It's been about a year since I last posted on this blog, and quite a lot has changed in that time. AI is embedded into almost every aspect of marketing, from research and strategy development to content creation, prospecting and campaign planning. Tasks that once took days can now take hours or minutes.
We have more tools, more data and more opportunities to automate than ever before. So B2B tech marketing should be getting easier. Except it's not.
While the technology has changed dramatically, many of the fundamental challenges remain familiar. How do we reach the right people? How do we differentiate when competitors offer similar services? How do we demonstrate expertise and build trust? And how do we know whether disappointing results reflect a marketing problem or something more fundamental about what customers want to buy?
After years of wrestling with these questions, I'm increasingly coming back to one conclusion: technology can make marketing more efficient, but it's still mainly about human connection.
When everyone follows best practice, how do you stand out?
One of the most interesting consequences of AI is that it has dramatically lowered the barriers to producing competent marketing.
Almost anyone can create a polished article, social media campaign, email sequence or piece of thought leadership. That's valuable, but it has also created a problem.
Almost every B2B company is following broadly the same marketing playbook: publish useful content, build authority, post on LinkedIn, run webinars, create case studies, develop sector propositions, personalise outreach and invest in account-based marketing.
AI has made these activities faster and more accessible, resulting in more content competing for the same finite amount of buyer attention. More articles, more emails, more LinkedIn posts and more automated messages. And it all seems very generic.
So what if following marketing best practice simply means doing what everybody else is doing?
That doesn't mean established approaches are wrong - but it's not the same as competitive advantage. Producing more content isn't the answer when everyone else can produce more content too.
The real challenge is reaching the right people
In B2B marketing, particularly when selling complex products or expertise, the audience can be relatively small and highly specific. CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and other senior decision-makers are difficult to reach because they're busy, already approached by countless suppliers and may not have an immediate need for your services.
Cold email has become increasingly difficult. Mass LinkedIn outreach is easy to ignore. Organic content has unpredictable reach. Paid campaigns can be expensive, while events and account-based marketing require significant investment with uncertain returns.
There is no simple, scalable channel that reliably solves the problem.
And this is where I think we need to reconsider some assumptions about marketing's role. Perhaps access to the buyer isn't simply a marketing challenge. It's an organisational challenge.
You can't outsource marketing to (solely) the marketing department
In B2B tech, for example, much of what makes a business valuable sits outside the marketing team. The expertise sits with engineers, architects and consultants. The understanding of customer problems sits with sales, account management and delivery teams. The strongest industry relationships may sit with the CEO and senior leadership.
Yet marketing is expected to turn all of that into compelling propositions, credible content, visibility and demand.
A marketer can write about it, but an architect who has spent months solving a difficult technical problem can explain what really matters. Marketing can create a case study, but someone needs to explain what made the problem difficult and what changed for the customer. Marketing can develop a LinkedIn strategy, but if the people with the expertise and relationships aren't participating, there's a limit to what the company page can achieve.
Marketing can uncover, translate and amplify expertise. It cannot manufacture it.
This means everyone has a role to play in building the company's reputation and relationships, not just the marketing team.
The marketing that works best often doesn't scale very well
We've spent years looking for ways to make marketing more scalable through automation, personalisation, lead generation systems and now AI. There are good reasons for doing so, but when you're selling high-value expertise, some of the most effective ways of building trust remain surprisingly human.
A salesperson connecting with someone on LinkedIn because they're genuinely interested in their work. A technical leader sharing an informed opinion on an industry challenge. A CEO developing relationships with other business leaders. A conversation at the right industry event or an introduction through a trusted partner.
These activities take time. They're difficult to measure, don't always lead anywhere and aren't particularly easy to automate. But perhaps that's precisely what makes them valuable.
In a world where automated communication is becoming abundant, genuine human attention is becoming more distinctive.
Personal professional networks are particularly important. The objective shouldn't be to turn every employee into a salesperson or LinkedIn influencer, but to make the expertise within an organisation more visible and accessible. Over time, those individual relationships contribute to recognition, familiarity, credibility and trust.
Understanding the customer's problem still matters most
Another lesson that hasn't changed is the importance of understanding the customer's world.
For example, a consultancy focuses on describing their capabilities. Those capabilities matter, but they're rarely the starting point for the customer.
Customers are thinking about becoming more efficient, cutting costs, launching a product before a competitor does, replacing a legacy system that's holding the business back, connecting fragmented data or resolving a problem that's affecting their operations.
The marketer's challenge is to discover those problems, understand why they matter and translate technical expertise into relevant business outcomes.
That requires asking better questions. Why did the customer first seek help? What had they already tried? Why had the problem become urgent? What would have happened if they did nothing? And what changed after the work was completed?
AI can help organise this information, identify patterns and develop propositions. But it cannot replace the conversations needed to understand a customer's real circumstances.
The marketing scapegoat
When growth is disappointing, organisations naturally look for ways to improve sales and marketing. More campaigns, more outreach, more content, a new website or another salesperson.
Sometimes those things are exactly what's needed. But sometimes the problem is more fundamental: Perhaps the market has changed, customers are buying differently, previously specialised services are becoming commoditised, or the proposition no longer addresses a sufficiently urgent problem.
Marketing cannot create sustainable demand for something the market no longer values in the same way.
Sometimes poor marketing results are an important signal that the business needs to reconsider its assumptions. This is where marketing should play a more strategic role, helping the organisation understand its market, customers and competitive relevance rather than simply generating leads.
That requires honest conversations across leadership, sales, marketing and delivery. Not always comfortable ones.
AI should bring organisational knowledge together, not fragment it
There's another challenge emerging as AI becomes embedded in business processes.
Different people within the same organisation increasingly use different AI tools and environments. Leadership uses AI for strategic thinking, marketing for propositions and campaigns, sales for prospect research and outreach. Individuals develop their own AI environments containing months or years of accumulated context.
This creates enormous individual capability, but it can also create fragmentation. Different AI systems may develop different understandings of the company's strategy, ideal customers, positioning and priorities.
AI is no longer simply helping us produce work. It's increasingly influencing the thinking behind the work.
That makes a shared understanding of strategy, customers, propositions and messaging more important than ever. The solution isn't necessarily to force everyone to use the same tool, but to ensure that different teams and technologies work from a common organisational foundation.
AI should help bring an organisation's knowledge together, rather than creating multiple competing versions of what the business believes.
Perhaps we need to rethink what we do with the time AI saves
None of this is an argument against AI, automation, content marketing or digital campaigns. Quite the opposite. AI has created extraordinary opportunities to make marketing more informed, productive and effective.
But perhaps we need to be more thoughtful about what we do with the capacity it gives us.
If AI allows us to produce twice as much content, should we simply produce twice as much content? If it enables us to send ten times as many personalised messages, should we send ten times as many messages?
Or should we use some of that time to do the things technology cannot easily replicate?
Talk to customers. Listen to their problems. Build professional relationships. Help technical experts share their knowledge. Bring sales, marketing and delivery teams closer together. Create opportunities for genuine conversations.
When you're marketing complex technology services, you're ultimately asking people to place their confidence in other people: confidence that they understand the problem, have the expertise to solve it and will deliver what they promise.
No amount of AI-generated content can replace that.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity AI gives marketers isn't the ability to produce more marketing. It's the opportunity to spend more time on the things that make marketing work in the first place.
Understanding people. Connecting people. Building trust.
And remembering that, even in B2B technology, we're still marketing to human beings.