Why Your Performance Marketing Is Plateauing — And What To Do About It

Insights from a conversation with Kamil Rextin, CEO of 42Agency, and data from Rocksalt's B2B Marketing Discourse Report

Introduction

If you're running performance marketing for a B2B company and the results that used to come easily are getting harder to replicate, you're not imagining it. The cost per lead is creeping up. The same budget is generating fewer opportunities. Your team is optimising harder for diminishing returns.

We recently sat down with Kamil Rextin, CEO of 42Agency — one of the most respected B2B performance marketing agencies working with companies in the $10M–$100M range — and shared data from our analysis of 6,956 LinkedIn posts from 38 B2B marketing influencers over 12 months. What emerged from that conversation was a clear and honest answer to why this plateau happens, and what actually fixes it.

The short version: you've probably captured most of the demand that already exists for what you do. Growing from here means creating demand that doesn't exist yet. And that requires a different kind of investment than the one that got you here.

The performance plateau is a demand problem, not a tactics problem

When performance marketing stops compounding, the instinct is usually to look for a tactical fix — better creative, lower bids, new audiences, a different channel. Sometimes that works. But Kamil describes a pattern he sees repeatedly with clients that no amount of optimisation can solve:

We've had clients who have been running Google search for so long, invested so much, that they've practically captured all the search volume. Every person who was ever going to search for what they do — they've reached them. The cheap customers are already acquired. Now the cost per opportunity keeps climbing because they're competing harder for a smaller and smaller remaining pool.

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

This is the ceiling that performance marketing hits when it's working in isolation. Search advertising — whether Google, LinkedIn, or any other intent-based channel — is extraordinarily efficient at one specific thing: finding people who are already looking for what you sell. The problem is that pool is finite. In most B2B markets, the number of people actively in-market for a given solution at any one point in time is a small fraction of the total addressable market. Once you've reached most of them, you're not optimising — you're competing with yourself.

The fix isn't better targeting or smarter bidding. It's building the thing that performance marketing can't build on its own: a market of people who know who you are before they start searching or asking AI.

What the data says about where B2B buyer attention actually is

Our B2B Marketing Discourse Report analyzed 12 months of LinkedIn posts from 38 B2B marketing influencers — tracking not just what was being posted, but what was earning engagement. The attention efficiency data tells you something important about what B2B buyers actually want to talk about.

Attention efficiency is the ratio between engagement a topic earns and how much it gets posted about. Above 1.0 means audiences are actively seeking that content. Below 1.0 means it's being pushed into a market that doesn't want it.

Two things stand out. First, the conversation B2B buyers most want to have is about pipeline and revenue — how it actually gets built, what works, what doesn't. Yet it's one of the most under-served topics relative to demand. Second, attribution content is the most oversupplied topic in the dataset. Marketers are producing it constantly. Their audiences are tuned out.

Kamil's reaction to the attribution finding was immediate recognition:

I went deep on attribution for years. Multi-touch models, U-shaped models, fancy dashboards. Then I realised none of my CMOs, VPs, or CEOs ever actually looked at that stuff. They did not care what model I had. My CEO just wanted to know: is money coming in?

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

The data reflects a market that's tired of attribution theory and hungry for honest conversation about outcomes. This matters for how you think about content and thought leadership — but it also signals something deeper about what B2B buyers actually want from the companies they're evaluating.

Why performance needs brand infrastructure to work

Here's the mechanism that explains both the plateau and the fix. Kamil describes it through something that happened with a client running Connected TV ads:

We were running CTV and consistently saw direct traffic climbing. Then over Thanksgiving, direct traffic dropped sharply — even though the CTV campaign was still running. Which meant we could say with about 80% confidence: when people stop working, they stop acting on what they've seen. The ads were creating familiarity. People saw them, didn't click, but came back later and searched for the company directly.

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

This is a window into how B2B buying actually works. Nobody sees a LinkedIn ad and signs a contract. They see an ad, they look you up, they read a post from your CEO, they see your company mentioned in a Reddit thread, they notice you at a conference, they hear your name from a peer. Then, weeks or months later, they search for you directly. The performance campaign gets the credit. The brand layer did the work.

When that brand layer is absent, performance campaigns have to work harder for every conversion because they're fighting unfamiliarity at the same time as they're competing for intent. Kamil puts it plainly:

It's better to compete on branded search than unbranded search. When someone searches for your company by name, they already know who you are. That's a fraction of the cost to acquire compared to someone searching a generic category term where you're competing against everyone.

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

The research from 6sense backs this up with a striking number: on day one of a buyer planning to purchase software, they already know 4.5 out of their 5 shortlisted vendors — before they've done any research into features or use cases. Brand awareness isn't a nice-to-have. It determines whether you're even in the consideration set before the evaluation begins.

What 'brand investment' actually means for a B2B company

This is where the conversation gets practical — and where a lot of B2B companies get stuck. "Brand" as a concept carries enormous baggage. It conjures up Super Bowl ads, emotional campaigns, Nike. None of which is relevant to a $30M B2B software company trying to hit pipeline targets.

Kamil draws a sharp distinction between what he calls Big-B Brand and small-b brand. Big-B Brand is the P&G-derived consumer marketing model — emotional positioning, mass-market campaigns, awareness at scale. Small-b brand is something different:

As an agency, all of our marketing spend is what I'd call small-b brand. We sponsor Emily Kramer's newsletter because she has the right audience. We run a Substack. I don't expect people to read it and immediately become customers — but over time, they do. It's showing up consistently in front of the right people with the right message. Whether they convert immediately is secondary.

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

Small-b brand for a B2B company looks like: consistent thought leadership from your senior people on LinkedIn, genuine participation in the communities where your buyers spend time, sponsoring the newsletters and podcasts your ICP actually reads, being visible at the events where your buyers gather. None of this is glamorous. All of it compounds.

A note on vocabulary

There's a practical dimension to this that the data from our report surfaced clearly. In 2025, the term "brand building" dropped 79% in B2B marketing influencer conversation. Our interpretation — confirmed in conversations with multiple CMOs — isn't that the work is being abandoned. It's that the word has become politically toxic in budget conversations.

Several CMOs told us they stopped using the word "brand" entirely in internal conversations — switching to "awareness," "top of funnel," or "air cover" — and suddenly found budget approved for the same proposals that had previously been rejected. The activity is identical. The framing is everything when your CFO is in the room.

How to measure brand investment without losing credibility

The objection that kills brand investment in most companies isn't philosophical — it's measurement. How do you show ROI on something that works over months and converts through channels you can't directly attribute?

Kamil's approach has evolved from attribution-heavy to deliberately simpler:

For my own business, the best attribution is: do I have money in the bank? I did X. Six months later, more money came in. That's enough for me. For clients, we use open-source marketing mix modeling frameworks from Google and Meta — augmented with AI — to give something more defensible than gut feel. But the principle is the same: directional confidence beats false precision.

— Kamil Rextin, CEO, 42Agency

In practice, there are three measurement approaches that work without requiring perfect attribution:

• Branded search volume. Track how many people are searching for your company by name. Run a brand awareness campaign and watch what happens. Run a paid campaign and watch whether branded search moves alongside it. When the system is working, branded search goes up. This is your leading indicator.
• Natural experiments. When you turn a channel on or off, what else moves? Kamil's Thanksgiving CTV observation is an example — the drop in direct traffic when the campaign kept running but people stopped working revealed a causal relationship no attribution model would have shown. Look for these moments in your own data.
• Incremental cost per opportunity over time. If your CPO is rising quarter on quarter despite stable spend, you're hitting the demand ceiling. That's the business case for brand investment — not abstract ROI, but the concrete fact that the alternative is paying more and more for less and less.

The question Kamil says most companies avoid asking — and should — is a simple one: are more people searching for us by name this quarter than last? If the answer is no, and you're spending on paid, something in the system isn't working.

The practical playbook: what to actually do

Putting this together, here's what it looks like in practice for a B2B company whose performance results are plateauing:

• Diagnose before you change anything. Pull your CPO trend for the last 12 months. Pull your branded search volume trend. If CPO is rising and branded search is flat, you have a demand creation problem. If CPO is fine and branded search is growing, you're probably fine. The diagnosis shapes what comes next.
• Build organic presence on LinkedIn before you scale paid. In B2B, LinkedIn is where the most buyers spend professional attention time. Your senior people posting consistently — not company page content, individual voices — creates the familiarity that makes paid campaigns more efficient. One year of consistent personal LinkedIn presence from your CEO or head of sales will move branded search. One year of company page posting probably won't.
• Be present in the communities where your buyers get peer recommendations. Reddit is increasingly where B2B buyers go to ask unfiltered questions about tools and vendors. One company Arjun spoke to drives 10% of their revenue from Reddit — not through ads, but through a team member who genuinely answers questions in relevant subreddits, transparent about who they are, almost never mentioning the company. The trust built organically makes their paid Reddit spend dramatically more efficient.
• Seed before you fuel. The newsletter sponsorship, the conference billboard, the YouTube pre-roll — these work much better when buyers have already encountered your brand somewhere. Kamil put a truck outside HubSpot's Inbound conference because 50,000 marketers were never going to be in the same place again. He didn't measure leads from it. The second and third order effects — conversations, content, proof of seriousness — were the return.
• Don't call it brand in the budget meeting. "Pipeline enablement," "demand creation," "top-of-funnel awareness" — these are the translations that get approved. The CFO doesn't want to fund brand. The CFO wants to fund future pipeline. If you frame it correctly, it's the same investment.

The companies that hit a performance marketing ceiling and keep pushing harder on performance tactics are, in Kamil's words, shooting fish in a barrel — with diminishing fish. The companies that break through it are the ones that use the plateau as a signal: you've captured the in-market demand. The next stage of growth means creating it.

That's not a brand argument. It's a pipeline argument. Which, it turns out, is exactly the framing that gets it funded.

The full data behind these findings is in Rocksalt's Signal vs. Noise: B2B Marketing Discourse Report — 6,956 LinkedIn posts, 38 influencers, 12 months.

About Rocksalt AI

Rocksalt AI helps B2B companies build awareness by leveraging their internal subject matter experts and driving organic traffic from LinkedIn and Reddit. Our Signal vs. Noise report analyzed 6,956 LinkedIn posts from 38 B2B marketing influencers between January 2025 and January 2026.

About 42Agency

42Agency is a B2B performance marketing agency working with companies in the $10M–$100M range on paid media, RevOps, and demand generation.