Brand vs. Marketing: What's Really Holding You Back?

In today’s fast-paced and competitive B2B landscape, understanding the balance between branding and marketing is more critical than ever. In this episode of How to Sell More, Mark Drager talks about why combining these two elements strategically can help your business stand out, attract better leads, and close more deals.

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Mark explores why many companies focus too much on short-term marketing tactics while neglecting the long-term impact of their brand, and how this mistake can cost you big in the long run.
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He covers:

• Why first impressions matter and how your brand can instantly build trust
• The hidden costs of relying solely on quick marketing fixes like social ads and SEO
• How a strong brand acts as the foundation for all successful marketing efforts
• The importance of defining what makes your company unique in a crowded market
• A practical framework for aligning brand, marketing, and sales for sustainable growth
• Why strategic branding creates long-term value while short-term tactics fade quickly

Are you tired of losing leads to low-cost competitors, struggling to stand out, or just looking to elevate your B2B sales process? Tune in and  learn how to align your branding and marketing strategies not just to sell more, but to sell smarter.

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Key Takeaways

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Branding Builds Long-Term Trust - Branding is like an oven—slow to heat but long-lasting. It creates trust, credibility, and recognition that keep your business memorable and resilient over time.

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Marketing Delivers Short-Term Impact - Quick but temporary. It generates leads and attention but relies on strong branding to make a lasting impression.

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Strategic Branding Drives Growth - It unites strategy, branding, marketing, and sales. This holistic approach ensures trust, connects with the right audience, and helps close more deals.

More About our Host, Mark Drager

AKA the Badass Brand Architect, 5th Generation Entrepreneur, Host of The How To Sell More Podcast

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When he's not podcasting, Mark's the Co-Founder & CEO of SalesLoop. He's a dedicated husband to his high school sweetheart, Jacqueline, and a proud father of four.

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Mark didn't follow the typical route to becoming a sales & marketing expert. A connected figure in the entrepreneur community, Mark provides listeners with a unique mix of wit, insight, and straightforward advice.

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Some of Mark's unconventional adventures include commandeering a Boeing 737-800 for a day, facing harsh criticism from a billionaire, and shedding 70 lbs in his late 30s. Though he never attended college, Mark stands as proof of the might of maintaining a student mindset and being ever-ready to seek assistance.

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A Transcription of The Talk

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Mark Drager : From SalesLoop. This is How to Sell More, where B2B business leaders get fresh sales and marketing ideas and proven strategies from industry experts and seasoned entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Mark Drager, and on today's episode, we are exploring the critical difference between branding and marketing and how combining them strategically can help transform your company's ability to attract and close more business.

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Now, maybe you are an entrepreneur or an executive who wants to stop losing deals to those low-priced competitors who are stealing your business. Maybe you are a service provider who's just looking to generate more qualified leads. Or maybe, just maybe, you are, at the end of the day, trying to stand out in a highly competitive market. Well, if you raised your hand to any one of those, this episode is for you.

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Now, here's a shocking stat: it takes just 50 milliseconds—that’s half of a tenth of a second—for someone to judge your company's brand. And that research comes from Carleton University. And so you have to kind of ask yourself, in today's ultra-competitive B2B world, how important is a first impression?

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Let's be honest: running a service-based company today is certainly more challenging than it was 10 years ago or even five years ago. And I'm sure you're feeling this, too. What we're seeing and hearing from our clients is that markets are getting more crowded. New competitors are popping up left, right, and center. Customers are demanding a lot more while always trying to pay the least amount possible. And don't even get me started on the rising costs. We're talking about labor, energy, materials—everything appears to be going up year over year, except our margins and our profits.

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We know that the answer always comes back to top-line revenue. We just need to sell more. That's why this is the How to Sell More podcast. But here's where many companies go wrong: they know that they need sales, their back is up against the wall, they want to make it happen, and so they immediately go into tactics—very short-term tactic mode. I'm talking about maybe starting an SEO campaign. They think, “I need more people to find me, so I better come up first in the Google search,” not realizing that SEO has rapidly declined in effectiveness for small and medium-sized businesses over the past 18 months.

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Or they might go out and hire a lead-generation or demand-generation firm. I'm talking about, “Let’s get some Facebook ads going, some Instagram ads, some YouTube ads, some TikTok. Let’s go ahead and drum up some business,” underestimating how competitive and costly some of these campaigns can actually be. Or they think, “All of my clients are out there in the world. I just need to create social content. I need a social media manager. I need someone to go straight to LinkedIn. If we build it, they will come—let’s just create some content, put it out there, and business is sure to pour in.”

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Or maybe this is you—maybe you fall into this trap. And I know I say that because I’ve fallen into this trap. I say, “Let’s just go out there and hire a rock-star salesperson,” or, “I just need to hire a young person, someone who knows social media—one of those young’uns.” Or—and we’re hearing this more and more often now—“We’re going to use AI,” like somehow AI is going to help turn around marketing, lead generation, and sales.

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But this begs the question: is the problem with your sales pipeline? Is it with lead gen? Is it with messaging, targeting? Is it the ads, the advertising channels, your sales process, your sales team, your thinking, your brand, your product, your pricing, what’s happening in the market, your competitors? There are a lot of things at play here, but if we take a step back, we might actually ask ourselves, “Maybe—just maybe—the problem isn’t with any one of those tactics; it’s actually with our brand.” And so, in this episode, we are digging into brand versus marketing.

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So let’s just take one step back and clear up what is the difference between marketing and a brand. I think the best explanation I’ve ever heard comes from my friend Nick Bradley. Nick Bradley is a podcaster; he is a scale-up expert. He’s facilitated 26 business exits, he’s been involved with $5 billion worth of deals through his private equity career, and he was featured on Episode 5 of the How to Sell More podcast. His explanation is fantastic. He explains that brand is like an oven, whereas marketing is like your microwave. An oven takes an incredible amount of time to heat up, but once it’s warm, it will stay warm for a really long time—even if you turn it off. A microwave, on the other hand, is instantly on, instantly hot, instantly working, but once you turn it off, everything stops—completely cold.

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This is a great analogy for what happens in B2B companies. Companies that invest in quick-fix, short-term marketing tactics—are you going to see a spike in leads and attention and sales? Most likely. But the moment you stop spending, everything goes cold. Meanwhile, other companies that invest in their brand—building relationships, building a great reputation over the long term—will create that lasting warmth. They become known in their industry, they get referred to more often, and they’re trusted long before they ever walk into the room.

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So think about your brand. Think about your company’s identity. Think about who you are, what you stand for, and, most importantly, why clients should trust you. Now, when we’re walking business owners or executives through our brand strategy process, there are a whole lot of questions we ask, but there are 17 questions that I really like to focus on. I’ve pulled a few of them just to help show the types of questions that will help you consider your brand. They’re questions like: “What do you stand for? What are you fighting against in your industry? What industry practices are the worst?” Meaning, are there players in your industry who do immoral things, or things you think are wrong or improper? Will they lie, cheat, and steal, doing everything short of actually catching criminal charges? Does that drive you crazy?

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Here’s another thought-provoking question that really hits the point home: “What’s truly at risk for your clients if things go wrong?” I don’t just mean something minor that breaks or a little setback—I mean if someone is trusting you as a provider, and they don’t pick you, and something goes wrong, what’s really at stake? And have they considered that? It might be something small, or in certain industries, it could be massive liability, or even criminal charges—people going to prison. That’s really important to understand because it shapes the value of who you are and what you do.

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Here are a few more, just to round it out: “Why are you the very best at what you do?” and “What are you really selling beyond the service itself?” These questions help uncover what makes a company unique—what makes a company valuable. It’s a company’s reputation, personality, and value proposition all rolled into one. And when done right, your brand is going to build credibility long before you ever walk into a sales meeting.

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On the other hand, marketing is really that promotional engine—the tactical stuff. I’m talking about lead gen, showing up at a trade show, your authority marketing system, your content marketing system. Marketing is about driving specific actions at a specific time for a specific audience—like getting a prospect to book the first meeting, show up for the second meeting, go through a scoping process, provide a quote, or respond to an RFP. This is marketing, and then this moves into sales.

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But the crucial part many miss is that these are not competing ideas. They are two sides of the same coin. Your brand is the foundation that everything else is built upon—it’s what makes your marketing effective. And so if on one side of the coin is brand, and on the other side is marketing, I want to take a quick moment and turn that coin into a cube. I’ve never said it that way—does that make sense?

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Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “I want that. I want more effective marketing. I want more effective branding. I want more sales.” I mean, this is the How to Sell More podcast—this is why I’m here, this is why I showed up. Well, let me take this one step further for you, because this is actually where strategic branding comes in, which is what we practice here at SalesLoop.

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At SalesLoop, this strategic branding approach really emerged from our own real-world experiences. Over the last 18 years, we’ve seen what I believe is every aspect of branding, advertising, marketing, and sales enablement. We’ve seen it in our own client work and by observing what works and what doesn’t within other agencies and across the industry. And when we decided, as a firm, to focus exclusively on what actually drives sales growth, the answer became clear: businesses need a streamlined, complete, unified approach—not just branding, not just marketing, but a strategic system that brings everything together.

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Now, if you’re like most entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders that I talk to, you hear “brand” and you think of companies like Apple or Tesla. Sure, they follow one playbook, but our clients—the SME businesses in manufacturing, industrial services, or AEC—need a different approach entirely, one that’s far more focused on practical results and on the real B2B challenges your business is facing, and less focused on trying to impress everyone with Super Bowl ads.

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And so this is where strategic branding comes in, which is what we practice here at SalesLoop. You see, at SalesLoop, this strategic branding approach—this playbook that works really well for SMEs—is not the playbook that works for the big multinationals. We developed this because, over 18 years, we’ve seen every aspect of branding, advertising, marketing, and sales enablement, both through our own client work and by observing what works (and frankly, what doesn’t) across the industry with other agencies. When we decided, as a firm, to focus exclusively on the things that actually drive sales, the answer became clear: businesses need that unified approach—not just branding, not just marketing, but a strategic system that brings everything together.

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Strategic branding is the process of intentionally aligning the four pillars needed to sell more. I’m going to share these with you right now, but in paragraph form. First is strategy. This isn’t some vague planning exercise; it’s about developing your unique business strategy. Who are you? Who are your customers? What do they care about? What’s the path we’re going to use to drop a sales message in front of them to generate a lead? Who or what are you competing against on these given channels, for these given people, at these given times? What makes you different from every other player in your market? These types of questions help us find the specific points of value that make customers choose you instead of the competition.

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Second, we move on to brand. Remember that 50-millisecond stat I shared at the top. It only takes 50 milliseconds for someone to judge your brand. Well, your brand needs to instantly communicate credibility and trust. Let’s add a few more stats: 94% of first impressions are design-related, and that’s so much more than your logo—it’s how you look, what you say, and how you make people feel at every touchpoint. In fact, 86% of people say authenticity is crucial when choosing which brands to work with. That’s why building real trust and credibility is essential for a service-based business, especially in the B2B world, especially if you’re small or medium, and especially if you’re selling to large enterprise clients.

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Third is marketing. Once you have your strategy and brand, it’s about getting your message in front of the right people—not just any lead, but a qualified lead who needs what you offer and is willing to pay for your services.

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And fourth is sales enablement. This is huge. In B2B, you need to give your team the tools they need to close business. Generating leads means nothing if you can’t work those leads, convert them, and close them—turning them into actual revenue.

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Now, you may be wondering if your company has a branding problem or a marketing problem. Let me break a few things down for you. Are you struggling to answer these fundamental questions about your business: what you stand for, what you’re fighting against, and why you matter in your market? When you look at a competitor’s website, does it feel like you could just swap out logos and no one would notice the difference? Is your team having trouble explaining what makes you different beyond saying, “We provide better service” or “We have more experience”? You know, the standard stuff everyone talks about. Are you losing deals on price because prospects can’t see the value of your services? Do your marketing efforts feel like that microwave—hot for a moment but cold as soon as you stop pushing content out or running ads?

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Here’s what I’ve learned after 18 years in this industry: success in B2B is not about choosing between brand or marketing. It’s not about jumping on the latest trend—whether it’s SEO, social media, AI, or whatever else might be hot. It’s about building something defendable, unique, and sustainable.

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Here’s what I’ve learned after 20 years in the industry: success in B2B is not about choosing between brand or marketing. It’s not about chasing the newest shiny object, whether that’s SEO, social media, or AI. It’s about building something sustainable, building a defendable company, something unique and special—giving people a reason to listen to you, a reason to trust you, and a compelling reason to buy right now. Like that oven we talked about, it takes time to heat up your brand the right way so that it stays warm and keeps working for you long into the future.

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So I would ask you to consider, if you’re looking at brand and you’re looking at marketing, expand it a little further. Look at strategy, look at brand, look at marketing, look at sales, which, as I’ve mentioned, is strategic branding—because it brings all the pieces together that you need. It brings the clear strategy that answers those crucial questions about who you are and what you stand for. It helps you shape your positioning. It gives you the brand that instantly builds trust and credibility and stands out from everyone else in the marketplace. It gives your marketing firms, teams, or agencies that missing secret essence that makes you different, allowing them to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. And then, ultimately, you’ll be able to create the sales tools you and your team need to work the leads and close more deals.

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This isn’t just theory. We’ve seen this transformation happen in other businesses—companies that were losing deals on price suddenly win deals based on value, businesses that struggled to stand out suddenly become the clear choice in the market. That’s the power of strategic branding. It’s not just about looking good (although that feels great as the owner or as a recruiter knowing people want to work at your company); it’s actually about selling more.

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If you have a topic suggestion or question, or you’d simply like to connect with me, head over to LinkedIn. My details are in the episode show notes—I’d love to connect with you there. One last thing: if you made it this far into the show, you really should subscribe, and here’s why: each and every week, we share fresh sales and marketing ideas and proven strategies to help you grow your B2B business brand—and, most importantly, to help you sell more.

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With that, I want to thank you for listening. We’re going to wrap up this episode. I am Mark Drager, and I will catch you in the next one.

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