Thought leadership done well is a foundational pillar of B2B marketing, and for good reason.

When it has actual thought and leadership, it satisfies a market craving for new thinking about emerging opportunities or problem-solving.

The format lends itself to measuring engagement. The substance can feed other marketing channels.

There are a plethora of surveys suggesting it’s effective.

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Like this one:

• 90% of decision-makers and C-suite executives are moderately or very likely to be more receptive to sales or marketing outreach from a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership;

• 75% of decision-makers said thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering;

• 60% of decision-makers “say that good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium to work with that organization”; and

• 54% of decision-makers said thought leadership made them realize other suppliers had a better understanding of their challenges.

Or this one:

• 65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed their perception of a company for the better;

• 64% say an organization’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets; and

• After consuming quality thought leadership: 42% invited the organization to bid on a project (when not in original consideration set); 48% awarded business to the organization; 53% decided to increase the amount of business; 54% purchased a new product or service not previously considered.

There are plenty more, and while they are compelling, I think there’s something deeper going on here that makes thought leadership effective. Thought leadership gets a marketing team, indeed a whole company, oriented towards the customer.

Where a lot of marketing is largely aimed at features, functions and value propositions, thought leadership is aimed at problem solving.

Where a lot of marketing strives to convince a customer their product can solve a problem, thought leadership allows the customer to see themselves in the problem.

Where a lot of marketing is produced to please executives, thought leadership looks at the landscape from the customer’s perspective.

In other words, it’s the focus, not the format, that makes thought leadership effective.

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One irony of marketing is that it’s commissioned with helping audiences understand a position, product and value proposition among a target audience – yet it struggles to explain “what marketing actually does” to the business every budget season.

So wrote MaryLee Sachs is a column for The Drum recently, titled, Budget season exposes B2B marketing’s biggest problem.

The topic grabbed my attention because this is one of the biggest challenges facing B2B marketing. And MaryLee’s name is familiar, as she was a senior leader at Hill & Knowlton when I was a young account executive 25 years ago.

You don’t just have to do your job; you have to argue with your non-marketing colleagues about how best to do your job. In effect, every marketing job has two roles: do your job and justify your job as you do it. Marketing spends as much time on the latter as it does the former.

No other role in business gets its decisions scrutinized and second-guessed like marketing, except, perhaps, medical doctors on a “peer-to-peer call” with a veterinarian employed by a big insurance company doing their darndest to deny your treatment and claim.

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The 4 “forces” behind marketing’s challenge

MaryLee sets up the problem in B2B marketing by comparing it to how other functions prove value to the business this way:

“Sales can point to the deal, operations to the product, finance to the numbers. Marketing’s contribution is usually distributed across all three, which means everyone benefits from it, but no one quite knows where to give it credit.”

Then she notes the differences between B2B vs. B2C:

“The deeper issue is that B2B companies are structurally predisposed to underestimate marketing…Nobody at Coca-Cola or Nike seriously thinks the brand, customer understanding and marketing investment are peripheral to how the company makes money.”

Matt Heinz recently pointed out that in a B2C environment, there is no sales team, so the brand manager owns sales and marketing. That’s one of the reasons he holds the somewhat controversial view that sales should report to marketing.

I’d go one step further and argue, in turn, marketing should report to comms, but that’s a separate blog post for another day.

In her piece, MaryLee says “four forces seem to be driving” the recurring grappling match marketing has with the business over attribution every budget season.

1. The value of sales is easier to see in B2B

She says sales is usually the “hero” in a B2B environment. She’s not wrong. Few businesses have a “President’s Club” award for marketing as they do for the sales team.

She writes:

“A salesperson can point to the contract they closed. Marketing’s contribution may have happened over the preceding 18 months: building familiarity, establishing credibility, creating content, generating an event encounter, shaping the proposition, equipping the salesperson and providing the proof that made the prospect take the meeting. By the time the deal closes, much of that contribution has disappeared from view.”

One possible solution:

“That’s why one of my CMO friends has switched from the language of ‘marketing-created’ to ‘co-created,’ which is so much more powerful. That shift is more than diplomatic. It is a more honest account of how B2B growth actually happens.”

If I could add a comment, it would be that the whole orientation of sales versus marketing is off. You need both, and you need to work together. Sales-marketing alignment has been a key issue my entire career, and I thought for a while a few years back it had been resolved. But it’s back with a vengeance in the headlines of late.

A better orientation, a unifying orientation, is a focus on the customer. Businesses exist to solve customer problems – that’s their purpose. Neither sales nor marketing is the hero; it’s the customer that’s the hero.

2. Domain expertise is more valued in B2B

Older marketers who grew up in a premise-based technology environment are familiar with this problem: using an on-prem product, and therefore understanding it, was really challenging.

In my mid-20s, I convinced a sales engineer to help me install a demo version of an IT operations product on my company laptop. I thought it would give me a better sense of the value.

It didn’t. User interfaces had a long way to go, and understanding the importance of managing network assets is something that requires lived experience you can’t get in a demo. The ease-of-use in SaaS has changed that a bit, but it’s not perfect.

MaryLee puts it this way:

“…expertise often outranks marketing inside B2B cultures. Engineers in engineering companies, lawyers in law firms, consultants in professional services, technologists in technology companies: the organization’s status hierarchy naturally favors the people who make or deliver the thing.”

As a result:

“…marketing is still treated as the department that markets the business rather than a discipline that helps determine how the business goes to market.”

How the business goes to market – that’s the operative phrase. Look at the 4P’s of traditional marketing – product, price, place and promotion – and you realize in many B2B marketing organizations, the only part they touch today is promotion.

The CMO job has been loaded up with additional duties with the proliferation of digital media, but they all focus on promotion. Most marketers don’t have time to think about the other Ps aside from marketing.

That’s what makes MaryLee’s suggestion so strategic: marketing ought to be leading the business to market, but today, it’s largely a reactionary exercise to help a business get to the market it’s identified.

I’d hasten to add, the way to beat domain expertise is to talk to a lot of prospects and customers. When the inevitable debate comes up, you reply with what you’ve learned from customers rather than with a marketing perspective. Incidentally, that’s also how you glean the knowledge to lead a business to market.

3. Marketing’s impact is hard to measure

MaryLee’s third force centers on measuring effects:

“…B2B marketing’s greatest effects are often the least measurable ones. Brand familiarity means a salesperson doesn’t spend the first 20 minutes establishing credibility. Reputation gets you on to the shortlist. Thought leadership changes what a buyer thinks the problem is. A distinctive proposition reduces price sensitivity. Customer insight changes an offering before it reaches market.”

What’s the impact on sales without brand?

“A recent conversation with a B2B CMO suggested that without brand, sales has to spend 25 minutes explaining who they are. With brand, you spend five and then have 25 minutes left to sell. That’s sales productivity, which is a much more persuasive B2B argument.”

I could not agree more, and I think there’s strong circumstantial evidence to support this: the amount of time and the number of touches it takes to close a deal in B2B have grown in tandem with the incessant pressure and budget cuts facing B2B marketing teams.

I challenge any CEO or CFO who doubts the importance of marketing to business growth to go all in and run a definitive test. If you think marketing doesn’t help, turn it all off and watch the results.

I doubt any ambitious executive would accept that challenge, given the career risks. But one that is willing to be wrong, if the data proves it, would go down in history books for running such an audacious experiment.

4. Few executives understand modern marketing

Her fourth and final point is an observation I share:

“Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, many B2B CEOs may never have experienced truly great marketing. A B2B CEO may have spent an entire career in companies where growth was driven primarily through sales, relationships, acquisitions or technical superiority. Their mental model of marketing may genuinely be 15 years out of date.”

The impact is clear:

“So when today’s CMO arrives talking about customer experience, data, brand, demand, AI, reputation and growth, the CEO isn’t necessarily being obtuse.”

That feels like an unfinished sentence, so I’m going to finish it here: The CEO isn’t necessarily being obtuse; they are just innocently ignorant of marketing.

This isn’t just my opinion. There are rigorous studies that demonstrate this is true for upwards of 95% of executives. You can’t even have a basic conversation on marketing because you a) have to spend the first 20 minutes of a conversation undoing all their erroneous assumptions and b) spend the next 20 minutes tutoring them on 101-level fundamentals.

The solution: understand what the business values

Marketing certainly has an attribution challenge, but MaryLee steps back and looks at the bigger picture when she says it has “an even bigger perception problem.”

She added:

“The function has expanded upstream into strategy and downstream into commercial outcomes, while the organizational perception of it hasn’t kept pace.”

Her solution?

“Understand what the business values. Demonstrate marketing’s contribution in those terms. Make the invisible role marketing plays across the B2B buying journey visible.”

Indeed, if we do that, we might get everyone back to basics. As Peter Drucker has said, a business has one purpose: to create a customer. Because of that, a business has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.

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A handful of people I know have experimented with blogs entirely created by generative AI. AI never sleeps, so they have a steady stream of content being published.

These sites are entirely automated once set up. They’ve got the GPTs connected to the widgets, which are connected to wingdings, which produces the chutzpah. They were counting the ad dollars these sites would produce, but that counting took place before there was anything to count.

In finance circles, this is sometimes called a “forecast.” That forecast never materialized. I think that’s foreshadowing in a story that’s about to play out, but that’s another post for circular financing day.

Few people have an issue with creators using AI to assist with content creation, but fewer people subscribe to a site that’s entirely written by a machine.

It’s logical: if you ask AI a question and use the AI answer to write the content about that question…nobody will read it. Why would they? They can just ask AI themselves and get a more personalized viewpoint with links to source materials.

If you just regurgitate answers these systems spit out, you are in effect validating the answer it provided as correct. The system has no more incentive to include your newly AI-written post, than humans have to read it, because it can already address the topic adequately – as your AI-generated post proves.

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Summarizing the Orbit Media survey findings

That story is why I look at the results of the 2026 Orbit Media survey of bloggers and draw a very different conclusion.

The study polled 1,000 bloggers this year and found:

• The length of the average blog post was 1,312 words long, down from the peak of 1,427 in 2023;

• It takes on average 3 hours and 20 minutes to write those pieces, down from a peak of 4:10 in 2022; and

• More than 92% of bloggers use AI for blogging, which Orbit’s Andy Crestodina says, “correlates with nothing.”

I’m going to come back to that “correlates with nothing” point at the end of this post. For now, the punchline of these findings is this:

• “14% report ‘strong results.’ That’s six points below the previous twelve-year low. That’s a huge dip.”

Content marketing has produced good results for people who do it right for a long time. In my book, ‘doing it right’ means running the site like a media outlet.

Many marketers think they do “content marketing” when really, they just make content and these are not the same thing. It’s not even close.

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Content marketers jettison best practices

Andy Crestodina builds a case that results have dropped because content marketers aren’t following best practices anymore:

• Guest blogging is down 29%;
• Influencer collabs are down 22%;
• Original research is down 24%;
• Keyword research is down 20%;
• Formal editing process is down 18%;
• Paid promotion is down 14%; and
• The obsession with analytics is down 14%.

Crestodina concludes, “Performance dropped because content marketers are using the most effective strategies less often. Also, marketers are using the least effective strategies more often.”

I agree. You can’t skip the best practices and expect results to improve. It’d be awesome if I could improve my strength and endurance by eating ice cream and watching movies, but that’s not how things work.

It’s the struggle that builds character, experience, and insight. There is no cheat code or hack that leads to quick and sustained success in content marketing. You will struggle. But you’ll learn too and once you get there, the results are momentous.

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AI adoption correlates with jettisoning of best practices

Across the board in this survey, AI use trended down relative to last year’s results.

About 14% of bloggers use AI for specific tasks – the same use cases you already know: brainstorming, writing headlines, suggesting edits, and that sort of thing. Here’s the hinge: about 8% of those polled say they don’t use AI at all.

Orbit ran an analysis comparing answers from the 8% that don’t use AI with the 92% of those that do and found:

“Today, 92% of marketers use AI. 8% of marketers do not. Both of those groups are equally likely to report ‘strong results.’ No difference. But non-AI users are much more likely to report “disappointing results.’”

So, Orbit compared the answers from ~930 bloggers that do use AI, with the ~80 that do not and concludes this means marketers who use AI aren’t more likely to win, but they are less likely to lose. Ergo, AI is table stakes.

That’s interesting. It makes sense. But I don’t think that’s the insight and I’m going to tell you why.

If you look at the chart plotting results of this survey from 2014 to 2026 (chart above), you’ll notice:

• Results start to drop in 2020 – as the pandemic took hold;

• Results then improve a bit and flatline in 2022 – ChatGPT was launched that November;

• Results from 2024-2026 continued to dip exactly in the same time frame that AI adoption started picking up.

That period was marked by  lavish tech spending that came with the pandemic, followed by the inevitability of a financial hangover. Layoffs. Budget cuts. More of the ‘more with less’ mantra.

Organizations have fewer people responsible for doing more work, which has been going on forever already, and made it all the worse.

So, they naturally turn to AI to help. And start skipping steps.

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AI isn’t the variable; best practices are

At risk of apophenia, I don’t think this survey shows AI is “correlated with nothing” in content marketing. On the contrary, I think this survey shows AI is the reason content marketers are skipping best practices that produce results.

AI is not the variable here; best practices are the variable. Yet, AI clearly influences the variable in that AI makes it all too easy to skip the struggle.

Instead of laboring for ~3.5 hours to write a 1,300-word post, you can just have AI do it with a prompt.

It happens. It is happening. It’s going to continue to happen. Until marketing can’t show results; then the budget for content gets cut.

It’s a foolish, if not self-made, labor arbitrage that gets the entire line item deleted from the budget spreadsheet.

The study itself provides evidence – a cohort of around150-300 of the bloggers still follow best practice. They are indeed using AI for assistance, but they are not relying on it to skip the struggle. They are following the best practices that have been proven effective.

Best practices only work if you follow them

If you follow a proven recipe, you’ll make a beautiful cake, but if you start skipping steps, for example, substituting butter with synthetic lard becuase AI said it was easier, you aren’t following the recipe.

And content marketing, as Robert Rose once said, is a bit like butter. Just as butter makes most things taste better, content marketing, done well, will make all of your marketing better, too.

Content marketing is still effective, but if, and only if, you invest the time and effort to do a good job. That requires passion beyond just doing a job. Machines can do a specific task, but they aren’t very good at a “job.” To that end, passion is an entirely human characteristic.

You can fool your client or CMO or CEO for a little while, but your audience can tell the difference, and that’s what I suspect is showing up in the results of this survey. To that end, you might be less likely to lose if you adopt AI, as Crestodina says, but you will surely lose if you become overreliant on it.

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Why content marketing and public relations need each other

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Strategy and tactics work in a similar way. Although the terms are often used together and sometimes interchangeably, they serve very different purposes. Strategy establishes the direction, while tactics turn that direction into action.

The plan and the Trojan horse

In an article published by the Public Relations and Communications Association, or PRCA, comms pro Anil Manji uses a Trojan Horse analogy to explain the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

In this Greek story, he explains the fake wooden horse, concealing warriors, was a “deception to get inside the city walls, and open the gates from the inside. The tactic is the Trojan Horse.”

The Greeks’ strategy was not simply to build a wooden horse. Their larger approach was to use deception to enter the city of Troy. Building the horse, hiding soldiers inside and presenting it as a gift were the tactics used to carry out that strategy.

Manji explains, “A really strong strategy is based on the audience insight.” The Greeks understood what would convince the Trojans to bring the horse inside the city. The plan worked because it accounted for how the audience was likely to respond.

Public relations (PR) professionals must think about audiences in the same way. Before selecting a tactic, they need to understand whom they are trying to reach, what that audience cares about and what motivates their target audience to respond.

For example, a press release, media pitch, event or social media post are not strategies. Each is a tactic that should support a larger approach.

Imagine a company that wants to increase the credibility of its CEO. Its strategy could be to position the CEO as a trusted source of industry knowledge. The tactics might include pitching the CEO for podcast interviews, publishing contributed articles and sharing educational content on LinkedIn.

The goal is credibility; the strategy is the positioning and the tactics are the steps taken to achieve it. In other words, the strategy explains the approach. The tactics explain what the communications team will do to achieve the goal.

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Research helps provide direction

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro and previously co-founded Moz. He has worked in marketing for approximately 25 years.

Fishkin describes tactics as “specific marketing actions you take to (hopefully) improve your marketing outcomes.”

The word specific is important. Tactics are individual actions, but they should always be chosen for a reason.

For example, a company should not create a TikTok account simply because the platform is popular. It should first determine whether its audience uses TikTok, what content interests them and whether the platform supports the company’s communication goal.

Research helps PR professionals understand where their audiences spend time and what information they trust. That knowledge shapes the strategy, while tactics such as media pitches, interviews and contributed articles put the strategy into action.

Strategy comes before execution

Mark Ritson is a longtime marketing professor, brand consultant and columnist. He has taught marketing at London Business School, MIT Sloan and Melbourne Business School.

Ritson believes marketers can become too focused on platforms and activities before developing a clear strategy:

“Marketing strategy is where we play and how we win in the market. Tactics are how we then deliver on the strategy and execute for success.”

This order also matters in PR. A communication team should not begin a campaign by immediately deciding it needs press releases, influencer partnerships or social media videos. It should first establish its goal, identify its audience and decide on an overall approach.

A press release can be well-written and still fail if the announcement does not resonate with the intended audience. A social media campaign can also look creative but accomplish little if it appears on the wrong platforms.

Strong execution is important, but even the best tactics cannot completely fix a strategy based on the wrong ideas.

Different perspectives, one main idea

Strategy and tactics can be explained in different ways, which is why learning from multiple professionals is helpful. Manji uses the Trojan Horse to show that strategy is the larger plan and tactics carry it out. Fishkin explains how research helps teams choose the right actions, while Ritson emphasizes that strategy should come before execution.

Although their explanations are different, the main idea is the same: Strategy creates the direction, and tactics are the actions that move an organization toward its goal. Tactics can change along the way, but they should always support the strategy.

Understanding this difference is important for anyone entering PR, marketing or communications. It helps professionals make better decisions, explain the purpose behind their work and build stronger campaigns in the future.

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Business executives read vendor content outside of work hours.  At least some of them do, according to a global survey of 1,500 B2B respondents by Digitalzone, with a margin of error of +/- 3%.  About one-third of respondents indicated they do industry reading on their personal time.

What type of content are they reading on their personal time?

According to the survey:

• Long videos – 34%
• Infographics – 32%
• Short videos – 28%
• Articles – 25%
• Email / newsletters – 22%
• Interactive content – 21%
• Podcasts – 16%

If you look at the graphic nearby, which contrasts reading at work with personal time, short-form video is the only content format where respondents say they spend more time reading at home than they do at work.

(click image for higher resolution)

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The survey asked a follow-up question – what types of content hold your attention when reading in your personal time?

The answers:

• Market trends – 44%
• News and current events – 38%
• Success stories – 29%
• Product reviews – 28%
• Educational content – 24%

These findings also remind me of two separate studies around content.

A study based on systems data by Netline found, which I covered earlier this year, found that prospective customers who download content today, will read it a week later.

The next one was the same study by Netline conducted in 2019. It found 51% of C-suite executives at large companies use personal emails – such as @gmail or @yahoo to register for content. That’s significant because many companies screen these emails out – and it’s a big mistake.

What gives buyers confidence?

The survey later asked respondents, “When you’re evaluating vendors, what gives you the most confidence in your decision?

Here are the answers:

• Proof of concept – 45%
• Transparent pricing – 44%
• Responsive communication – 39%
• Personalized proposal – 36%
• Understanding of business – 32%
• Peer recommendations – 27%
• Case studies – 25%
• Independent validation – 14%
• Vendor reputation – 6%

Did you notice anything? Of the seven types of content mentioned above, only case studies are on the list of what gives buyers confidence (“success stories” and “case studies” are generally synonymous). Most of what is high on this list is not in the purview of marketing.

A proof of concept? It takes a sales engineer.

Transparent pricing? That’s a leadership decision. They don’t like to list prices for fear of giving up negotiation power, but other studies have shown that without it, you might not make the short list.

Responsive communication? It depends on where they are in the pipeline, but typically this is a sales responsibility to respond to customer inquiries. Ditto for personalized proposals.

It’s not until we get to the fifth item – understanding the business – that marketing has a direct role. Prospective customers need to get the sense from your marketing content that your business understands your customer’s industry and the problem they are trying to solve.

Marketing can influence peer recommendations if they have an effective customer marketing program that includes reviews. Usually this falls to the team outside of lead gen.

Case studies are squarely on the to-do list for marketing, so make sure they are solid, and please do not put case studies behind a registration gate.

The last two – independent validation and vendor reputation – those could come from several directions, but often these involve PR or comms, which in B2B tech, often reports to marketing.

What can B2B marketing do with these findings?

There are three takeaways for B2B marketing that stand out.

First, taking all the studies mentioned above together, it’s worth thinking about the effect being at home might have on your landing or registration page. While some businesses have attempted the RTW effort, the fact is a lot of people still work from home or are on a hybrid arrangement.

The line between work and home has blurred and that ought to be a consideration when marketing thinks about it’s content strategy.

Second, in terms of confidence, there isn’t much marketing can do about tasks that belong to sales.  That is to say, other than stirring up a lively office debate when the sales team doesn’t follow up with new registrants in a timely fashion.

I think this shows one of the key challenges with measurement in marketing: the handoff between marketing and sales. The sales-marketing alignment has dogged marketing my entire career. This is exactly why we’ve seen new functions, like marketing operations, emerge in recent years.

Third, there is something that marketing can do: make sure that factors like understanding the business, peer recommendations and independent validation are reflected in the top-of-the funnel content.

How? Weave your own survey data, customer quotes, product reviews and analyst quotes into your content. That’s a starting point that any B2B marketer with initiative can implement immediately.

The full report is worth a read and is freely available here: Dimensions of Demand 2026: Buyer Report.

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A couple of weeks back I highlighted a survey by the UK-based marketing agency Propolis. They polled business leaders, primarily CEOs, and found most of them have little faith in marketing.

The survey found most of them don’t think marketing helps the business; it’s a cost center. I proposed an experiment to test that assumption: turn marketing off. The effect on growth – whether it continues or stagnates – will provide a definitive answer.

I don’t anticipate many taking up that experiment. Sales would scream. I doubt even a marketing-skeptical board would endorse such a plan. Such a move poses career risks for a CEO if it doesn’t work out. So, the status quo will continue to reign.

Unless marketing (and PR) steps up to change it. The survey has some findings that speak to marketing’s obligation as well.

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The biggest marketing budget hitch for CEOs are these:

• 81% say marketing budgets are harder to justify than sales budgets;
• 76% say budgets are too tight to spend money on non-lead-generating marketing; and
• 76% can no longer justify marketing investment unless it generates leads.

This causes marketers to capitulate and pour all their budget into short-term campaigns – performance marketing – because it’s easier to measure clicks. That decision comes at the expense of long-term awareness and reputation building.

That has an impact. If you subscribe to the 95:5 rule, just 5% of your total addressable market is looking to make a purchase. That means most of the marketing budget is falling on deaf ears. There’s evidence to suggest this also impacts legal, finance and procurement departments, which are increasingly involved in purchases, and they aren’t being educated.

I’m becoming more convinced that when businesses cut marketing budgets, the sales cycle grows longer.

Some marketers don’t have the vocabulary or understanding to make the case, according to the CEOs polled in this survey:

• 88% think marketers would be more credible if they spoke the “language of business”;
• 83% would trust marketers more if they showed stronger commercial understanding; and
• 79% want marketers to talk less about creativity and more about results.

Most marketers, it seems, don’t dispute this finding. Just 18% of B2B marketers polled in the same study say they can demonstrate business impact to the C-Suite.

Marketing measurement is hard. There’s a new survey every month that suggests marketing struggles to measure its impact. Such surveys have more or less had the same conclusions over my entire career. I suspect it has more to do with a lack of business acumen than it does with measurement.

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Marketing – and PR – has an obligation to be curious – to be perpetual learners. The things we should collectively ask are basics like this:

• What is the addressable market size?
• What is the problem your solution solves?
• Where do prospects hear about you?
• What convinces them to engage sales?
• What are the top objections your sales team receives?
• Why do they choose your solution?
• Why do they decide against choosing your solution?
• When do customers churn?
• Why do they churn?

Those are conceptual questions that will drive better positioning, messaging and marketing programs. You should ask these questions of prospects, existing customers and the sales team too – and make note of the similarities and differences.

Marketing also needs to have a basic understanding of the financial metrics:

• What is the cost-per-lead?
• What is the cost-per-customer acquisition?
• What is the breakeven point?
• What is the company’s run rate in terms of ARR or MRR?
• What is the delta between NRR and GRR?
• What are the NPS and CSAT scores?
• What is the renewal rate?
• What percentage of the marketing budget is spent on leads and awareness?

If you understand what motivates customers and can relay marketing programs in terms of influencing these metrics, you’ll have a whole lot more success making the case for brand.

Marketing also has to be tech-savvy. We need to understand how to use the automation tools and be able to mine them for data. If you don’t know where to start, I’d suggest picking the last five deals won and auditing the history:

• When did they engage the company?
• What did they engage?
• Where did they engage it?
• How frequently did they engage?
• What were the pivotal steps that moved the deal forward?

Marketing can’t lead with the art – it has to lead with the math and social science. If you are in PR and you have a strong grasp of this stuff, then you’ll be inherently valuable to a range of business functions. We’ve got to understand the challenges, hopes, dreams and aspirations of our target audience. And then we need to communicate our efforts to influence those factors in the language the business understands.

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Marketers without *authority* leads to marketing without *accountability*

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Marketing and communications professionals are taking AI visibility seriously, but their ideas for improving it seem to be at odds with what can and cannot improve it.

That’s according to a new survey of U.S.-based professionals, the vast majority of whom work in-house (76%). While business and marketing leaders seem to believe AI visibility has a real impact on marketing, many are looking at marketing operations and paid media to drive results.

The survey was conducted by Sword and the Script Media, LLC in late July, using a commercially available survey panel, and the results are being published here for the first time.

Below are the findings. Click any graphic for higher resolution.

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1. Marketing has three primary views of AI visibility’s significance

Most marketers believe AI visibility is a significant part of their marketing efforts. The survey found nearly half (47%) believe AI visibility is either “highly significant (17%) or “significant” (30%). Another 19% say AI visibility is “moderately significant,” and 45% believe it’s “somewhat significant.”

Not everyone is as convinced. Some 16% of respondents, which is 1.5 in every 10, say AI visibility is “not significant.” Finally, 6% are unsure.

Analysis. At a high level, the data shows marketers tend to fall into three camps: advocates, fence-sitters and skeptics. More, but not most, are in the advocacy camp, which suggests more marketers are convinced AI is influencing awareness and demand. That’s the key — if AI is changing the behavior of customers and prospects — then it’s clearly significant to the marketing effort.

2. Business leaders are asking marketing about AI visibility

One sign a new marketing trend has hit the mainstream is when other business functions start asking about it. To that end, a majority of marketers who responded to this survey (63%) said business leaders outside of marketing have been asking marketing about AI visibility. This includes 29% who said they have asked “multiple times” and 34% who said, “once or twice.”

Analysis. Whether marketing is convinced of the influence AI has on marketing or not, marketing needs to be prepared to answer questions about it from business leaders. Moreover, they need to be prepared with detail and specificity that demonstrates they’ve looked closely at how it’s working, how it’s influencing customers and prospects, and what they can do to affect it.

3. No specific marketing team is tagged with AI visibility

When asked which team is most responsible for improving AI visibility, the survey found responses were all over the board. Marketing operations was the most frequently selected team at 17%, followed by product marketing at 14%, social media at 13% and creative/design at 13%.

Surprisingly, teams traditionally empowered with external communications were ranked the lowest among the options. Few marketers in this survey viewed SEO or organic search (8%) or public relations and communications (3%) as the team most capable of influencing AI visibility.

Analysis. The broad array of answers to this question suggests marketing hasn’t landed yet on an “owner” for AI visibility. This parallels other trends in marketing over the years. For example, social media was initially labeled as a fad, and then as its staying power became obvious, various marketing and communications functions would later compete for ownership.

More importantly, they seem to be looking for help in the wrong places. PR, comms and SEO ought to be the first teams marketing leaders lean on for help. Studies show that the structured format of news, press releases and blog posts tends to have a clear impact on AI visibility. Indeed, PR is having a moment to the extent even the tech analyst firm Gartner has weighed in.

With respect to SEO, PR and comms ought to be joined at the hip when it comes to AI visibility — the same way these teams worked together to rank in traditional search. If Google can’t crawl and index your content, the best content in the world won’t rank. That’s true with AI visibility as well.

4. What channels have the greatest impact on AI visibility?

Marketers taking this survey said paid media (35%) has the greatest influence on AI visibility. This was followed by shared media (28%), earned media (24%) and owned media (14%).

Analysis. These results are exactly backwards, which suggests marketing has some homework to do in understanding how AI is impacting their market. We have yet to see a single study that suggests paid media, including advertising, impacts AI visibility. In contrast, there are a plethora of studies indicating owned and earned media do influence AI visibility.

Earned media in particular has more credibility than paid media, because there is an element of third-party validation. The incentive of being paid to say nice things doesn’t exist in earned media, so it very naturally has more weight. For most organizations, the priorities ought to be owned, earned, shared and paid – and in that order.

Marketing operations (MOPs) plays an important role and has earned a spot as a marketing leader’s trusted advisor. It keeps sales and marketing aligned, helps the marketing organization quantify its impact, and is probably a good team to keep in mind for measuring experiments. However, beyond reporting, MOPs rarely have anything to do with marketing output and so they are the least likely team to influence AI visibility.

5. Do marketing teams have the skills to improve AI visibility?

Most marketing teams (65%) either “agree” (43%) or “strongly agree” (22%) that their team has the knowledge, skills and resources needed to improve AI visibility. However, a full 37% aren’t so sure, including those that “neither agree nor disagree” (26%), those that “disagree” (10%) and those that “strongly disagree” (1%).

Analysis. Given the context of previous questions — relying on paid media and MOPs for AI visibility — it’s reasonable to conclude that AI visibility is a bit of a blind spot for marketing. In other words, marketing’s confidence in their ability to grow their skills is at odds with what current research shows influences AI visibility.

6. AI will make human expertise more valuable

Most respondents (61%) said AI visibility will make human expertise “much more important” (12%) or “more important” (49%). Nearly one in three (29%) think it won’t make a difference either way. Finally, 10% believe it will make human expertise “less important” (8%) or “much less important” (2%).

Analysis.  One of the pervasive problems in marketing is the “sea of sameness.” It’s the idea that the content produced by one brand more or less sounds the same as their competitors. This is especially prominent among B2B technology companies.

Those companies that rely on AI to write for them are liable to make the matter worse. Why? Because AI writing is by definition an “average” of all the writing on which it’s been trained. Here again there are studies — data studies, not opinion surveys — that show AI-generated content underperforms.

AI is an incredible tool, but it can’t feel, it can’t experience and it doesn’t have emotion. Those are uniquely human characteristics — and characteristics that connect people. Marketing has to strive for connection and you can’t get that out of a machine.

Recommendations

The findings of this survey present a two-part problem for marketing leaders. The first problem is understanding precisely how AI visibility is impacting their company and the second is teaching their teams how to influence the results.

Their very first step should be to research how AI visibility is affecting their brand. They need to speak with prospects, customers and sales and determine where and how AI is influencing customers’ decisions. A methodical audit for branded and non-branded keywords should be performed using the major AI platforms.

AI is moving very quickly, so the process should be repeated at least every six months or so. If AI visibility is in fact having an impact on your business, the next step is to educate your team.

The second problem is a professional development issue for marketing leaders: marketing needs to get their teams current on what influences AI visibility. Adding a few lunch-and-learn sessions, scheduling a few hours off-site, recommending an online course or sending members of your team to a marketing conference are easy-to-implement options.

Marketing tends to be a game of momentum. It takes time and effort to set things in motion and build that momentum. The best time to get started on AI visibility was a few years ago; the next best time is right now.

Methodology & demographics

This AI visibility survey was conducted by Sword and the Script Media, LLC in July 2026 using a commercially available survey panel. It surveyed 200 U.S.-based marketing and communications professionals. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents worked in-house for a business (49), non-profit (11%), association (11%), government agency (5%) or academic institution (2%). Participants represent a mix of B2C (42%), B2B (18%) and hybrid organizations (24%), providing a broad view of how professionals perceive AI visibility.

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A theory on why B2B marketing requires so many darn customer touches today

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More than 4 out of 5 (84%) of CEOs “think marketing is a support function, not a commercial growth driver.” That’s according to a survey published in late July called “The CEO blind spot: How B2B marketers prove, protect, and grow their commercial impact.”

A UK-based B2B marketing agency conducted the survey in July 2026. It polled “150 [B2B] CEOs and senior business leaders responsible for companies with annual revenues exceeding £20 million.”

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It’s been a minute, but I’ve done quite a bit of work with tech startups in the UK over my career. In my experience, UK business leaders have always been far more engaged with marketing, compared to US executives.

Accordingly, this is a more common problem in the US, because most C-suite business leaders and board members have little experience in marketing. That’s not merely an educated guess; it’s been well studied and shown to be highly probable.

This survey had more eye-popping findings: “Three-quarters (75%) of business leaders think that while marketing matters, it doesn’t actually drive growth.”

If you aren’t a growth driver, you’re a cost center – at least in the eyes of the C-suite.

How CEOs can definitively test their assumptions

There is a definitive way for CEOs to test their marketing assumptions: turn marketing off and see if there’s any effect on business results.

What do I mean by turning marketing off? Cut the budget to 0% of revenue and lay off your entire marketing team.

If the sales team objects, and they will because they’ll lose their favorite excuse, that can be resolved by putting the budget savings to sales enablement. Hire some former marketers to be order takers for sales. They can write emails, make shadow enablement tools, or whatever sales might need.

Give the website and marketing technology to IT to manage. Sales can manage configurations with a technical administrator. Sales ops handles lead routing.

The benefit? Instead of guessing what marketing brings to the table, you can know with certainty. If you cut marketing out of your organization and business growth continues, then you know for sure that marketing is indeed an unnecessary support function.

On the other hand, if growth stalls, then you know marketing did in fact have an influence, despite the challenges of proving it. 

One caveat to turning marketing off

There is one caveat that CEOs should know before choosing to engage this experiment: Marketing follows Newton’s Laws of Motion.

It takes a lot of marketing energy to overcome inertia, and marketing in motion tends to stay in motion. If you stop everything, it takes a while – 6-12 months at minimum – to regain that momentum.

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Do marketing budget cuts make B2B sales cycles grow longer? 

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It takes 62-plus touches to close a deal in 2026.

The B2B tech buyer requires 62.4 touches on average, across 3.5 different marketing channels – from first touch to deal closed. It’s a process that exceeds six months and now lasts 192 days.

It sure seems like an incredibly high number of touches. Yet the source of this data isn’t an opinion survey; it’s behavior – it’s based on data running through a technology marketing platform called Dreamdata.

I wrote about the Dreamdata report in May 2026, it made my semi-annual half-year highlight reel, and came up again in an interview with Michelle Garrett – for her PR Explored podcast.

She couldn’t believe the number, and it’s been on my mind ever since.

Sixty touches does sound excessive. I’ve worked in B2B for 90%-plus of my career, which spans 25 years. We never needed this many historically.  What changed?

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A brief history of marketing touches

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a study conclude more touches are required today than historically, or that sales cycles are trending longer. In fact, I’ve written about many of these over the years.

Some of the most recent findings include the following:

• A 2022 study by Forrester found B2B sales requires 27 touches;

• A 2024 study by McKinsey found B2B marketing manages an average of 10.2 channels in 2024 – that’s double what it managed eight years ago, which at the time this study was published was 2016; and

• A post I wrote in 2025 rounds up five different studies on this topic with a range of answers from just a dozen to 28.87, to as many as 266.

Two hundred and sixty-six touches! What’s the cost-per-touch on that Machiavellian marketing campaign?

At the same time, there are a number of complementary findings from studies that also show prospects consume more content; as many as 11 pieces of content from a vendor.

And avoid talking to sales until the very last minute. But there’s more.

Sales cycles have gone from long to longer. There are more decision-makers involved in these deals – legal and finance teams are increasingly influential.

These aren’t isolated examples. What I’ve just provided is an 80,000-foot view of B2B marketing for the last decade, but the conclusion is solid:

It takes, on average, more time and more effort directed at more people to attract, convert and close a deal today than it did 10 or 20 years ago.

Theory: Why does B2B marketing need so many touches?

With respect to marketing, there’s one significant and multi-year marketing observation, dare I say trend, that coincides with the accumulation of required customer touches to close a deal:

the deliberate cutting of brand marketing and awareness-building budgets.

These programs get cut because they are hard to measure. And the budget goes toward tactics like performance marketing because it’s easy to count clicks.

If you work in marketing, you know this is a fact. If you don’t, or if you are like 97% of the company board members who haven’t cracked open a marketing book since undergrad, there’s a boatload of studies that demonstrate it:

• 2025 CMO Spend Survey by Gartner: “54% of CMOs prioritized performance marketing versus 22% who prioritized brand marketing”;

• 2025 Voice of the Marketer survey by WARC: “42% share expect increased investment in performance, against 29% share who envision increased investment in brand”; and

• CMO Outlook 2026 by Lippincott: More CMOs come from performance marketing (35%), strategy and ops (15%), and product marketing (13%) than from brand (12%), media (11%) or comms (2%).

That’s just scratching the surface. Any marketing or comms person or activity that has to do with brand or awareness has been under intense pressure for the last 10 years.

My theory is that we are seeing the results of those cuts manifest in long sales cycles and innumerable touches. The more these functions and programs get cut, the longer the sales cycles become and the more touches are required.

Awareness and brand marketing are hard to measure in the short term, but cutting them has a dramatic and adverse impact on an organization’s ability to close deals in the long term.

‘Correlation is not causation’ 

Theories, including Einstein’s, Darwin’s, and Quantum Mechanics, are based on observation.

Theories aren’t fact. They aren’t laws. They aren’t immutable. They are an educated guess based on observation. They earn consensus in due course.

The prize-winning theories hold up over time, and unification or at least reconciliation notwithstanding, new observations support old conclusions. Einstein needed Edwin Hubble’s observation to believe the constant he put in his own equations.

Now there are those who are going to say, correlation is not causation. Certainly, my Excel spreadsheet calculations, based on an eclectic mix of surveys devoid of random sampling, aren’t even remotely on the same level as scientific observation or mathematical rigor.

On the other hand, budget cuts don’t require scientific instrumentation; for B2B marketers, it’s just another Tuesday.

Markets are conversations 

Even so, I have three responses:

First, I’m not the first person to suggest this theory. A 2023 analysis by the Boston Consulting Group put it far more elegantly:

“Across all the industries and periods of uncertainty we examined, key performance metrics suffer when companies decrease their investments in brand marketing.”

Second, the preponderance of evidence is apparent. I’ve written about literally hundreds of studies and surveys for the last 17 years. When you step back and look, the trend line is clear: when companies cut awareness and brand marketing, sales cycles grow longer and require more touches.

Third, it just makes sense. If you aren’t familiar with a company when they call on you, you are going to have a higher level requirement for information. That is if you even meet the 95:5 rule, which is probably better described as a business parable than it is a statistic.

For the sake of this argument, let’s assume you do, and you now have to satisfy all of the needs that awareness and familiarity, if they had been budgeted, would have already resolved. Marketing is spending money on performance and buyers are consuming that spend for awareness. The sales cycle takes six months and a gazillion touches becuase no one has heard of your tech company before; they haven’t heard of your company because you haven’t “talked” to anyone.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was right: Markets are conversations but many of today’s companies have decidedly opted out of participating.

The buyer, you, is cramming a couple years’ worth of awareness into six months of study. This approach to marketing is not scalable unless you have an unlimited budget, which nobody does.

Worse, from a PR perspective, you lose your ability to frame the context. Instead, you are reliant on how the medium – search, social or today, generative AI – is going to present your case for you.

In the long run, this is a more expensive approach to marketing. If you dump most of your marketing budget into performance, you are far more likely to have a higher CAC. That’s a metric that any marketing leader can measure, based on historical or comparative data relative to brand spend, to start a conversation that gets your marketing efforts right-sized again.

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Do marketing budget cuts make B2B sales cycles grow longer?

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Successful media relations requires more than writing a strong pitch, according to Michael Smart, in a free online class covering the basics of media relations. It starts with understanding journalists, finding the right contacts, presenting the story in a way that matters to them and providing information that is actually useful.

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1. Journalists aren’t there to promote your brand

Journalists are not there to help organizations reach their marketing goals. Their job is to serve their audience by creating stories that people actually want to consume.

However, reporters often receive large numbers of irrelevant and generic pitches while also managing deadlines, watching social media closely, keeping up with breaking news and other newsroom responsibilities.

This makes it even more important to be relevant, accurate and concise. Public relations professionals should not expect journalists to understand their needs. Instead, the goal should be to understand what journalists are looking for and provide information aligning with their needs.

2. Quality pitches beat quantity

Media relations should focus on quality rather than quantity. Sending the same pitch to a large list may create more harm than opportunity because journalists remember irrelevant outreach.

To accomplish this, Smart recommends building a separate, targeted media list for each campaign and prioritizing different outlets that are trusted by the intended audience. Instead of only targeting large news outlets, communication professionals should also look for reporters and bloggers who regularly cover topics related to their story.

Smart suggests using the “80/20 principle.” This means spending 80% of outreach time researching and pitching the top 20% of media contacts. Focusing on these key relationships allows communication professionals to build trust and become a reliable resource over time.

3. Don’t wait until it’s time to pitch

Strong media relationships begin with consistently reading, watching and listening to journalists’ work. The course describes this approach as “read and react.” Public relations professionals should follow key journalists, engage thoughtfully with their content and provide useful information even when they are not actively pitching.

This could include sharing a relevant resource, asking a meaningful question or helping promote a journalist’s work. These interactions must be sincere and consistent. Journalists can recognize when engagement is only being used as a temporary strategy before a pitch.

As Michael Smart suggests, “Don’t be creepy. Be friendly.”

In his example, he says something like, “Oh, I see you have a cocker spaniel. So do I,” not, “Oh, I see your son goes to this school and plays baseball.” That is creepy.

4. Think beyond the subject line

Personalization helps a pitch stand out from the many generic emails journalists receive. A personalized pitch should demonstrate an understanding of the journalist’s work, audience and professional interests.

Communication professionals should go above and beyond simply personalizing a name and instead empathize with the reporter receiving the email. Subject lines should also be clear, concise and immediately relevant.

The way a pitch is worded is not as important as showing why the story is relevant to the journalist’s audience.

Over time, building credibility allows communication professionals to create a name for themselves. Instead of being just another subject line, they become a trusted source that journalists recognize.

5. Why your story matters now

A strong pitch must explain why a story matters now. The course identifies timeliness as the most important element of newsworthiness, followed by impact. Other important elements include proximity, prominence, human interest and conflict.

However, human interest should usually support a stronger news element rather than serve as the entire reason for coverage.

Framing also depends on the type of outlet. Television and radio pitches should sound similar to the language an anchor might use to introduce or tease a story, making the idea easy for a producer to visualize.

6. Get to the point of your pitch quickly

Journalists need pitches that are brief, clear and accessible. The course recommends removing unnecessary background information and leading directly with the news. Emails should use short paragraphs, white space and bullet points when appropriate.

Smart also strongly recommends against starting an email with “Hope you’re well” because it sounds generic and takes up valuable space.

Pitches should also provide useful resources, including independent experts, real people affected by the story and strong visuals. The goal is to complete as much of the journalist’s research work as possible.

7. Don’t be afraid to follow up

Following up is appropriate when the original pitch was carefully researched, relevant and personalized. Many journalists never notice the first email because of the volume of messages in their inboxes (see this survey of reporters on follow-up preferences).

A follow-up gives the story another opportunity to be considered. The course advises waiting at least 24 hours and following up within the first week, depending on the timing of the story. Follow-up emails should remain confident and avoid apologetic language; never say you are sorry.

They can also add value by connecting the pitch to a new development, offering updated visuals or referencing the journalist’s recent work.

Together, these seven lessons demonstrate that successful media relations is built on preparation, empathy and trust.

By understanding journalists, carefully researching the right contacts and consistently providing useful information, public relations professionals can become trusted sources and create stronger opportunities for meaningful media coverage.

Should you take this course?

Overall, I highly recommend Muck Rack Academy’s Fundamentals of Media Relations course to anyone interested in public relations or looking to strengthen their media relations skills. The course is completely free and provides a certificate that can be added to your resume or LinkedIn profile, making it a valuable credential for students and early-career professionals.

While the course can be completed in a little over two hours, I found that breaking it into smaller sections made it easier to absorb the information. I will definitely carry the knowledge and techniques I learned throughout this course into my future career in public relations, and I would encourage anyone interested in media relations to take advantage of this resource.

You can find this course by using this link: Muck Rack Academy’s Fundamentals of Media Relations.

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Alex Austin Vollor is a recent communication graduate from Mississippi State University with a concentration in Public Relations. She is the first-ever participant of the Graduate Jump Start Program (GJSP) by Sword and the Script Media, LLC. Find her online portfolio here.

GJSP is an intensive, yet part-time, paid learning program for new graduates. The program is designed to help new college graduates develop real-world PR and business skills, build a portfolio and provide access to mentoring, while they seek a full-time position.

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