B2B Marketing Has Changed. But Have We?

AI is changing how marketers work

AI is changing how marketers work, but B2B marketing’s future depends on what stays unmistakably human, not what gets automated.

I’ve been working in technology and financial services for more than 35 years, which means I’ve now been around long enough to have lived through several technologies that were apparently going to change marketing forever. First it was the internet, then mobile, social media, marketing automation and big data, and now, of course, we are being told that AI is going to change everything.

The interesting thing is that they were all right.

Marketing has changed almost beyond recognition, but while the technology surrounding how we market, research and buy has transformed, I am not convinced the psychology of buying has changed anything like as much.

People still want to understand what they are buying, they still want reassurance that they are making the right decision, they still seek advice from people they trust and they still worry about getting it wrong. Particularly in B2B, someone still eventually has to walk into a room and explain to somebody else why spending a significant amount of the company’s money is a good idea.

AI doesn’t make any of that disappear and, if anything, I believe it makes those very human elements of marketing more important.

That was the argument I recently had the opportunity to explore at Grand Rapids Tech Week and, as marketers everywhere understandably focus on what AI allows us to do differently, I think there is another question worth asking.

What isn’t changing?

When everyone has AI, AI isn’t the differentiator

I’ve watched this cycle before. Twenty years ago, simply being good at digital marketing could differentiate a business, ten years ago sophisticated marketing automation could provide an advantage, and today we are going through the same process with AI, as marketing teams experiment with it for writing, research, search, personalization, analytics, video, agents and probably another dozen applications that didn’t exist a year or two ago.

Much of it is genuinely useful and, personally, I think this is one of the most exciting periods we have experienced as marketers.

But something happens when every marketing organization has access to roughly the same models, intelligence and capabilities.

Technology stops being the differentiator and starts becoming the infrastructure.

Simply having access to generative AI isn’t a competitive advantage.

Your competitors have ChatGPT too.

Sorry if I’ve just ruined anyone’s strategy deck.

What interests me much more is what becomes scarce when everyone has access to the same extraordinary technology, because I think that’s where competitive advantage moves next.

Credibility. Original thinking. Judgment. Relationships. Trust.

The things that are hardest to automate.

The funnel is disappearing

Something else has been happening while we’ve all been talking about AI. The traditional funnel we have relied upon for decades to explain, organize and measure the B2B buyer journey has quietly been disappearing.

For years, we drew a beautifully orderly journey, with awareness at the top, consideration in the middle and decision at the bottom. It was logical, measurable and extremely convenient for PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, buyers appear not to have read the PowerPoint.

Today, enormous parts of a B2B buying decision happen where marketing cannot see them. Someone asks a former colleague whether they have ever used a particular company, messages a friend on LinkedIn, asks a question in a private community, reads reviews, watches an executive discussing the problem they are trying to solve, sees an employee sharing something useful or, increasingly, asks an AI engine which platforms or companies they should consider.

Eventually, after all of that activity, they arrive at your website and Marketing looks at the analytics and concludes that organic search generated a lead.

Except organic search may simply have been the door they happened to walk through after a journey you couldn’t see.

That is the reality of dark social and I think AI is going to make more of the buying journey invisible, not less, because buyers can conduct their research somewhere else and arrive at your website having already formed a view of your category, your competitors, your reputation and perhaps even your product.

For marketers, that presents a fairly fundamental challenge. We cannot simply optimize the places we can measure, we have to influence the places where buyers actually make decisions, and increasingly those aren’t simply channels, they are networks of customers, employees, executives, analysts, peers, partners and communities.

Some of the most valuable marketing we do may therefore be the marketing we cannot neatly put into an attribution report.

I am certainly not arguing that we should measure less, but I do think we need to stop confusing what is easy to measure with what is valuable.

When information becomes abundant, trust becomes scarce

This is where I think AI creates an interesting paradox for marketers.

It gives buyers access to an extraordinary amount of information, but when almost unlimited information can be generated on demand, information itself becomes less scarce. What becomes more valuable is knowing which information to believe.

That is why I believe trust is becoming one of marketing’s most valuable assets, perhaps the most valuable.

Think about customer stories, employee advocacy, executive visibility, analysts, partners, reviews, thought leadership and communities. They may look like very different parts of the marketing mix, but they have something important in common: they are all mechanisms through which one human being helps another human being decide what to believe.

Increasingly, that is what a brand is.

It isn’t simply your logo, your color palette or the sentence Marketing spent three weeks debating on the homepage, it is the accumulated evidence someone encounters while trying to answer a much simpler question:

Can I trust these people?

We don’t completely control the answer to that question.

Actually, I’m not sure we ever did. We just had a brief period where we convinced ourselves we did.

Your customers help define your brand, as do your employees, executives and partners, but so do the conversations taking place about your organization when nobody from Marketing is in the room.

That changes our role.

Marketing’s job isn’t simply to manufacture messages. Our job is increasingly to orchestrate trust, finding the people who have credibility, helping them develop something worthwhile to say, enabling customers to tell genuine stories, helping executives establish meaningful points of view, giving employees the confidence and support to participate in the conversation, and then making all of that expertise discoverable wherever buyers are doing their research.

The companies that win won’t necessarily be those shouting the loudest.

They’ll be the companies buyers hear good things about when the company itself isn’t speaking.

AI won’t replace marketers. It will replace average marketing.

I don’t think AI is going to replace marketers.

I think it’s going to replace average marketing.

And there is an enormous amount of average marketing.

AI is already exceptionally good at research, writing, analysis, summarization and automation, and it is going to get better at all of them. If your primary value as a marketer is taking a brief and producing 800 words of perfectly acceptable copy, that is going to become an increasingly difficult position to defend.

AI can produce perfectly acceptable content all day. It doesn’t need lunch, it doesn’t complain about the brief and it has never once asked me whether Friday afternoon is really the best time for a meeting.

What it doesn’t remove is the need for judgment.

AI can give you options, but someone still has to decide. It can produce content, but someone still has to determine whether it is worth saying. It can identify patterns, but someone still has to understand what they mean, and it can help an organization move considerably faster, but somebody still has to decide where it should be going.

The best marketers won’t necessarily be the people who can produce the most, they will be the people who can distinguish between what is possible and what is valuable, and I think the premium we place on that kind of judgment is going to rise enormously.

Because there is a second part to this that I think we sometimes overlook.

If AI enables every company to create ten times more content, we don’t suddenly get ten times more attention. We get ten times more competition for the same finite amount of attention.

Average content doesn’t become more valuable because it’s cheaper to produce, it becomes less valuable because there’s more of it.

AI lowers the cost of creation. It does not lower the cost of attention.

That is why creativity, point of view, expertise and trust become more important, not less.

The machines will increasingly handle the average.

Our job is to make sure we aren’t average.

Marketing needs a new scorecard

I’ve sat in enough boardrooms over the past 35 years to know that the language of the boardroom is commercial, yet Marketing has spent years reporting followers, impressions, clicks, CTRs and MQLs as though activity itself were evidence of impact.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those metrics. The problem comes when we confuse them with business outcomes.

Imagine the CFO saying revenue is behind plan by $4 million, Sales explaining that pipeline coverage is down, and Marketing responding with the good news that impressions are up 37%.

Nobody has ever been carried triumphantly from a boardroom because impressions were up 37%.

The language of the boardroom is pipeline, revenue, retention, growth and influence, and I think trust increasingly needs to become part of that conversation too.

Marketing absolutely deserves a seat at the revenue table, but there is a condition attached: we have to be prepared to speak the language of revenue.

That doesn’t mean pretending that every marketing activity can be tied neatly to a dollar of revenue, particularly when so much influence now happens in places we cannot observe. It does mean understanding which accounts are engaging, which people are influencing opportunities, which content is associated with pipeline progression, what customers are saying, where trust is being created and where demand is emerging.

After all these years of dashboards and attribution models, perhaps the question we should be asking is actually a very simple one:

What changed in the business because we did it?

That is a much more interesting measure of marketing and, frankly, a much more powerful position for Marketing to occupy.

Buyers don’t experience your technology stack

Most organizations have built their marketing technology in much the same way they have accumulated kitchen drawers. Nothing is technically wrong with any individual drawer, but nobody is entirely sure why there are fourteen takeout menus, six batteries and a key that hasn’t opened anything since 2007.

We have social over here, employee advocacy over there, marketing automation somewhere else, alongside CRM, customer data, analytics and now an ever expanding collection of AI tools.

The problem is that the buyer doesn’t experience your organization as a technology stack.

They experience one company.

They don’t care which department owns LinkedIn, whether an email came from Marketo, HubSpot or something else, or whether Sales and Marketing have finally agreed the lead definition this quarter.

They simply experience you.

Which is why I think the opportunity is less about adding another tool and much more about connecting the intelligence we already have. Customer conversations should inform content, social activity should provide context to the rest of the organization, employee expertise should be easier to amplify and AI should help us identify patterns across all of it, with commercial outcomes feeding back into Marketing so we can learn what is actually working.

AI becomes much more useful when it understands context.

The future shouldn’t be disconnected AI tools producing ever greater volumes of activity.

It should be connected intelligence, not automated noise.

What happens next?

If I’m right about all of this, there are five things I think we should expect to see next.

1. The first is that buying committees will continue to grow. B2B decisions are becoming more distributed, with more people researching, more people influencing and more people able to veto a decision, which means Marketing cannot simply persuade one buyer, it has to build confidence across an organization.
2. The second is that employee advocacy will become standard practice, not because every employee suddenly wants to become an influencer, most don’t, thank goodness, but because organizations will recognize the power of distributing expertise through hundreds or thousands of credible human networks. Your people are already part of your brand, the question is whether you help them participate.
3. Third, AI will become invisible. Today we talk endlessly about AI because it is new, but eventually we will stop, in much the same way nobody talks about having a cloud enabled marketing strategy anymore. AI will simply become embedded in how we research, analyze, create, personalize and make decisions, and the question won’t be whether you have AI, it will be whether you use it well.
4. Fourth, trust will become a primary competitive advantage. Information will become abundant, content will become abundant and claims will become abundant, but trust won’t. When everyone can create something that looks authoritative, knowing who to believe becomes extraordinarily valuable.
5. And finally, Marketing will increasingly be measured by commercial impact. The era of Marketing defending itself primarily with activity metrics has to end, and we should welcome that accountability because when Marketing can connect its work to pipeline, revenue, customer growth and influence, it stops being treated as a cost center and becomes part of the growth engine.

And that’s where it belongs.

What should remain unmistakably human?

After all of this technological change, this is the part I find most interesting.

Creativity, curiosity, leadership, relationships, empathy, judgment and trust.

Which of those becomes less important because of AI?

I would argue none of them, and most become more important because technology has a habit of commoditizing capability. When everybody has access to similar tools, differentiation has to move somewhere else, and I think it moves toward the things that are much harder to replicate: your point of view, your relationships, your understanding of your customers, your willingness to say something genuinely interesting, your judgment, your reputation and your people.

AI might make us dramatically more productive, and I hope it does, but productivity isn’t the objective of marketing.

Growth is. Influence is. Preference is. Trust is.

The goal isn’t to use AI to do more marketing. The goal is to do better marketing.

The goal is to use AI to do better marketing.

People still trust people, not logos, polished ads or corporate videos featuring impossibly attractive colleagues having suspiciously enthusiastic meetings around a whiteboard.

People.

That’s why customer stories matter, why employee voices matter, why executive visibility matters and why communities matter, and it is why I believe the human part of B2B marketing becomes more valuable as AI becomes more capable.

In The Social B2B Organization, Daniel Kushner, CEO at Oktopost, and I wrote:

Trust isn’t bought. It’s scaled.

I think that may become one of the defining ideas of the next era of B2B marketing because technology gives us extraordinary scale and AI gives us extraordinary capability, but neither automatically gives us trust. We still have to earn that through the experiences we create, the expertise we demonstrate, the relationships we build and, increasingly, the people who represent us.

The organizations that understand how to combine the scale of technology with the credibility of people will have an enormous advantage.

So yes, B2B marketing has changed and AI will change it again, probably faster than any of us expect, but buyers will still be people. They will still seek advice, look for evidence, trust people they respect, worry about getting a significant decision wrong and ultimately choose organizations they believe in.

Which means perhaps the most important question for B2B marketers over the next 12 months isn’t: What can we automate?

It’s: What should remain unmistakably human?

That’s the question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think there’s a single right answer. Every team, every market and every buyer relationship will draw that line differently.

What I do believe is that the marketers who ask it seriously, and keep asking it as the technology keeps changing, are the ones who will build something buyers actually trust.

If you’re working through where to draw that line for your own team, let’s talk it through. Book a consultation with us.