BEST Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Businesses 2026

The brands that are growing fastest through digital marketing and bringing in the most qualified leads and sales going into 2026 are the ones that are nailing these three digital marketing pillars. Traditional search, AI search, and brand experience. Today, we're going to break down each of these pillars and six underlying strategies that you can deploy to your digital marketing over the next year. And we're going to show you a ton of examples from our clients at Exposure Ninja where we're using these exact strategies to grow them. So, if you're planning your digital marketing strategy for the next year, stick around to the end and then you'll get the full action plan breakdown. First pillar we're going to talk about, traditional search, yes, Google is not dead. There is still a ton of traffic and buying intent on Google. In fact, Google's market share has actually been going up recently. It's back at over 90% of all search. Whilst Google is facing more competition from the likes of Chat GPT, it is still the number one most visited website in the world with 98 billion monthly visits. And as you can see, it's number one by quite some margin. And what do people do when they're on Google? Well, according to our friends over at Profound. 52.7% of the time they're looking for information. 14 12% of the time though, they are looking to buy something. So, if you want to sell stuff, you kind of want to be in front of this audience on this platform. Of course, you know it's important to rank on Google, but here are two strategies that you might not be prioritizing just yet. Firstly, getting found for high intentformational searches. And secondly, focusing on what we call your search to conversion rate. So, let's take a look at each of them in turn. Okay, so our first strategy today is topic first SEO. And this is a slightly different approach to how most businesses do SEO. We've found over the years as search engines have become more sophisticated, the key to getting found by people who are looking for information is to move away from just thinking about keyword focused SEO to instead building content systems around topics. There's a few problems with taking a really sort of old school just purely keyword approach to SEO. Firstly, you end up producing very shallow surface level content. Secondly, if you've got lots of sporadic content that you've written around different keywords, some of which are kind of similar, others aren't, you can often end up cannibalizing where your pages are competing against each other in the search results. This is particularly common for large enterprises that might have sprawling websites, sometimes across multiple different geographies. The third problem with keywordonly SEO is you often miss entire subtopics or create content gaps because you're not thinking about covering a topic from all angles. you're just thinking about creating individual pieces of content. Sometimes your audience ends up going somewhere else for the particular thing that they're looking for. Whereas a topic first SEO strategy really focuses on interconnected personadriven content systems that all link together. And it's the sort of approach that both traditional search and AI really likes to reward. But we're going to come back to the AI stuff later on. Now, that might sound like a whole bunch of jargon. So, let me give you an example. One of Exposure Ninja's clients that we've used this strategy particularly effectively is Golf Course Lawn Store. This is an e-commerce business that sells all manner of golf course lawn care products. And you probably heard us talking about them on the channel before. Now, they operate in a space dominated by e-commerce giants, the likes of Amazon. And you're never going to beat Amazon for particular product keywords. Well, sometimes we are, but it's a very difficult thing to do. What we decided to do instead was go allin on topic first SEO instead. The people buying from Golf Course Lawnstar are lawn enthusiasts. So we started by thinking what topics are these people interested in at different stages of their journey. So we think of them in a funnel. Right at the top of the funnel, you've got people who are interested in general topics like lawn care. You know, they're just getting into it. They've maybe looked at their neighbor's lawn and they've thought, "Wow, that's pretty impressive. I mean, that is seriously impressive. That makes my lawn look like the surface of the moon." This is a really detailed and comprehensive guide, but it's very top of funnel. This is for people who are just starting to dip their toes into the slippery slope of lawn care to mix a whole bunch of analogies. Now, of course, even though it's top of funnel, we're still introducing people into the idea of buying some products and we want to encourage people to buy if they're ready at this stage. So, of course, we're linking through to the relevant sections of the website. But as people get a little deeper into their lawn care journey and they move down that funnel, they start to look for specific answers to their problems, like how do I get rid of weeds? Again, this is a really comprehensive guide and it's designed for people who are maybe falling a little bit more in love with this whole lawn care thing. We start to recommend some specific products for them to go and buy from the store. And then of course, we want to cater for the people at the bottom of the funnel. These are the hardcore people. They're in so deep. They're looking for specific solutions to specific problems and they are most likely about to buy something. Here we've got a guide on the best herbicide for St. Augustine grass and we wanted to work with one on one of the most detailed guides on this particular topic that could be written. Of course, because this audience is in deeper, they're much more likely to purchase so we can include products with add to cart buttons directly in this post knowing that some people are just going to make that purchase there and then. But rather than just coming up with individual ideas and thinking, "Oh, yeah, it'd be cool to do a blog on that," or, "Yeah, we should write a guide on this." We structured everything into a knowledge base organized around certain topics. Seasonal lawn care and pest management, lawn care, how-tos and guides, weeds and diseases, pests. This meant we could be much more strategic about the topics and the subtopics that we wanted to cover. We could make sure that each of these topics was covered from multiple angles, the articles were linked to each other, and we weren't leaving any gaps. All right, Tim, how did it go? Well, this site ranks top three positions on Google for 4,874 keywords. Some of the best performing content on this site is getting hundreds of thousands of views. We're being seen consistently in AI overviews, featured snippets, and even Google Discover. In fact, one of their blogs went viral on Google Discover, picking up over 146,000 views in a single week. Yeah, but what about the money? Well, a 288% increase in revenue from organic search year. It works. So, how do you do this for yourself? Well, firstly, group your content by topics, not just isolated keywords. Secondly, map your content to the different buyer journey stages. Remember, think of that funnel, people who are just getting into your world, people who are a little bit deeper, and the people who are really deep. Don't forget to make sure that content in each topic is linking to the other pieces in that content. And also don't forget things like your authority. Making sure you're using videos or author bios, anything that you can to show Google and users that the people writing your content are true experts on this topic. And when you're measuring the performance of this stuff, measure it on a topic basis, not just individual content pieces. Of course, getting traffic to your website is all lovely, but you need to turn that traffic into money, either leads or sales. So that brings us nicely onto strategy two, which is search to conversion optimization. And by the way, this is more important than ever. With traffic fragmenting in lots of different places, you got people on chat GP, people on Publix, people on Google. We need to make sure that anybody who lands on your website has the highest possible chance of turning into some business for you. So let's go through a live example where we can talk about some of the principles deployed in search to conversion optimization. When we started working with skincare brand the ordinary, their blog and content strategy on their website was driven largely by product launches and sort of brand initiatives. In other words, they were thinking about what did they want to publish on their website rather than approaching it from what do our potential customers want to read? What are they searching for? What can we show them? So whilst taking that sort of what do we want to publish approach worked for raising awareness, it did leave some major gaps in search and meant that they weren't attracting anywhere near as much traffic as they could be to the content sections on their website. So what did we do? Well, we restructured the blog around topics. Topics like skincare routines or ingredient guides. Now, we did this because we identified that people were looking for information about skincare regimes and ingredients. And these topics really suited the ordinary because they have so many different products. You can build your regime. And because they've got such a scientific approach, they are very happy to share their authority on the performance of certain ingredients. And it's really important that the topics you choose are ones that work really well with your brand. You want to use these topics to emphasize the best things about your brand. And obviously, all of this stuff is a lot more effective if you're choosing topics that resonate with your brand and make the most of the areas that your brand is really strong. So, of course, we worked with them to create content in these topics. But we didn't just stop there. Just as you saw in the previous example, we wanted to make sure that when visitors were landing on these pages, they were going through to make a purchase. So, we did things like embed products in these posts. But to avoid these posts getting crowded, we sometimes just link through to the product pages instead. To encourage people to make a purchase, we did things like embedding products actually into the post themselves. When we wanted to help people choose between lots of different products, we link through to the product pages, giving them advice about when to choose each one. If it was a more top offunnel content piece, we might include a link to a guide or to a regimen builder instead. You've got to make sure that the things that you're pitching in your post actually make sense for where the audience is at. By helping them reposition their blog from a brandled resource to a high converting revenue machine, we're able to increase the revenue from the content section of their website by 451%. And we increase the traffic to this section of their website by over 5 times between September 2024 and February 2025. 4 and 1/2 times the revenue, 5 1/2 times the traffic in 5 months. So that's traditional search. But what about the new kid on the blog, AI search? Well, that's pillar number two. You want to be building a really strong foundation in SEO and traditional search for sure. But you also need at least one of your 100 eyes on the future, which is AI search. Now, a lot of people have taken one of two mindsets with AI search in 2025. Either you don't need to worry about AI search. Just do SEO and you'll do really well in AI. This is just not true. The other mindset is, I guess, reservation. Yeah, we know this thing's happening, but we're not really sure what to do with it or how much of a priority it is. Well, I'm here to tell you that denial is deadly and reservation is risky. This whole AI search thing is only going one way. Google's investing $85 billion in capex over the next year, primarily in AI areas to build out AI overviews, AI mode, and Gemini. So, even if you're thinking, well, I'm just going to focus on Google and traditional search, even Google's AI is coming for you. In fact, Chat GBT now gets double the number of monthly visits than Bing. And we're seeing more of our clients get more of their traffic from Chat GBT. So, you need a very deliberate strategy to target AI search in 2026 and beyond. Okay, so our strategy number three is AI search optimization. This is a game you need to be playing. Let me show you an example. Now, I'm just over on Perplexity and I've asked which investment platform is best for beginners. It has recommended me a whole bunch of different options here. And we got some well-known examples being mentioned here. But the most significant thing about this, of course, is that the UK's number one by market share and number of users is not featured in this answer. Yes, Harru's Landsdown is nowhere to be seen. All that advertising, all that marketing, all that brand awareness, no AI search optimization, invisible. So, let me show you an Exposure Ninja client that we've done this for. If you search for best iPad case on pretty much any of the AI chat platforms, you're going to end up being recommended a Zugu case. If it's not number one, it's going to be one of the top few, but most of the time it's number one. Now, they're a client of ours and we've helped them with this AI search optimization. How have we done it? Well, broadly speaking, we've done it by helping them rank in the underlying searches that are going on behind this answer. So, if you go over here, you'll see that Perplexity has searched for a bunch of different things in order to compile this answer. We've made sure that Zugu is ranking well in all of those. We've then got it featured in a whole bunch of different sources that are being pulled through to create this answer. For example, this article on Wired's website, on ZDNet, on macroomers.com. But you don't get this from just doing SEO. I'm sure Harrians spends a fortune on SEO and they're invisible in AI. So, how can you make sure that your brand is being recommended, featured, and cited more often in AI search answers? Well, firstly, you need really solid brand positioning. You need a really clear, differentiated answer that answers the questions, what are you known for and who are you for? But we're going to come back to these later on. You need a strong technical foundation to your web presence. That means clean site architecture, using schema properly, fast website performance. All of that stuff is important to be found, trusted, and understood by these AI platforms. You also need citationworthy content. You want to provide clear answers to real user questions if you can, adding in things like visuals, expert quotes, your own unique data, credible authors, and if possible, show firstirthand experience through video, case studies, stories, that type of thing. And then, of course, you need to be mentioned across the web. Increasingly, these AI tools aren't just going to your website to tell people about you. They're going to other people's websites that talk about you. In fact, age found that branded web mentions were the number one factor correlating with AI overview features. In other words, you need to be talked about everywhere. But of course, when these AI tools see you mentioned everywhere, they need to see a consistent message about your brand. This is really important, and this is completely different to anything that you've had to do in SEO before. We're going to come back to this later on though. Strategy number four is selling to Agentic AI. Until fairly recently, tools like Chat GBT have been great to help customers find products to buy, but then it's up to the customer to go and do that stuff themselves, to actually navigate to the website, make the purchase. You know, all that old school stuff that's just such a drag. Well, with the roll out of Aentic AI systems, we're now seeing these AI tools start to take on more of that process on behalf of the customers. Perplexity Pro started this way back in late 2024 when it allowed people to actually buy products through its search results. Now, these tools aren't perfect yet, but they are getting better. We also covered in a recent video Open AAI's new instant checkout mode. And it doesn't take a genius to see that a combination of agent mode and instant checkout mode could see these tools buying products on your behalf. There is a whole set of new stuff to familiarize yourself with as we move into this new world. Open AAI and Stripe have even developed a new standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol or ACP. And this powers secure tokenized payments behind the scenes. Now, there is undoubtedly going to be a bit of a land grab opportunity here where businesses that are fast to adopt these things see some great early results before everyone else piles in later on. So, we're recommending for all of our e-commerce clients that for 2026, you need to make sure that your products and your website are ready for this new world of aentic commerce. That includes things like structured product data, using product schema on every product page, real-time inventory and pricing feeds, clear detailed descriptions, ideally with data about the products as well, building in trust signals like reviews and testimonials, of course. And by the way, if you're watching this thinking, "This is all feeling a bit overwhelming. I don't really know where to start or I really want to work with a company that's on the cutting edge of this so they can just help me prioritize exactly what I need to work with." Then hello. You can request a free digital marketing review from the team here at Exposure Ninja. Just go over to our website at exposuringinja.com/re and tell us a little bit about what you're planning over the next year. Or even if you don't have any plans, just give us your goals. We'll then take a look at how you're doing at the moment. We can dig into your data. We can analyze your visibility on different platforms and we can build your prioritized action plan for the next 12 months that get you the sort of results that you've seen from our clients in this video. This service is completely free, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for it at exposioninja.com/re. Our third pillar is brand experience. Now, when you say brand, most people think of Apple or Starbucks. They think, "Yeah, Tim, we're not really a brand cuz we make pipe insulation or warehouse racking." Maybe so. But where digital marketing and AI are going, every business needs to think of itself and position itself like a brand. That's because both humans and AIs seem to be increasingly turning to brands. Why? Well, that leads us on to strategy five, nailing your branding and positioning. Now, when I mention branding, you might think, "Yeah, Tim, thanks. We're happy with our logo. Don't need to worry about this." But this is not that. We talked earlier about how branding and positioning are foundational to your visibility and your likelihood of being recommended in AI search, but this is also happening in traditional search now as well. When AI tools like chat GBT or regular search has AI overviews, what these tools are doing is scouring the entire internet looking for recommendations. They are going and doing the research for their users about which products and services and brands to recommend. And what are they looking for? They're looking for a consistent message about each company. So, if your pipe insulation manufacturer is well known for producing the highest performing insulation for its thickness on the market, you are much more likely to be recommended by an AI tool or an AI feature in traditional search than competitor brands which are much more generic and aren't really known for anything, even if they have better overall visibility than you. If on the other hand, your positioning is a bit fuzzy or inconsistent, you're much more likely to just be left out of that recommendation entirely. Let's look at another client example, US mortgage lenders. Well, according to this data, in 2023, there were 5,113 home loan lenders in the US. How on earth do you stand out in that market? Well, you do it by having a crystalclear proposition, a very specific audience, and being seen across the internet mentioning that very specific proposition and that very specific audience. This is exactly what we worked on with our client DSLD Mortgage. When they came to us, they had a really outdated website and they were relying on their sister company for all their leads. They didn't really have any sort of digital presence at all. But instead of rushing straight into SEO or Google ads, we worked with them on strategy. We did something called our brand and positioning accelerator which does a deep dive into who the customer personas are, where the competitors sit in the market, and what sort of position we can take in all of this to make sure that we really stand out. And by the way, this branding and positioning accelerator is the first thing that we do with all of the companies that we buy as well because if you get this right, everything else becomes easier. So we worked with them on their different customer personas, mapping out the different motivations, pain points, and the levels of financial literacy. We also work with them on their messaging. What we really want to do with the messaging side of things is be able to answer the question, why DSLD and why? Now, if we can get a really clear, compelling answer to those questions, we can use that across every different customer touch point. This meant when it came to redesigning the website, we knew exactly who we were designing for and the message that we wanted to convey. And by the way, this brand and positioning accelerator is one of the most popular services that we offer at Exposure Ninja. It is completely amazing and I've personally been through this process twice as a client with both of the renewables businesses that we've bought. Just look at the detail it goes through. Firstly, it goes through customers and competitors. So, who are we selling to and who are we up against in the market? How are they positioning themselves? We get this full breakdown of each different buyer persona, showing us what's most important to them, what sort of things are going to resonate most with them. We then get this conversion analysis which seeks to answer the question, what can we offer these people in order to get them to take action. If necessary, we do a full refresh of all the visual elements of the brand, logos, color schemes, that type of thing. Then we got the crucial piece which is the messaging. What do we need to say to people? We'll also design a tone of voice framework so that everyone in the organization knows how the brand talks. Now, if that sounds really weird, trust me, it's a lot less weird than not having a tone of voice framework. And then finally at the end we get some recommendations. This is a really killer service. If you're interested in working with Exposure Ninja then click the link in the description to go and check out the branding and positioning accelerator. Now strategy six is taking this work that's been done and making it a multi- channelannel experience. Tim, what does that mean? Sounds like jargon. Okay, your audience isn't just on Google. They're not just on chat GPT. They're on a few different places. They're likely everywhere. And ideally, you need to make sure that you are in those places as well. Now, this isn't about just spreading yourself thin and doing the bare minimum on each channel just so that you can say you're everywhere. But what this is about is making sure that you have different touch points with a customer, making sure they've been on your website, they then see your ad on Facebook or they get an email from you in their email inbox. Omnisend found a 287% purchase rate increase when brands use three or more channels to reach their customers. And because you've got that great brand and positioning framework, when they do find you on each of these different platforms, they're seeing a similar sort of visual style. They're seeing similar tone of voice. They're getting the same message reinforced. This might sound really obvious. Of course, we sound the same in all platforms, but of course, you might know that as the organization gets bigger and as you get more channels and there's more people involved, it's increasingly different to nail brand consistency across all of these different places and to actually connect these different channels so they all move the customer through in one direction. Going back to the DSLD mortgage example, this wasn't just about doing the research and building them a website that spoke to their audience. We also needed a multi- channelannel digital marketing strategy that backed this up to move people along to inquiry. We blended Google ads, meta ads, SEO focused content, AI search optimization, and email marketing to make sure that DSLD was present and visible on every relevant channel that their audience spent time on. Because when somebody is thinking about a mortgage, ideally you want to reach them from every different angle. But when you do reach them, you need that experience to be consistent. So what happened? Well, 11,410 qualified mortgage leads in 12 months happened. Okay, ready to build your 2026 plan? Grab a pen. Let's go. Strategy number one, get found on traditional search by building topic focused content ecosystems. Strategy number two, making sure every visitor counts by working on your search to conversion optimization. Strategy number three, increase the number of times you're recommended and cited by tools like AI overviews, chat GBT, and Perplexity by optimizing your website content, your site itself, and your web presence. Get those tools selling your brand. Strategy number four, particularly if you're e-commerce, make sure that your website and your products are ready for aentic commerce. This looks like it's happening and there are some new things that you need to be doing. Contact the team at Exposure Ninja if you need help. Strategy number five is define who you are and why people should buy from you. This sounds really simple, but actually we've noticed that the larger the company often the more difficult they find this, but this is really important. It's a key pillar moving forward in the future of digital marketing and AI. And then strategy number six is taking all of that and making sure that you deliver a consistent experience across all of the different digital channels that you're using. Hope you've enjoyed this video. Don't forget to request your free digital marketing review from the team at Exposure Ninja. Go to exposureninja.com/re and watch this video if you want to learn more about the top SEO strategies to use in 2026 and beyond.