Ten good things about B2B marketing right now.

1. The extraordinary firepower AI gives us all

The acceleration is real. The ammo is real. AI hasn't just made us faster, it's fundamentally shifted what a small, ambitious team can produce. The playing field isn't level; and it won’t be until marketers use AI where it counts and refrain from doing so where it only turns their insight into insipid drudge. But the opportunity is there to transform our industry. Some are doing it so well and the advantage is colossal. 

2. AI has also made us grow up

AI has also inadvertently triggered a maturity shift. Nobody wants customers, clients or bosses to feel their content was spewed out the arse-end of the machine. There's a palpable increase in marketers taking real care to avoid their work looking, feeling, or sounding crap. The AI arms race is, paradoxically, raising the bar on craft and intention.

3. We're solving genuine business problems

For decades, B2B marketing seemed to confine itself to solving ‘theoretical’ problems; vanity problems. White Label Loyalty is helping B2B manufacturers evolve their marketing strategies from trade promotions, to using first-party data in understanding their customers’ needs, pretty much the first time ever. Research commissioned by White Label Loyalty showed more than 70% of B2B manufacturers say they have customer data but only a tenth of them actually know how to use it. EngageTech is sharing the actual science that’s made it the world’s best outsourced sales development partner for complex Enterprise B2B technologies needing to boost pipeline generation. The EngageTech Standard is a blend of proprietary AI agents and the most rigorously trained SDRs in the market. Everywhere you look, B2B marketing is building things that matter to real businesses with real problems.

4. The biggest lessons aren't about technology at all

Watch my roundup this Thursday (21st May) of the last two or three months of Do More With Less. You'll find that very little of the best work being executed by marketing leaders in this pressure cooker of a market is about AI or tech. Most of it is down to smarts, adaptability, capability, and mindset. The human stuff; the hard stuff - the stuff that rarely gets written about. 

5. We’re maturing faster than B2C

This might sound so bold as to make me look a bit stupid, but there is so much happening in B2B right now that it feels like we're almost ahead of B2C; certainly for pace of growth, innovation. And although this would arguably be coming from a less advanced starting point, our thinking. At OrbitalX: we made a shift long ago from promising, tracking and measuring MQLs for our clients to dealing instead in ICP-qualified pipeline. That’s the conversation CEOs, CFOs and leading B2B marketers are having. It’s a reimagining of marketing accountability and it’s a powerful switch for our clients. 

6. Marketing is finally turning up at the heart of growth strategy.

The best B2B marketers are thinking and delivering in terms that make their work genuinely valuable rather than just ‘visible’. I'm seeing less tolerance for the bland, the mundane, and the safely agreeable. Thank God. It’s about time. My hope is that we continue to see less ‘thought leadership’ on broad topics like trust or even ‘thought leadership’ (I kid you not); topics that only serve to fog the real value of proper, smart, relevant business campaigns.

7. The willingness to share is remarkable.

B2B marketing leaders are genuinely opening up and sharing best practice and, as host of the Do More With Less podcast, I’m entirely here for it. Of course many of my esteemed guests have their own profile in mind when they turn up to chat - no problem, I'll take it. Because when I hear Robert Norum delivering sharp education to the market on ABM inside 35 minutes, or Michaela Dempsey giving away deeply practical tips on using press releases and LinkedIn to lower CPLs by up to eight times, that's not just personal branding. It’s generosity, and it's changing how the whole industry learns. When the top marketer in the country Pete Markey turned up from his B2C environment to share with B2B marketers how we’re still getting our pitching and approaches to him so badly wrong, that feels like a decent school day. 

8. The brand vs. demand argument is over.

For the most part, there's no longer a serious debate about whether B2B marketing should incorporate brand awareness or reach as a key plank of strategy. The theory is embedded. What's still to get right is the execution; I still see plenty of bland, feature-led, one-hit-wonder advertising and marketing moments out there. But the shared understanding of what good looks like? It's there. Since I wrote it in Boring to Brave in 2021, I've seen the learnings from the likes of Binet and Field echo everywhere. “Be less boring”; “B2B marketing can be fun”; “Don’t forget we’re marketing to humans” and so on. Such lines have almost become clichés but honestly? That's no bad thing. The next chapter is making it real.

9. The best stories win. Not the biggest budgets.

OrbitalX is building for a B2B world where story quality matters far more than team size and marketing spend. And the clients I work with are living proof of the validity of this take. They simply will not settle. They only accept ‘really, really good’ or better. Yes, they know they need momentum, volume, content at pace; but they’ll also push back on everything until they also have the story that’s effective, relevant, and distinct enough to win them demand. This wasn;t always the case in B2B marketing. Channels were the obsession; not the story. As a storyteller, I’m now being pushed harder than ever. And I love it.

10. B2B marketing is becoming an aspirational career.

B2B marketing is no longer an industry young people need “fall into”. It's one they should feel ready and good enough to choose. It demands technical skills alongside psychology, business acumen, emotional intelligence, and behavioural smarts. The people coming out of university who want to be genuinely, intellectually challenged? Those that used to head to the big ad agencies? They'll instead be heading to tech-enabled services, to firms like OrbitalX, working deep in the roots of success for private equity firms and their portfolio companies. 

Now - if we could just fix B2B marketing recruitment (as broken as it ever was), we’d be in a really good place…