B2B Marketing Trends

Branding in B2B is more important than ever. That's a fact...or better yet, facts! B2B marketing was once all about facts, figures, and rational decision-making. Creativity? That was for B2C. But in 2025, the game has changed. B2B and B2C buyers are the same humans, driven by emotions first, logic second. That’s why brand is now a company’s most valuable asset. Marketing Week reports a major shift: in 2021, lead generation ranked as the 3rd most important B2B strategy, now it’s 7th. Meanwhile, brand awareness jumped from 6th to the top priority in 2024. For years, B2B companies relied on product-first strategies, dropping most of the cash into short-term lead generation. But as differentiation becomes near impossible, with features and offerings being nearly identical, the real competitive edge isn’t what you sell, it’s how you make customers feel. AKA B R A N D. Why Brand Wins Over Product - IBM vs. cheaper alternatives? Trust. - Salesforce dominates CRM? Familiarity. Why do buyers choose one car over another with the same specs? Once again B R A N D. Branding isn’t about logos or colours; it’s about trust, credibility, and being top of mind at the right moment. But why invest in brand? - Reduces risk perception: A strong brand makes buyers feel safer choosing you. - Shortens sales cycles: Familiar brands require less convincing. - Attracts top talent: People want to work for admired brands. - Creates pricing power: Strong brands command higher prices. - Future proofs your business: Products get copied. Brands endure. 4 Key steps to build a strong B2B srand: 1: Shift from product to purpose to benefit. Stop marketing what you do. Start marketing why it matters. IBM helps businesses ‘Build Smarter Businesses.’ HubSpot helps them ‘Grow Better.’ Your brand purpose should be at the core of your ecosystem. 2: Tell better stories. People remember stories, not specs. Case studies, success stories, and founder journeys humanize your brand and build trust. 3: Invest in distinctive assets Logos, colours, taglines, music... and so on, they create instant recognition. Think Salesforce’s blue cloud, Slack’s multicolour hashtag, or AWS’s signature orange. 4: Play the long game brand building isn’t a quick win, it’s a long-term strategy. Top-of-funnel activities now drive more financial value than performance marketing, with CMOs allocating 51%+ of their budgets accordingly (Marketing Week). If branding is still an afterthought for your B2B strategy, it’s time to rethink or prepare to fade into irrelevancy very soon...In life, the best product doesn’t always win. The best brand does.

The future of footwear may not be manufactured in bulk. It may be fabricated around you. That is what makes this shift so interesting to me. 3D-printed footwear is moving from novelty to a real industrial model, with market forecasts pointing to rapid growth over the next decade. At the same time, brands and manufacturers are using additive manufacturing, digital design, and custom-fit workflows to shorten development cycles and make more personalized products viable. What is new here is not just the printer. It is the system around it: → scan the foot → model the fit digitally → print the part on demand → produce closer to the customer That matters. Because once footwear becomes data-driven and locally fabricated, several things change fast: → fit gets more personal → prototyping gets faster → waste drops because you do not overproduce → inventory pressure falls because you do not need to guess demand the same way To me, that is the bigger signal. This is not just about a better sneaker. It is about a different manufacturing logic. Formlabs notes that 3D printing already enables customized orthotics with better biomechanical precision, lower material waste, and simpler digital workflows. McKinsey has also pointed to digitization and 3D design as a way to shorten design cycles and reduce sampling iterations in apparel and footwear. And once that logic matures, the use cases get much bigger: → custom athletic footwear built from gait and pressure data → hospitals producing orthotics faster and closer to the patient → micro-factories making products on demand instead of stocking shelves → footwear designed for one body, not an average body That is why I think this matters now. The question is no longer whether personalized fabrication is possible. It is whether brands move fast enough before customers start expecting every product to fit like it was made only for them. Would you actually wear a shoe fabricated around your own biometric data? #AI #3DPrinting #Footwear #Manufacturing #Innovation #FutureOfWork #RetailTech #Customization #Technology

The shift from seats to agents pressures SaaS margins. At the same time, the longstanding practice of getting enterprise customers to pre-commit and also prepay for functionality they may never deploy will get harder as CIOs look to free budget for their own LLM costs. To weather the storm, some SaaS companies have increased prices. This boosts revenue and margins in the short-term but can't be done repeatedly and creates even greater scrutiny over shelfware as procurement teams right-size and shift contracts to "pay as you go." To achieve sustainable growth, SaaS companies need to become hyperefficient at sales and marketing. Here are common ways to do so and who's doing it well: 1. PLG. Shopify and Atlassian exemplify efficient go-to-market based on product-led growth with free trials, low-friction upgrades and upsells. Their sales teams only need to get involved in the biggest opportunities at the largest accounts; every other step in acquisition, commercial transaction, activation, onboarding, and growth is self-service and automated. 2. Vertical SaaS. Guidewire Software and Veeva Systems are laser-focused on insurance and life sciences, respectively. Rather than casting a wide net, they spear-fish with deep domain knowledge and purpose-built solutions for that industry's specific workflows and regulatory requirements. Guidewire doesn't need to buy Super Bowl ads– their annual customer conference is the Super Bowl for property & casualty insurance executives. Nearly zero GTM effort is wasted– unsurprisingly they're the two most efficient on the list. We modeled Hearsay Systems after both these companies, and this focus allowed us to win incredible market share among Fortune 500 banks & insurers despite only raising $60M in totality. 3. Relocate operations to lower-cost regions and AI. This is private equity's favorite playbook to take costs out of companies they buy. Field sales continues to shift more to Zoom, which means you can hire AEs anywhere. Inside sales contributes a greater % of revenue as PLG motions are established. AI handles top-of-funnel leads qualification and generating marketing content and campaigns. 4. Focus on gross revenue retention. Because of high customer acquisition costs in #SaaS, leaky buckets are margin killers. Use LLMs to help customer success teams analyze product usage, segment cohorts, and identify opportunities to increase value realization. Put in guardrails to prevent sales reps from overselling an account, as doing so only creates churn in the next renewal cycle. 5. Introduce another product line. This only works if your new product has the same buyer as your existing products. Many SaaS acquisition pro formas fail to actualize for this reason, as it's not actually feasible to have the same AE sell both old and new products. Every SaaS company right now needs to double down on one or more of these levers in the AI era.

Trends I'm currently observing in B2B SaaS: 1. Everyone and their mother is rushing to get their product AI-powered. Or is it AI-solution? Or AI-platform? Pick your poison. 2. AI features often require changes in customer behavior to be fully effective. Self-serve experiences struggle to accommodate these shifts, making human involvement frequently necessary. Sales and Support teams - it is your time to shine! Is PLG dead then (again)? Nah. But it's not always the preferred path. 3. There’s little understanding of how much AI actually deteriorates margins because... AI is so expensive and SaaS businesses are not used to deal with such costly 'things'. Move over astronomical AWS bills; there's a new, costly AI kid in town. 4. Freemium and free trials are hard to justify with AI costs. Paid and credit card–required trials are making a big comeback. 5. As AI costs change, companies will need to adjust their pricing... a lot. Having a platform that allows pricing experimentation will be key to success. 6. Product teams will need to get hands-on in owning pricing models for their features. SaaS is no longer 80%-margin candyland. Product teams will need to control costs and play a much more active role in pricing and packaging. 7. The rush to AI means many products will offer overlapping features, making it difficult to stand out. PMM-I feel your pain already... 8. Too many products are rushing to ride the AI wave by acting as simple ChatGPT wrappers with no proprietary functionality. This positions OpenAI (and others) to use these products as proof of concept, allowing them to observe user behavior (while getting paid!). Eventually, they can build competing functionality themselves and shut off API access whenever they choose. OpenAI giveth, and it can taketh away. 9. AI definitely feels reminiscent of the dot-com boom: exciting, but inevitably likely heading for a crash. #b2b #ai

Marketing in the AI era is a game of extremes. Average no longer cuts it. Only two types of marketers will thrive: - Standout Creatives who craft unforgettable creative. - Engineer-led Marketers who leverage AI to personalize and scale like never before. Why? Software is multiplying, but distribution is shrinking. Attention is scarce, and generic is invisible. We're entering the era of value: - Better software, lower costs - Better marketing, lower costs To win, you must deliver extreme value—either through remarkable creative or precise, AI-driven personalization. Everything in between is becoming irrelevant. The middle will disappear fast.

The hottest job in B2B marketing right now is the VP of Revenue Marketing. Two years ago this would have been VP of Demand Generation. In just the past week I've talked to four CMOs who are prioritizing a VP of Revenue Marketing role as a key member of their leadership team. The differences and shifts in organizational and go-to-market philosophy represented here are significant for companies hoping to grow and scale profitably in the quarters and years to come. To me it signals four things happening in B2B marketing (all positive signs): 1️⃣ It's a recognition that demand alone is short-sighted. Focusing on near-term direct pipeline alone is expensive and misses the nuances of an increasingly advanced and complex buying journey and buying group dynamic. Demand generation alone also fails to coordinate consensus building and influence from inside and outside the buying group. - partners, peer groups and more. 2️⃣ It recognizes that revenue comes from far more than just net-new leads. We have some clients that focus 90% of their efforts on their customer base. The concept of scrambling for net-new leads outside of their core target market would be inefficient and borderline negligent. 3️⃣ It means more CMOs are focused on the entire marketing function, not just "promotion". In all too many cases in the recent past, the CMO WAS the VP of Demand Generation. The role in some orgs had been reduced to tomorrow's leads and this week's new pipeline. Thankfully today's advanced Chief Market officers are leaning into product roadmap leadership, product/market fit, brand management and more. Back to the roots of successful marketing leadership, as some may say. 4️⃣ It validates that “lifecycle revenue marketing” is outperforming… and org charts are catching up. Forrester’s work on lifecycle revenue marketing shows advanced teams are more likely to meet/exceed revenue goals than siloed teams. Lifecycle + orchestration + accountability is becoming the model—so companies are hiring the executive who can build it. 5️⃣ It reflects how "self-serve" is moving upmarket, putting website + lifecycle in the revenue path. Forrester predicts that more than half of $1M+ B2B transactions will be processed through digital self-serve channels (vendor site or marketplace). That’s not “demand gen.” That’s revenue infrastructure: conversion paths, nurture, expansion, product-led signals, and orchestration. 

15 moats to choose from. Corporate creators unlock 14 of them. I studied 50 B2B SaaS companies the ones that went from zero to $10M ARR in under 1 year The pattern was unexpected: No influencer budget → Yet viral growth No sales team → Yet enterprise deals No ad spend → Yet category leaders No PR agency → Yet media coverage Their secret? They partnered with corporate creators. The Corporate Creator Advantage: →That senior engineer posting about your API beats your $50K developer conference booth. →That data scientist's LinkedIn thread outperforms your $100K Google Ads campaign. →That product manager's newsletter drives more MQLs than your entire content team. Corporate creators aren't generic influencers they're trust accelerators. The proof is undeniable: → Notion grew through employees-turned-creators sharing workspace setups, not ads → Linear scaled via engineers documenting their workflows, not sales calls → Vercel exploded through developers teaching deployments, not marketing campaigns Here's the multiplier effect: Corporate creators unlock EVERY other moat: Network Effects → Their audience becomes your first 1,000 power users Switching Costs → They create tutorials that embed you in workflows Brand Moat → They lend their credibility to your unknown startup Engagement → They seed communities with actual practitioners Not influencers. Not celebrities. Domain experts with day jobs. The uncomfortable math → Average B2B company page reach: 2% Average corporate creator reach: 20-30% Their engagement rate: 8x higher ↑ Their trust score: 87% vs 31% ↑ Their content cost: $0 kinda (it's what they do everyday) In 2025, every successful SaaS company has this playbook: Find 10 corporate creators in your space ↓ Partner before they hit 10K followers ↓ Give them insider access, not just money ↓ Watch them become your distribution moat ↑ Which corporate creators in your industry would you partner with? (Hint: They're probably reading this right now)

Here's the number that should reframe every B2B marketing team's LinkedIn strategy: only 3% of employees share content about their company, but those shares generate roughly 30% of a brand's total engagement on the platform. A distribution architecture most teams are ignoring. Meanwhile, your company page is reaching about 1.6% of your followers. LinkedIn replaced its entire ranking system with 360Brew, a 150-billion-parameter AI model that reads content semantically. It's no longer counting likes. It's evaluating expertise, professional context, and whether engagement signals real value. Andddd Corporate broadcasting didn't make the cut. It gets more consequential. 64% of hidden decision-makers (finance, legal, procurement, compliance) trust thought leadership content over marketing materials... (yes, it's happening!!) These are the people influencing deals who never show up in your CRM. Employee voices on personal profiles are the only mechanism that reaches them at scale. As we see by the parade of people posting the same company media... most advocacy programs are breaking down bc they optimize for posting frequency when the real gap is having something coherent to say. Twenty employees posting in twenty different directions is noise. Twenty employees who understand the brand's point of view and can articulate it in their own voice The AI layer makes this urgent. LinkedIn is now the second most-cited domain across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. What your employees post is becoming the source material for how AI systems describe your brand and your industry. No employee voice on LinkedIn means you're invisible to the AI discovery layer that B2B buyers increasingly use to build shortlists. Ten employees with brand clarity will outperform a hundred with a content calendar and a Slack reminder. The platform has already decided. The question is whether your team has. Full piece via State of Brand : https://lnkd.in/gwef6SWk

I’m extremely bullish on account-based GTM motions in 2026. As AI makes generic outreach cheap and ubiquitous, differentiation comes from precision, relevance, and deep context around a small set of high-value accounts. This sounds wonderful on paper until it’s time to set up a modern account-based GTM engine. IYKYK. For help I turned to Dan Rosenthal from Workflows.io. They’ve set up 250+ GTM systems including dozens of ABX implementations over the past year. Dan put together what I think is the most comprehensive & useful guide to *modern* ABM with HubSpot, Claude Code, Clay & best-of-breed tech. Read the full deep dive in Growth Unhinged here: https://lnkd.in/eyF9bgyb There are 7 steps — follow these in this order: 1️⃣ TAM & stakeholder mapping Dan recommends combining 3+ data sources to reach 90%+ of TAM coverage w/o blowing through your budget. AI research agents help qualify the list based on website content & do the merge/de-dupe. 2️⃣ Account research Most companies Dan works with gather 30+ custom data points with Claude Code & MCPs. Some interesting ones: closest coffee shop next to their office, competitor tech usage. 3️⃣ CRM cleanup & enrichment Nobody’s favorite step, but you can’t skip it. 4️⃣ Signal tracking Intent signals are hot. Reps also don’t trust a lot of them. And many signals have commoditized. The most valuable signals are from your first party data (website visitors, gated content, product usage, event attendance, outreach replies, etc.). 5️⃣ Awareness scoring If you embrace ABX, you need a way to see where you stand with your target accounts (no, MQLs/SQLs don’t work). Identified > Aware > Interested > Considering > Evaluating. 6️⃣ Demand generation With the scoring in place, reps can focus on the warmest accounts who already show interest. Use a mix of 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many campaigns. (Pro-tip: Dan says event invites have been a great CTA in outbound.) 7️⃣ ICP pipeline progression reporting Success can be harder to quantify w/o an arbitrary MQL goal. The upside: you’re now collecting far richer data about what resonates with your target accounts. — I hope you find this guide as useful as I do. Let me know what you think 🙏 -KP

Answer to :"Don’t Know What to Post on LinkedIn” :: 1. Define Your Content Pillars: 📌 Growth – Build your network, attract new followers. 📌 Authority – Showcase expertise, position yourself as a thought leader. 📌 Sales – Convert leads into paying clients/customers. Example: 📌 If you're a freelance designer → Talk about branding trends (Growth), share case studies (Authority), and offer design packages (Sales). 📌 If you're a startup founder → Share lessons from your journey (Growth), industry insights (Authority), and how your product solves a major problem (Sales). 📌 If you're a career coach → Post job market insights (Growth), success stories (Authority), and promote your coaching programs (Sales). 2. Create Engaging Hooks: 📌 Growth Hook: "I started with ZERO connections. Today, my content reaches 1M+ people. Here’s how I did it." 📌 Authority Hook: "Over the past 5 years, I’ve helped 200+ businesses grow. Here are the top 3 mistakes they ALL made." 📌 Sales Hook: "How I helped a client go from struggling to get leads to closing $50K/month in sales—without paid ads." 3. Never Run Out of Content Again – Ask These Questions Ask yourself: ✅ What services do I offer? ✅ What mistakes have I made (and learned from)? ✅ What wins can I share? ✅ What do clients frequently ask me? ✅ What industry myths need debunking? ✅ What case studies can I highlight? ✅ What’s a surprising lesson from my journey? ✅ What’s the best advice I’ve ever received? Example: 📌 If you’re a freelancer, talk about how you landed your first client. 📌If you’re in tech, share a behind-the-scenes look at a product launch. 📌If you’re in sales, discuss the biggest objection you hear—and how to overcome it. Your experiences = your content goldmine. 4. Use Proven Content Frameworks Instead of overthinking, plug your ideas into these structures: 📌PAIS Framework (Pain, Agitate, Ideal, Solution) Example: ❌Pain: “Most people struggle to grow on LinkedIn.” 🔥 Agitate: “They post content but get zero engagement.” 💡 Ideal: “Imagine having inbound leads & opportunities daily.” ✅ Solution: “Here’s a 3-step framework that changed everything for me.” 📌Zero-to-Hero Framework Example: "I was rejected by 50 companies. Then I cracked a strategy that landed me a dream job in 3 months. Here’s what I changed." 📌Carousel Post Structure 1️⃣ Hook Slide: “Struggling to get engagement on LinkedIn?” 2️⃣ Context Slide: “Most people make these 3 mistakes…” 3️⃣ Breakdown Slide: “Here’s how to fix it…” 4️⃣ Results Slide: “What happened when I applied this…” 5️⃣ CTA Slide: “Follow for more LinkedIn tips!” 📌 Cheat Sheet Format 🎯 Pick one topic. 🎯 Use simple, actionable tips. 🎯 Keep the design clean (max 2 fonts) 5. Final Tip: Show Up Consistently You don’t need a viral post to win on LinkedIn. You need consistency. Post value, engage with your audience, and trust the process. #linkedin #linkedintips #personalbranding