they are better at keeping them and motivating them to tell others.” In practical terms, ensure your organization is devoting marketing effort to customer success and advocacy programs. For instance, marketing can collaborate with Client Services to produce useful adoption guides, or work with Account Management on loyalty campaigns and customer communities. The goal is to provide ongoing value so that customers achieve what they intended (driving ROI on your solution) and feel positive about the partnership. When customers have great experiences post-sale, they’re more likely to renew and even become brand advocates who bring you referral business or serve as case studies.

Importantly, in a B2B account context, “while customer satisfaction is linked to repurchase, it doesn’t predict account growth”. In other words, a client might be happy enough to renew, but that doesn’t mean they’ll expand their business with you or buy additional services. The strongest driver of high-value account growth, Gartner found, is customers’ decision confidence – essentially their trust in their own decision and its outcomes. Buyers see expansion (buying more from a vendor) as a risky decision, even if they’re satisfied. To spur growth, marketing and sales must increase the customer’s confidence that expanding the relationship is a smart, safe choice. How do you do that? Gartner recommends delivering content and digital experiences that guide customers through their decision-making. For example, provide case studies quantifying the results of deeper engagement, ROI calculators for add-on solutions, or peer testimonials addressing common concerns. If you can equip your customers with evidence and assurance, you reduce their perceived risk in saying “yes” to more business – thus driving growth in account value.

Another aspect of great CX is consistency and omnichannel engagement (which we’ll cover more in the next section). Customers today interact with your brand across many touchpoints – website, webinars, customer portals, support calls, social media, and more. Ensuring a seamless and coherent experience across all these channels is key. A customer shouldn’t feel like a stranger just because they moved from talking to their sales rep to using your product’s help center or attending your user conference. Break down internal silos so that every team (marketing, sales, support, product) shares a unified view of the customer and coordinates messaging. Consider forming a cross-functional customer experience council or similar, where departments regularly sync up on customer feedback and journey improvements.

Finally, don’t neglect the emotional dimension of B2B customer experience. Even in professional services and enterprise tech, where decisions are “rational,” the feelings you create — trust, confidence, a sense of partnership — profoundly influence loyalty. We argue that great B2B experiences often stem from human touches and clear communication, even in virtual settings (see “Why Great Customer Experience is Rooted in Strong Content Architecture” and “How a B2C Mindset Can Dramatically Improve B2B Customer Experience” for ideas on injecting humanity and simplicity into B2B engagements). In summary, make your customers feel understood and supported at every stage. By delivering experiences that consistently solve problems, anticipate needs, and add value, you will not only retain clients but turn them into growth engines for your business.

(Related Reading: Reimagining B2B Customer Experience in 2025: Strategies for Success offers forward-looking tips on using personalization, AI, and customer journey mapping to boost loyalty.)

4. Establish an Effective Multichannel Marketing Strategy

Today’s B2B buyers are everywhere – researching solutions on Google, engaging with thought leadership on LinkedIn or YouTube, reading industry forums, attending virtual events, and more. To reach and influence these buyers, marketing must be present and unified across all relevant channels. The Gartner Symposium highlighted the need to “thrive in a world where omnichannel and multichannel efforts have stalled” and customers are “overwhelmed with content.” Marketers should seek “practical advice on building, scaling and accelerating your approach across digital and channel marketing.” In short, this means developing a multichannel strategy that ensures you meet your audience wherever they prefer to engage, with consistent and compelling content.

Why is multichannel so critical now? B2B buyer behavior has become increasingly self-directed and digital-first. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. Moreover, the typical buying group for a complex B2B purchase involves 6–10 stakeholders, each consuming information from 4–5 channels on their own. If your marketing is concentrated in only one or two channels, you risk missing a large portion of the buying journey. For example, a target decision-maker might never attend the webinars you host, but will read an article about you on a third-party site or see questions about your product on social media. Effective multichannel marketing means covering all bases in a coordinated way.

Start by identifying the channels that matter most in your industry and for your buyer personas. In professional services marketing, for instance, LinkedIn might be a top channel for reaching decision-makers, but don’t overlook channels like industry newsletters, conferences (in-person or virtual), search engines (SEO and PPC), and even review platforms or communities. Map the typical research and buyer journey stages and list what channels are influential at each stage. Then audit your current presence: Do you have content and campaigns in each key channel? Are some underdeveloped? This exercise often reveals gaps. For example, you might discover you have plenty of blog content (website/SEO channel) but little presence on YouTube even though video content is trending in your space, or that your email nurture program is robust but you’ve ignored third-party media sponsorships that your competitors are utilizing.

Once you’ve identified the right mix, focus on integration and consistency. All channels should sing from the same hymn sheet regarding your brand narrative and value proposition. A prospective client who encounters your brand on LinkedIn and then visits your website or meets you at an event should receive a coherent story, not a disjointed experience. Consistent messaging and design across channels builds brand familiarity and trust. Additionally, channels should work together: for example, an analyst report you publish can be promoted via email, discussed in a webinar, sliced into infographics on social media, and optimized for search. This surround sound approach reinforces your message and increases the chances of breaking through buyer information overload. Remember, buyers are “overwhelmed with content” and easily distracted. Repetition across channels (without being spammy) helps your message stick.

Of course, quality over quantity is key to combatting content fatigue. It’s better to have a strong, customer-focused presence on a few channels than to stretch yourself thin trying to be everywhere with mediocre content. Prioritize channels where you can commit to excellence. That said, avoid being too narrow: the risk in B2B marketing’s “new normal” is assuming one channel will carry all the weight. The pandemic accelerated digital omnichannel behaviors – even traditionally face-to-face activities moved online – and there’s no going back. For example, webinars and virtual events might not fully replace conferences, but they’re now a permanent fixture alongside them. A truly effective strategy might blend digital and physical channels in a complementary way.

Embrace emerging channels and formats as well. Being ahead of the curve in channel strategy can yield big benefits. Is your team experimenting with things like podcasts, interactive tools, or community platforms (e.g. Slack/Discord groups for industry professionals)? How about newer social platforms or features (say, LinkedIn Live or Twitter Spaces or whatever platform your audience is exploring)? Not every shiny object will pan out, but ignoring new channels could mean missing early mover advantage. For instance, some B2B brands that jumped on LinkedIn’s newsletter feature or TikTok for thought leadership found large untapped audiences with relatively low competition. If it aligns with your brand and audience, give new channels a pilot test.

Finally, measure and optimize your multichannel mix. Use tracking (UTM parameters, marketing automation, CRM integration) to attribute leads and engagements back to channels. Analyze which channels drive the most qualified leads or influence pipeline, and invest accordingly. Be aware that attribution in a multichannel world is complex – rarely will one touchpoint seal the deal, so look at multi-touch influence in addition to direct last-touch metrics. Gartner’s Digital IQ research stresses benchmarking your brand’s digital performance against competitors to find where you lag or lead. For example, if competitors have a strong YouTube presence and you don’t, that’s an area to consider bolstering. Tools like Gartner’s Digital IQ Index or Marketing Score can help evaluate your multichannel maturity and highlight investment priorities.

In sum, a multichannel strategy ensures you have a wide reach (touching buyers across their journey) and deep resonance (reinforcing a unified message). By integrating your efforts in content, social, search, email, events and beyond, you make it easier for customers to engage with you on their terms. As one of our articles says, B2B marketing’s new normal requires adapting to an omnichannel world – those who orchestrate channels effectively will stand out (see “B2B Marketing’s New Normal: How to Adapt to an Omnichannel World” for practical strategies to unify online and offline channels).

5. Increase Sales Through Integrated Buying Experiences

Sales and marketing alignment has been an evergreen B2B topic, but it has taken on new urgency in the era of self-service buying. The fifth strategy is to create integrated buying experiences – where marketing and sales (and customer success) work in concert to support buyers through their journey, rather than operating as separate silos. This is crucial because B2B buyers today prefer to drive their own purchasing process via digital channels, yet they often need human help at critical junctures to avoid mistakes or regrets.

Consider these Gartner findings: 75% of B2B buyers now say they prefer a rep-free experience, conducting research and even purchases digitally without talking to a salesperson. However, purely self-service buying can backfire – buyers who go it alone are far more likely to experience purchase regret. In fact, Gartner found that fully digital purchases result in significantly higher regret, and that buyers who do engage with sales reps are 2.3x more likely to be satisfied with their purchase (a stat implied by comparing outcomes). The takeaway is that the best outcomes come from blending digital and human interaction. As Gartner states, Sales and marketing must identify the right mix of digital and human interaction to drive profitable purchase decisions.

For marketing leaders, this means ensuring your digital channels empower buyers with information and making it seamless for buyers to get human assistance at the moments that matter. An integrated buying experience might look like this: A prospect finds your content online and enters a nurturing cadence (pure digital). As they show buying intent (e.g. visiting high-value pages or downloading a buyer’s guide), your sales team is alerted and reaches out to offer help – but in a consultative, no-pressure manner consistent with the content they’ve consumed. During product evaluation, marketing provides on-demand tools (ROI calculators, case studies) to aid the buyer’s research, while sales provides personalized demos or addresses specific concerns. The hand-offs are smooth; the messaging is aligned. From the buyer’s perspective, it’s one continuous experience of learning and problem-solving, with your company’s digital and human channels reinforcing each other rather than feeling disjointed.

Achieving this requires tight sales-marketing collaboration and often new processes/tech. Tactically, you might implement lead scoring models to identify when a self-service buyer is ready for sales outreach (ensuring sales contacts them at the right time). You might also deploy chatbots or live chat on your site – these can serve as a bridge between digital and human, offering help to buyers who have questions in the moment. Another key element is content. Marketing should equip sales with content that aligns to what the buyer has already seen online, and vice versa. For example, if marketing publishes a guide on “Selecting a Cloud Provider” and a known prospect downloads it, sales should follow up referencing that guide and perhaps offering a tailored workshop on the topic. This shows the buyer that you know and remember their journey.

Importantly, integrated buying experiences also extend beyond initial purchase to account growth, linking back to the customer experience track. The concept of “buyers’ decision confidence” comes into play again. As noted, customers will only expand their relationship if they feel confident in the decision. Marketing and sales together should focus not just on closing the first deal, but on making every stage of the buying and owning journey confidence-inspiring. One Gartner session insight was that marketing can boost buyers’ confidence by guiding them with content and digital tools. Concretely, this could mean providing frameworks to help a buyer gain internal buy-in (e.g. ROI calculators or template business cases they can use internally), or offering benchmarks and analyst data that validate their choice. An integrated approach might involve sales sharing these marketing-produced tools during their conversations, rather than each function creating separate, redundant materials.

Alignment around the buyer’s perspective is paramount. “Integrated” implies not only teamwork internally, but also an empathetic design of the journey from the outside-in. Remove any friction that is a byproduct of your internal org structure. A classic example: a prospect attends a marketing webinar and asks a question, but then struggles to get an answer because marketing and sales both think the other will follow up. In an integrated model, that question is logged and someone (doesn’t matter who, as long as it’s assigned) follows up promptly with useful info. Or consider RFP responses – often a tedious sales exercise – which marketing could assist by providing better templates and content, speeding up the process for the buyer. Every touchpoint should feel cohesive and buyer-centric, not like they are dealing with separate departments.

Account-based marketing (ABM) or account-based experience (ABX) strategies are one effective way to create integrated experiences for key accounts. ABM by nature forces close sales-marketing coordination and personalized content for each account. If you haven’t already, consider piloting ABM for a set of high-potential accounts, with joint sales and marketing teams, shared goals, and custom programs for those accounts. Even if you don’t formally adopt ABM at scale, applying its principles of personalization, coordination, and shared metrics will improve integration.

Lastly, monitor outcomes that signal success in integrated experiences. For instance, track whether prospects engaged by both marketing and sales convert at higher rates (they usually do). Look at sales cycle lengths for leads nurtured with an integrated approach versus not. And gather buyer feedback: are they getting the information they need? Where do they hit snags or have to repeat themselves? Use that data to continually refine the experience. When done right, an integrated buying journey shortens decision cycles and increases win rates – because buyers feel informed, confident, and positive about the process. A recent Gartner stat underscores this: when B2B buyers receive helpful information and feel confident in their decision, they are far more likely to finalize a high-quality deal. Integration is the means to deliver that confidence.

(For more on aligning sales and marketing, see How to Bring Sales & Marketing Together for Stronger Lead Generation. You might also read Integrating the Sales Pipeline and Customer Journey with Automation for how technology can connect the dots between marketing touches and sales follow-ups.)

6. Transform Your Organization Through Strategic Brand Management

The final track from Gartner’s symposium is a reminder that brand is a strategic asset – and managing it well is pivotal to long-term success. In an era of information abundance and skeptical buyers, a strong brand can be the deciding factor that opens doors and shortens sales cycles. Gartner observes that marketing leaders are under pressure to “evolve and align brand narratives to ensure differentiation and credibility,” all while “proving value from brand investments.” In other words, CMOs must modernize their brand strategy to keep it relevant and distinctive, organize their teams to deliver a consistent brand experience, and demonstrate how brand building pays off in business terms.

Start with your brand strategy and narrative. Does your brand story clearly convey how you’re different from competitors and why that matters to customers? In crowded B2B markets (professional services, SaaS, etc.), it’s easy for brands to blur together with similar messaging. To stand out, refresh your brand positioning by drilling into what truly makes you unique (e.g. proprietary expertise, culture, approach) and how that solves client problems better. Then ensure this narrative is reflected in everything from high-level campaigns to sales decks to employee communications. Marketing leaders face pressure to align brand narratives across all these touchpoints for consistency. A compelling, authentic brand story not only attracts customers but also guides employees on how to represent the company. (In fact, employee advocacy and behaviour are part of brand management – more on that shortly.)

At the same time, brand strategy must be linked to business outcomes more tightly than before. Historically, branding could be a fuzzy domain focused on awareness or perception metrics. Today, CMOs need to reframe brand discussions in terms of commercial impact. As Gartner analyst Alex De Fursac Gash notes, “CMOs are responsible for demonstrating the vital connection between brand marketing, demand generation and desired business outcomes.” Brand awareness on its own isn’t sufficient – it’s a means to an end (business growth). To prove the value of brand investments internally, define concrete metrics that tie to brand health and business performance. Gartner has introduced a Six-Point Brand Health Framework to help with this. It encourages measuring brand health across six areas: Brand Strategy, Reach, Communication, Engagement, Experience, and Business Outcomes. Briefly, this means:

• Brand Strategy: Does your target audience see clear value and differentiation in your brand’s positioning?

• Reach: Is your target audience broadly aware of your brand?

• Communication: Are you communicating your brand value in a way the audience understands?

• Engagement: Do they engage with your brand and want to learn more?

• Experience: Do you deliver experiences that live up to the brand promise?

• Business Outcomes: Is the brand driving the desired actions (e.g. inquiries, loyalty, advocacy) that impact business results?

Using such a framework, you can identify where your brand is strong or weak and track improvements over time. For instance, you might find you have high awareness (Reach) but low engagement – signalling a need to refresh messaging or content strategy. Or you may see good engagement but poor conversion to outcomes, indicating a disconnect between brand promise and actual product/service delivery. By regularly evaluating these facets, you keep your brand management strategic and evidence-based, rather than just aesthetic. Gartner’s research suggests that this structured approach helps gain internal buy-in for brand initiatives because it shows exactly how brand health links to growth.

Next, consider the organizational aspect: Do you have the right team and processes to manage the brand? “Transforming your organization” through brand management often involves breaking down the wall between brand and the rest of marketing (and even the rest of the company). Brand shouldn’t be an isolated “comms” function; it should permeate content marketing, demand gen, product marketing, HR (employer brand), and so on. Many leading companies establish cross-functional brand councils or governance committees to ensure brand consistency and relevance. This might include representatives from marketing, sales, HR, customer service, etc., who meet to discuss brand messaging and usage. Training is another tool – e.g., training all customer-facing employees on brand messaging and guidelines so that every touchpoint reinforces the same story.

Employee advocacy is a growing focus in brand strategy, especially in professional services. Your consultants, engineers, and account managers are the brand in the eyes of clients. Leading firms turn employees into brand ambassadors by encouraging them to share thought leadership on social media and recognizing them for embodying brand values. (Our article, Employee-Generated Content: How Your Employees Can Be Your Best Brand Advocates discusses how leveraging employees’ voices can humanize and strengthen a B2B brand.) This not only amplifies reach but also builds credibility – buyers trust real voices over corporate ads. So, empowering your people to represent the brand well is an organizational shift that pays dividends.

Additionally, brand and demand (performance marketing) should work hand-in-hand, not in competition. In times of economic pressure, it’s tempting to cut brand spend and double down on short-term lead generation. But that can starve your brand, undermining long-term demand. The key is to maintain investment in brand-building activities (thought leadership content, PR, reputation campaigns, etc.) while also running targeted demand-gen – and use insights from one to inform the other. For example, a strong brand theme or story can increase the effectiveness of your ads and emails (by differentiating your message), and conversely, data from performance campaigns can inform which brand messages resonate most. By aligning brand and demand teams on common objectives (like a shared pipeline or revenue target that brand contributes to alongside sales), you avoid the silo effect. Our article Brand and Performance Marketing: The Key to Sustained B2B Growth delves into strategies for marrying these two disciplines so that each reinforces the other.

Lastly, reinforce brand consistency and protection. As your organization grows or adopts new channels (e.g., launching a podcast or expanding internationally), ensure the brand guidelines evolve and are adhered to. Regular brand audits can catch inconsistencies in logo usage, tone of voice, or customer experience quality. Gartner highlights protecting the brand’s long-term health as a priority – this means both staying true to your core values and adapting to remain relevant. For instance, you might modernize your visual identity or update your tagline if they look dated, but do so in a way that builds on your brand equity rather than discarding it.

In conclusion, strategic brand management transforms your marketing from a campaign execution engine into a steward of one of your company’s most valuable assets – its reputation and promise in the market. By clearly articulating your brand’s differentiation, aligning it with business strategy, measuring its health, and engaging the whole organization in delivering it, you create a brand that not only resonates with customers but also drives enterprise value. As Gartner says, the solution to internal challenges is to “align brand marketing objectives to broader business objectives — and educate stakeholders on the importance of building a healthy brand.” Do that successfully, and your brand will fuel growth, trust, and resilience for years to come.

(Related Reading: A Great Brand Story is a Powerful B2B Marketing Strategy – learn how crafting and communicating an authentic brand story can set you apart. Also see Promoting Expertise at Scale: A Guide to LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads for tips on boosting brand credibility among target audiences.)