How To Create a Results-Driving B2B Marketing Strategy for 2026

Welcome to the Dojo, a search marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. This week, we're going to be talking about how to create a results driving B2B marketing strategy for 2026. I'm joined by Charlie Martin, our CEO, as well as Tim Cameron Kitchen, Exposure Ninja's founder. I want to get us started by asking, well, where do we start with creating a resultsdriven B2B marketing strategy? I think with B2B you have to decide your ICP and that's where you have to start and that is both your your graphics the actual profiles of the companies you're going after but it's also understanding the roles and the people within that company as well. I think one of the big big pitfalls with B2B marketing is thinking like I'm just going after this kind of business but actually everyone in that business is a human they are a person and you are actually going after specific people. So sometimes that might be procurement. You're a supplier. It's a little bit more transactional. But actually sometimes you are going after someone specific in the business. It might be CFO, CMO, CEO sometimes as well. And you need to market towards that person and their pain points and their needs. And if you only think about the kinds of businesses, how much revenue they're making, what niches they're in, and you haven't thought about the roles and the actual people and what drives them within the organization, it's going to be very difficult to build a B2B marketing strategy that's actually successful. On top of that, would you extend that all the way through to the decision committee? So often in B2B sales there's a group of people involved in the sales process where there's the initial contact point then there's maybe a CFO who needs to be brought in there's a line manager or key stakeholders too. Does the marketing have to market to all those different people and their decision making um process for example the CFO is just thinking about the money just thinking about okay how much is it going to cost and how much are we going to get out the back end. Whereas maybe somebody who's in the marketing leadership team might be thinking, "Yeah, but what's that look like in terms of lead generation?" Does my marketing therefore need to try and say all of those different kinds of things or do we just talk to that first point of contact? I mean, the first point of contact is going to be the most important to actually get in the marketing funnel. Otherwise, you don't have your foot in the door at all. What I would say about all of the other stakeholders is they definitely need to be considered. And what you should be thinking is, how do I make sure I don't turn them off when they look at my website, when they look at my ads, when they look at my marketing? Because realistically, what's probably going to happen is they're going to go straight to your website once they've been referred internally. Once that initial point of contact person has then referred the business, they're going to go look at your website. Then they're probably going to get retargeting ads. They're going to get LinkedIn ads. Suddenly, they're going to start seeing your business all over the shop. And if that marketing is totally irrelevant to them, it is going to be quite difficult to then push the decision through within that business. So you do need to think about how your targeting works when you're working B2B. And I also think once you've got that initial contact through the door, the front-end marketing has done most of its job, but then you kind of have that next level which is the conversations that they have and having the right stakeholders in the room with your sales team and how you nurture them from there. And that you can do that by doing things like separate types of webinars that you put out that they might then see that then might be relevant to them. those kinds of things you can make more specific because if you have a webinar title that's like about CFOs, it's going to appeal to the CFOs in general. So, I don't think you need to, you know, try and make your website do absolutely everything for everyone, but you do need to be quite specific in how marketing funnels work and thinking about how those stakeholders might interact with your business's marketing once they've heard about you. And this can also be about arming the advocate in the client's in your target company with enough material that they can then send out to those other people as well which might have different decision criteria to your advocates. Like I guess there's an initial piece here working out what are the objections, what are the decision um decision points that not just the lead your advocate is going to have but working out what what are the other boxes that need to be ticked in the organization and making sure all of that is catered to. Whether that's making sure your sales team knows how to have that conversation to give that advocate the oneline description of what it is that you do that's really going to appeal to the CFO or you know whatever it needs to be but you need to have an awareness. You can't just be looking at the organization as a single person as Charlie says. I've got a great example of this as well. So one password which is a password management system. They essentially encrypt passwords for your business. So any business that's got online operations hopefully has one and if you don't then get one and I would recommend one password. Not affiliated in any way but they have a fantastic process for this where they know that the person that's going to be contacting them is either going to be CEO and small business who needs to sort this out. They're the person responsible for the data security or it's going to be some kind of data security officer within that organization. and it's going to be cyber security team, IT team, that kind of person who actually needs to go and find the supplier. And what then they have is comparisons against other tools. So they arm that person with this is the cost comparison, the monthly subscription fees of us versus Last Pass versus other passwords management tools. And here's a breakdown of what you actually get in a really simple sort of checklist format so that someone who isn't offay with all of the different types of encryption or doesn't work in it and that's not their space can look at that and understand because they know the first question the finance person is going to have is well is there not a cheaper alternative to this? Why wouldn't we go with a cheaper alternative? but they might not always necessarily be able to get that finance person on the phone because they've got better things to do in the business than coming on and speaking to the team at the password management software that are trying to sell you. So when when Tim's talking about arming the advocate is actually thinking about okay what have they got to get through and one of the great things that one password did was ask which stakeholders are you going back to in the business now? What questions do you think those stakeholders might have for you? how long do you need before we have our next meeting after you've spoken to those stakeholders. They're like moving you through the buying journey, but they're also almost training that advocate to have the right conversations internally because they've actually had a conversation with you about the information you need before you've even gone back to the internal stakeholder whose sign up you're about to get. It seems to me that B2B marketing is a lot about sales enablement. like how you provide the market marketing materials necessary to make the sales team's job easier. Does that mean that the marketing team's time and maybe resource dedication should be towards creating this marketing material or should it be more focused and maybe the priority mix? The split is on lead generation on brand awareness. Should it be that end or is it a balance? You need both. If you don't have anything generating leads, who are you giving the marketing materials to? Then you've just got a whole suite of beautiful decks and assets that are totally useless to anyone because you don't have any leads. So, there definitely needs to be a balance. And I think really B2B businesses learn that over time based on how many leads they've got coming through and understanding why they lost leads and where those leads fell off, which is very difficult to get information on. But if you actually have a process of trying to get your sales team to say, okay, who did you go ahead with? Why didn't you go ahead with us? That can really help with giving a bit of direction to the marketing team to understand the assets that are needed. Because otherwise, the marketing team might also just be guessing because they're not the ones having those frontline conversations to understand all of those internal stakeholders and what needs to go across the line. So that does also need to come from the sales team. It seems to me like there are a lot of touch points as you said beforehand like the marketing team has to be responsible for all of it and can you try and assist as best it can but surely that makes it really hard to really know how well that's working. You can have these conversations but how can you track it all? It seems like there are a lot of things to track or should you just literally be looking at leading and lagging indicators of this is how many impressions we're our content is getting in uh Google for example this how many clicks we're getting there this how many impressions we're getting via social impressions via video marketing as well and then attaching okay these are the MQLs SQLs and and everything else do you ignore the other touch points and try not to measure it or is it business dependent I think you want the best type of measurement that you can get without becoming obsessed with it. And that kind of goes back to having really clear objectives, which for the marketing team is probably going to be MQL's, SALS, sales accepted leads. And then they do need to know the number of SQLs, the number of qualified leads that the sales team are like, we can actually sell to this person. But in reality, their metrics are going to be closer to things like the number of marketing leads that they can get through, number of MQLs and SALS. But then you do want to be tracking things like your customer retention, your lifetime value of those internally to understand which leads that you closed made the biggest impact to the business's revenue and bottom line. And when it comes to you're kind of touching on attribution, like how do we know exactly where these leads come came from? That wasn't just Google Analytics reporting that the last touch was a Google ad, for example. And then I think you just need to have a good idea of what channels did our leads interact with, what touch points are there existing, and if I turn this off, would it affect the rest of my pipeline that I actually need to keep it going? And usually, so for example, if you turn off Google Ads for one day, you'll probably see it impact your pipeline if you usually get leads every day, even if that isn't usually the last touch point because that's it. It it tends to be there's multiple things that a buyer is looking at on a B2B journey. Tim, obviously you've been running involved with Exposure Ninja for over a decade at this point. You've seen B2B marketing change quite a lot. Are you seeing any or preparing for any changes in how B2B marketing might work in 2026? For example, like I imagine at the beginning there was a lot of direct mail that you were doing, you know, magazine advertisements. Do you think that that kind of stuff is still present and can still work within a complex but you know revol results driving B2B marketing strategy? I'm not that old. Um, so I guess we've been doing the B2B marketing show is one that we've um that we've been at for about 10 years. And I'd say actually I don't know how much has changed. I I think certainly in when it comes to B2B digital there's a lot more attempt to track and measure the performance of each touch point and obviously the standard has raised generally right if you were doing email marketing 10 years ago then you were pretty good um whereas that's now sort of a definite expected thing I think something that no one is or not many people are really thinking about is that a lot of decision making is now happening um using tools like chat GPT where you know even a simple decision we can throw in transcripts and sales proposals from different options and we could ask these tools to go and do deep research into possible um possible suppliers. So I would expect that there is a lot more of that stuff going on behind the scenes. There's no data. I don't think that we can say that this is happening, but um you can have these tools go and do a bit more research for you than you definitely would have done previously. So, I think that's a vote in the AI search optimization column to make sure that you're you're always appearing in those conversations if they're happening. But I don't personally I don't see the core of B2B marketing having changed that much in the last decade. Maybe I'm just old though. Maybe it's all happening in Tik Tok DMs and I'm just not aware of it. Charlie, you've obviously been speaking a lot over the past year, some big conferences like you Moscon just recently about the changes in search behavior, how people are behaving differently. They're doing this supplier research differently. The when you've been doing these, you obviously been having conversations with some key uh B2B marketing leaders. How are they thinking about the changes that they can expect in 2026? I would say the majority of B2B marketing leaders are a little bit obsessed that they know their customers are comparing them in LLM and particularly ChatBT is the one that gets referenced quite a lot. Um because I think it can be really difficult to actually compare suppliers and it's also really time consuming when you're trolling around the internet like trying to read reviews of different CRM or different SEO softwares and particularly if it's not your main ballpark that the tool or the business or the service that you're trying to find is not necessarily your day job. You might not know all of them and you're especially with software. No one at work wants to spend their whole day looking at demos for five different versions of the same tool, five different versions of the same password manager. I tell you that from personal experience. So I I think that making like a lot of people are now Yeah. making those decisions, having those conversations within CHBT because ultimately when you're at work, you need to get something across the line. you need the tool, the service, the software, the person, the agency, whatever it is to actually get the thing you need across the line. So, you're going to have to make a purchase most of the time. You're in the situation where you need to find the supplier and you want that process to be as easy as possible and you want to know that the supplier you choose is going to do what you need them to do and that they're going to do it effectively. And part of that journey I think also comes into other areas of the business like customer service. Like if the sales process or the marketing process as well is a nightmare, you're just going to assume the customer service will be a nightmare. And particularly if you are looking for a new software or tool, you do not want it to be a nightmare to speak to the customer service team for things that you need functioning in the business. And the larger the business, the bigger the scale of that problem becomes. So making the right decision is extremely important. And AIs like ChatBT just make that comparison so much easier because they do pull through all of those review sites. They pull through Reddit. They pull through Quora. They pull through G2 all of that stuff and then actually give you the summary that you need so that you don't have to read 20 plus pages and go through five plus demos of things online. I did a search just yesterday for an AI search visibility tracking tool. I did a very simple search in chatb and said what are the rough prices for these tools and it only spat out like four lines or three of those lines were the name of like three of the tools and how much they cost per month is is there not a concern that a lot of the stuff that we need people to see around brand messaging and positioning all that kind of stuff that's not going to be seen and should therefore I personally would be terrified of the idea of people only seeing the price and not hearing everything else that they should do about me. What would you say to anyone who's probably feeling the same? I'd I'd say that that wasn't a particularly useful response um for for that for that query really. And I think as tools like chat GPT develop more memory and allow the user to ask much longer and more complex and more detailed queries. I don't think only the surface level information getting through is going to be the main issue. For example, let's say that you've got a meeting internally in your team to choose a new CRM and you have a discussion with the sales team, you got people from marketing, you got people from, you know, high up in the company and they're all talking about this thing, right? You just take that transcript, throw it into chatt and say, "What are my options? Go and research. Go and find me." it will go and look at 300 websites, pull out the recommendations and break it down for your situation specifically. I think with important decisions, it's that sort of workflow that I think we need to be thinking about in the future. Yeah, of course, some someone's just going to go and ask Chat GP, what's the best sales CRM for marketing agencies? For sure, that that will happen, but people will quickly learn that that's not going to give them the best and most tailored response. So, what do we as marketers do with that? Well, we need to make sure that there is as much information about our products, our services, case studies, customer examples, testimonials, reviews, features, comparisons. We just in the early days of SEO, we used to say that SEO was about taking the knowledge from inside your business and putting it online in a way that makes Google want to recommend you. I think that entire thing is true. we just substitute Google for chat GPT and the name of the game will be just getting as much info about your business and every aspect of what you do online so that when chat GPT is going and doing that research and looking at 500 websites to recommend the best marketing uh sales CRM or whatever it's got enough info there to recommend you. So I think people will learn not to hopefully in the chat tools will learn not to give terrible line answers like that. I also think it's very unlikely that someone would make the decision direct from the chat tool. So even if sometimes chat GBT does link to websites and same with other LLM sometimes it doesn't. Quite often it doesn't still. But if it had made a list of CRM, for example, HubSpot, Monday.com, Salesforce, and it didn't link them, the average person's going to highlight that, rightclick, Google search it, and go onto that website. And then you've got them. Most smart B2B businesses have then got something like lead forensics set up, and they can see who just came onto the website, what company they came from, and then bam, that's it. You're in their marketing funnel already. So yeah, they're not seeing the the brand, the front face of the brand in LLM answers, but I think it's very very unlikely someone would convert without also coming to the website and seeing some of that brand, gaining some of that brand recognition from there. I was just thinking of all the different iterations you can go like trying to make sure that you are covering all these different bases like how There's a lot to cover now it feels with B2B marketing because you do have this new addition of this additional layer that's kind of before the buyer journey of possibly some AI interaction like how do you map out the buyer journey nowadays is it is it that changed yeah B2B marketing is hard if you're working in B2B marketing you already know that um mapping out the buyer journey I think a good way to do that is actually to just talk to your customers and understand where they came from in the beginning, but also I think you want to design something logical where you roughly have an idea of what you want the person to do next. So you're going to have the marketing that you do that's top of funnel, how you're initially getting seen or in front of people and that might be a couple of different channels, couple of different things that you've got. And then you're actually going to be mapping through to most likely they're going to come to your website. What do you actually want them to do on the website? It's probably not as high commitment as them just ringing and buying from you. That's really unlikely to actually happen straight off the bat. So, there's going to be things in that process that you need to do to get them into the funnel. And that could be things like a free consultation, like request a call back kind of CTAs for software. It can be things like book a demo, all of that. And you want to as soon as you can actually get them interacting with someone, but you have to realize that that person is going to have some resistance to actually interacting with someone quite a lot of the time until there's been enough marketing, enough nurturing for them to think, okay, I think I could enter a sales conversation with this business. This could be the tool, the service, the thing that I'm actually looking for. Then I think it's useful to have a bit of a map. Otherwise, someone might be going on a really, really confusing journey and the high likelihood of that outcome is that they will just stop going on that journey. They're not going to see it through. Tim, I wonder if the B2B journey as you see it now is probably a lot different than you have seen it over time where you are yourself as somebody in the business world of having different interactions on your pathway to making purchases yourself like you because of your uh ownership of now multiple businesses you I imagine have gone through the same journey a couple of different times different kinds of B2B purchases as are they all kind of shared some similarities or are you seeing a bit of a change? Um, I think overall the process is usually identify a problem, identify a range of possible solutions and then spend a bit of time researching each one, isn't it? And then dig in in a bit more detail to like the top few. And I I don't think that has changed too much. Yeah. I guess you're using AI throughout that decision making process and you might use the AI to do the first you might use the AI for the problem identification and the sort of range of solutions that you might go with and then you might use AI to help you differentiate at the end but I think fundamentally the the journey is probably the same. It's probably how humans make decisions about stuff um that that hasn't really changed. So going into 2026, would you maintain this the same marketing channel mix that you've had historically or would you start to develop other areas? Would you lean more into say paid search to make up for, you know, any possible change of the scene with organic? Would you lean more into any other channels or mediums even? Um well I mean to me AI is like a filter that you look at everything that you do through just like sort of SEO has really been a filter that everything that you look at your website activity when you're planning your website activity you're always thinking about SEO right and I think that AI is is is also a version of that. So AI is like the filter that you're viewing all of your digital marketing through. How is this going to help me in my positioning and my visibility in in AI search tools? And then probably just switch out traditional SEO for AI search optimization given that AI search optimization usually includes the traditional SEO. So if I was working, for example, if we had an agency marketing exposure ninja, let's say we didn't do our SEO and um there was just a pure SEO agency doing that, I I'd bin them off and get someone who was focused on AI search. Absolutely. Um other than that, I don't think the mix would change too much. Um I don't know. What do you think, Charlie? Would you change anything about the mix going into 2026? My take is or my hot take is that I would debunk a myth first which is that B2B isn't boring to boring like it should actually be fun and you should be doing something interesting in your business's marketing and I think B2B over the years has become more fun and that's probably one of the main shifts I've seen since working in B2B. We have tons of B2B clients ourselves. We're of course B2B, but if I take the example of air ops, who are like an an AI agentic type of tool that a lot of people wouldn't be familiar with at all. They don't even know that they could be looking for air ops, for example. They do that. I see them all the time. They're everywhere because what they actually do is like UGC, they have people making actual workflows using their AI tool. You know, they've just given influencers on LinkedIn free access. They're making UGC videos. You don't even know they're about to promote air ops until it gets to the end of the video. They're doing stuff on YouTube. They're doing webinars with like thought leaders in the sectors that they're targeting. They're hosting them, doing accountbased marketing, sending out emails, trying to get people into that webinar funnel, repurposing that UGC, sometimes running ads with the UGC. There's so much like fun stuff going on that you see a lot of the time and the same like we see brands like Monday.com for example making really good YouTube ads so that in between the videos that you might be watching on YouTube you're actually getting almost like this userenerated type of ad of someone being like oh man CRM was such a headache and I've solved it with monday.com I'm not sure if that would actually be true but that's there that's the position in the ad and I I think that kind of marketing is quite fun thinking about it beyond just the one thing that you do to get traffic through to your website and how you compare against other businesses selling the same thing as you. You make yourself different by doing something a little bit fun by having thought leaders by having like a webinar host who's really recognizable that people actually gel and like or by trying to get people to follow influence in influencers thought leaders within your business. Great example. One of our partner tools is tribe profound.com, an AI search tracking tool. And they have the amazing Josh Bliskll who's like a lead strategist and researcher, but his job is basically researching what happens in AI searches and then making that research really interesting. So, he's repurposing content with that. But he has a huge following on LinkedIn because he puts out amazing stuff. And then you are like, "Wow, I would like some help from these guys." you you sort of get into their marketing funnel. You don't even realize it because you might just actually be information gathering. You might just be being involved in the LinkedIn community for the thing that you do for your job. And you might you imagine a lot of people in business are often on LinkedIn just as part of their workday or see emails coming inviting them to webinars and they think, you know, like I do actually have half an hour free at half 4 today. I'll jump on that webinar. And I think that's the great thing about B2B is you can make it fun by using those different kinds of touch points within that journey as well. There are definitely studies out there. There's one called the compounding creativity I think by system one which talks about how the biggest and most successful brands the ones that lean into some kind of creative advertising or in their general marketing that trying to be don't really want to say fun but you know trying to be more fun. But there going to be some businesses that feel like they can't go that direction because I think there is sometimes a mistake some brands may make. And I'm not saying that the brand that I'm about to mention is making that mistake, but it could be you could read into into what I'm saying. Okay, I'll just say who here it is. There's a company into it maybe a little bit. There's a company called Clay which is a SAS tool which helps with go to market outreach all that kind of stuff. And they've done as you said like air ops a lot of UGC putting the tool into the hands of others so they can demonstrate how powerful it is. But their core leadership team is also out there doing videos that include rapping and doing scene like you scenes out of the office or something like full-on comedy. Do you think that maybe that's a step too far or do you think that's just right for them? because I imagine if I'm working in one of the top three or four or five, let's say I work for G's um health division, I can't go out there and put a Bohemian Rapsidy parody out there because it just doesn't make sense. So, am I limited completely from doing anything relatively fun or creative? Or maybe that's just not at all possible. I don't know. You can be fun without being weird. Like I I don't think these brands have to go into like the realms of weirdness. That's for me that's like forced fun and that's not fun at all when you're forced into fun. Like I I just think you've got to hit the right tone and that tone actually has to be where you are in the market and what you want your brand to be because there's also plenty of examples of of big brands like Mailchimp for example, Salesforce who use like cute fluffy mascots or various cartoon type graphics. But if you use them in the right way, that still feels fun without absolutely turning off all your customers and like an enterprise business never dreaming of buying from you. Like those kinds of brands do sell B2B to enterprise level customers. So I think that's just about finding the right tone. And sometimes you're going to make a mistake along the way. And I think as long as you're not doing anything like outrageously offensive that would completely undermine what it is that you sell, then you can have fun without being weird. And I I do relate to the point you're making here. I went to a conference not that long ago where um the founder of Brewog was speaking about all of the crazy off-the-wall types of marketing that he does. That's obviously BTOC, but there's a lot of people who admire the type of marketing that he's done as well. and someone raised their hand in the room and was like, I run a cyber security consultancy firm. What's my version of the punk marketing that you do? And he shut them down. He was like, there just isn't. You just have to accept that you can't do this kind of marketing for your business because you need people to trust you and they're not going to trust you if you're throwing taxi dermy out of planes above Big Ben or whatever it is that they're up to. You need to find your own version of something that's a bit interesting and it's not what we do. Tim, would you agree with what um Brew Dog's fan was saying there that B2B bands or some even like you know cyber security can't do that kind of disruptive marketing because I know over the years you've done a lot of brand analysis and we put a lot of good videos out there about the very same subject of how to disrupt like in fintech. Okay, that's more B TOC but in fintech there's often a lot of disruption to kind of you know make a name for yourself. I think this comes down to positioning. I I I think there's two things. Firstly, would it make sense for a cyber security firm to throw taxiderermy out of a hot air balloon? No. But could they take that same disruptive approach and sort of adapt it so it made sense for their brand? Absolutely. You know, could they um make a box in the middle of London that was supposed to be impossible to hack into and then invite people from around the world to try and hack into this box and whoever hacks into the box gets $10 million. Right? There is a version of that that would make sense. Brew Dog is fundamentally selling a a sort of a you know like a a colored liquid. So it's very difficult to ascribe a particular value. You know it's difficult to have a position for that other than what what Brew Dog has arrived at which is sort of punk and now really just stunts and stuff. But I think there is a flavor of that. But I think there's actually a bigger trend here. By the way Dale can I remove my previous answer that B2B marketing hasn't changed because actually it's completely changed. There there's a there's a bigger trend here which maybe we call it like the B TOCification of B2B marketing in that B2Bs are realizing the value of their customers means that a lot of other marketing channels that might have previously been too broad are making sense. I'll be watching TV with Kate, for example, and there'll be like some ad in the middle of Love Island for Salesforce, right? She's got no idea what this business does, what it's talking about, or any of that. Now, it's probably being targeted because Virgin has got data and it, you know, whatever. like so there's probably some targeting in there but historically a B2B brand like that using TV advertising for something which is fundamentally very very niche would be pretty rare another example would be Formula 1 right in the '9s who was sponsoring Formula 1 well it was like cigarette brands and alcohol brands it was like mass market B2C products now you look at it it's pretty much all B2B there is a bit of B TOC in there but a lot of it is B2B why because the B2Bs have figured out. It's so valuable to get a customer that actually some of these channels make sense for us. So I think there is this sort of emerging of B2B and B TOC. You don't have to just be like super laser focused on your target customer. There are some circumstances where it does make sense to cast a wide net and have a lot of visibility. And I think that's a relatively new phenomenon. On that point of Formula 1 sponsorship and advertising, um I do find it really interesting that you've got some brands there that are advertising. I think now because they realize or they're just doing better buyer research, market research and understanding that Formula 1 is typically nowadays because it's so restricted availability in some countries. It's mostly like a certain economic level that people are at. they're in certain types of roles that they can afford to pay for the channels that you have to pay for to be able to watch it. So in Formula 1's case, it was mass market advertising because it was available on ITV or BBC or wherever else in the UK. Therefore, everybody could watch it. Whereas now it's on Sky Sport and therefore it's only people who can afford the extra 60 70 pounds a month which means they have to be a certain economic level which means they're probably uh you know they so have a certain salary level and also there's also Formula 1 tends to be it tends to attract people who are interested in engineering and interested in strategy and interested in these kinds of fields and like if those kinds of people tend to end up in leadership roles you know and therefore it's a perfect place to to want to advertise But to come back onto this idea of like being fun in your marketing, there is a really good example of a cyber security company doing this called Whiz who have a YouTube series called CISOs making cocktails. I bloody love it. And all it is is that they have like somebody from Whiz and they invite in a CISO from some company. They there's a bartender behind them ask them to they make a cocktail for them with some kind of cyber security theme and they just have an interview backwards and forwards. But they took what would normally be a traditional interview format that we may do on a podcast for example, but just inserted a little bit of fun that doesn't go all the way to absurd as I think we were talking about earlier. That's you know if you go full disruption absurdity you're going to make a mark but still adds a little bit of fun and there's potential of most businesses could do that. I I would say I feel like if a cyber security firm has been listening to this then they have got an arsenal of fun ideas for next year's marketing. Okay. Well, let's say for everybody else who isn't in in cyber security for the B2B marketer, how do we go about creating a strategy for 2026 that's going to drive results? I think you're starting with the ITP as I mentioned at the beginning, but the ICTP being both the firms, the kinds of companies, businesses you're going after and the people within it, which the Formula 1 example just illustrated perfectly why you need to know who those people are and the demographics relating to them. the objectives, the goals, whatever it is. Most likely it's going to be revenue ultimately, but in the meantime, it's probably going to be number of qualified leads, how many leads you've got in the pipeline at any one time, and the lifetime value of certain kinds of leads, where they came from, what lead sources are, how they first found out about you, the touch points that they had. understanding all of those areas so you know where to actually put your marketing investment and that's going to be things probably like SEO and organic Google ads it might be things like LinkedIn ads might be a bit of LinkedIn organic if you know that your customer base uses LinkedIn a lot and probably it's also going to have a really strong element of accountbased marketing and email streams for most B2B as well which comes back to also thinking about how you nurture your customers over the long term and how you increase repeat business, the lifetime value of those customers as well, particularly if they're on any kind of contract or type of retainer set up with you because then a huge huge part of a profitable strategy for B2B is making sure those retainers, those contracts are actually renewed at the time at which they're coming to an end against competitors as well. So, I think all of those things is where you need to start. And Tim, I know you and I, we work on videos together. One of your more recent videos was talking about how the AI search part of AI search optimization needs to also integrate with these other areas that Charlie's just referenced about, you know, pulling in um and discussing things with your customer team, with your product team going into 2026, how would you kind of bring those things together with the AI, search optimization, and everything else? I I just think it's like a filter that you have to look at the world through really when you're producing a video. You know, what are you making a video about? Is this the sort of thing where you could get a transcript and write a blog and publish it on your website knowing that that's, you know, fairly likely to be picked up by the AI search tool? When you're titling that video, is the title going to be the sort of thing that Perplexity is finding when it's going off and doing its background search? when you're doing, you know, customer interviews, could you take those customer interviews and turn them into content that you could publish so that the AI search tool has more info to go with? You know, when you're we've just sponsored a Formula 1 car and you're going to go and do your press, well, where are you going to do the press? Are you going to make sure that you've got visibility on the type of sites that these AI search tools are tending to reference? I I think it is just like a worldview that people have to adopt if they're going to make the most of it. If you just look at it as, oh yeah, we've got all our marketing over here and then yeah, we're going to do this like AI search thing as well. I think that's there's going to be a lot of wasted energy there because actually all of this stuff that you're doing can all feed into AI search optimization and AI visibility if you look at it through that lens. Well, we're going to close it up for this week, but before we do, are there any kind of final thoughts you want to leave any B2B marketers to go away with after this? I would say just enjoy putting together a strategy for 2026. I think this is a great time to be working in B2B marketing. And if you are, you have so much more freedom now than you may once have had to try different things and look at different channels and do something a bit different from the other businesses in your sector. And I would say don't worry so much about what your competitors are doing because we see a lot of stuff, don't we, that we look at and we think, not sure that makes sense. Like that might work, but it also might be just completely wild and they just want to do it for the hell of it. Like let the data and your understanding of your customers, let that be your guide. And try not to be pulled into too many directions. just sort of do your thing and be confident and choose a direction and go for it. I think it can be so overwhelming if we look at all of this stuff and we think, oh, you know, we need to be a bit more brood dog in our marketing. Yeah, but who says? Is that actually what your customers want? Do your sales team want you to be a bit more brood dog or do they just want you to spend a bit more budget on LinkedIn ads because those ads are generating some wicked leads? like just follow the steps that Charlie says and try not to get pulled off in too many directions. Yeah, definitely agree with that. Well, thank you for joining us for episode four of the marketing strategies for 2026 series. Next week, episode 5, we'll be creating a ROI focused marketing strategy for BTOC. So, do make sure you join us for that. And uh thank you so much for joining us today. Take care and see you then. Bye. [Music]