The New Rules of B2B Marketing 2026

Have you ever wondered why the B2B marketing playbooks from 2023 are completely failing right now? Well, we just tested something that got us higher quality leads with half the work, and the companies still playing the old game are getting crushed. So now, look, I know what you're thinking. It's another AI will change everything video. I'm going to show you the 5 new rules of B2B marketing in 2026. What's actually working, what died, and why most B2B marketers are about to get left behind. Rule that died number 1, volume over quality. The old game was to blast hundreds of thousands of cold emails and get maybe 100 replies or so. That worked in 2020, but it's broken in 2026. Everyone's inbox is flooded and open rates are going down. They're continuing to tank right now. So what we've tested instead was that we're still sending the hundreds of thousands of emails, but we're very targeted towards our total addressable market. So for us, that's B2B SaaS. And so in that world, you don't have a lot of people that we're looking to target. But the other key thing here is you can't just send volume. The quality piece that we're doing is one, we have a really good offer. The really good offer is we send an Amazon gift card. So $105 for Amazon gift card. The reason it's $105 is because the extra $5 that gets their attention. It's not just $100. That's a right, a nice round number. It's $105. Okay. So it's like, oh wow, you're incentivizing me to get on this call. I would like to have $100 extra for the time I'm already putting into my day job. And, but the other piece too, so we have a product called ClickFlow, which is our answer engine optimization Our search engine optimization product. We'll say, not only are we going to give you this $105 Amazon gift card, if it makes sense, we will give you 10,000 words for free as well. How does that sound? That's a no-brainer offer. You want to make them feel so stupid for not taking the offer, and that's the hallmark of a good offer. Role that died number 2: logging into a SaaS solution and doing everything on your own. Now in 2026, everyone wants a push a button and leads appear type of thing, a one-click marketing solution. And a lot of marketing solutions currently are just simply reporting tools. You have to log in and track your ranking. You have to look at how you're stacking up to your competitors. It's not exactly the best. I want something that tells me how I'm doing right now, comes up with some recommendations, and just does it for me. That's going to make you a lot more money automatically because you're going to log into Cursor and it's going to say, hey, we got all these insights for you. We're recommending these changes. Okay, you select the ones that you like. Do you want us to just do it for you? Boom, you say yes. You just verify that what the work looks like is good. That makes work a lot easier. Rule that died number 3, traditional SEO as the main channel. So website traffic is continuing to decline. We're talking 20, 30, 40, 50% dips. When you look at AI overviews, Google's AI overviews, they're eating up 30 to 40% of the clicks. And you look at traffic on our website, at least most websites right now, it's an open jaw traffic pattern, meaning that the impressions are going up, but the clicks are going down. Don't get me wrong, Google still matters. Google, in fact, they're still one of the most profitable companies in the world, $116 billion in profit. I think the most profitable company. But you gotta look at this as website traffic that you have coming in is a cigar butt channel, meaning that that traffic's gonna continue to decline over time. Google is still continuing to have more queries. People are searching for more things. And especially when you're using AI, the queries are a lot longer. People are searching for a lot more things. And so usage is going to go up, but just expect that your website traffic is going to continue to decline. Meaning that traditional SEO as we know it is slowly dying. I hate to say it, but me coming in with the SEO background is slowly dying. What you got to look at instead is SEO as search everywhere optimization. And meaning that you look at some of the traffic being diverted over into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Sure, those LLMs are available. But when I say search everywhere optimization, that means YouTube, second largest search engine in the world. That means if you're optimizing for shoppers, Amazon, maybe you're doing Pinterest as well. Maybe you're doing App Store optimization. There's a lot of different options now and attention is so disparate. When I first started my career in SEO, we're talking 15+ years ago or so, SEO was very much the only game in town. Instagram wasn't even really taking off yet. YouTube was still kind of very nascent. The game has changed quite a bit and you've got to adapt and you can't just bet on Google SEO because if you just do that, you're going to be screwed. So internally for the Single Grain team now for our internal marketing. This is why I'm recording this video right now. This is going to go to YouTube. We're going to try to figure out how to chop it up for short-form clips as well. This pillar topic over here can now move over to LinkedIn. It can move over to X as well. We're trying to play the everywhere game because organic reach is no longer just constrained to one channel. And back in the day, when you look at marketing, they used to say that marketing was the rule of 7. Because there's so many different channels now, marketing is very much the rule of 21. There's actually numbers to back this up now, even the rule of 28 in some cases, right? Because when you pull out your phone as an example, oh, you might be looking at X and then you're scrolling TikTok and you're scrolling Instagram. So you have a lot of different options now. When we talk to clients, the ones who are trying the everywhere game and they're listening to this content, they're the ones that are actually thriving. The ones that just want to do SEO, they just want to do traditional SEO with link building, keyword research, you know, blog content. Not saying that stuff doesn't work, but you have to enhance and expand your strategy. New rule number 1 is adoption speed over strategy. So the Fiverr CEO quote said this, if you're not adopting AI, you are now a burden on society. And my belief is, look, that's harsh, but it's true. There are companies like my friend's company. They're hiring a bunch, actually, a bunch of 17 to 19-year-olds who actually will volunteer to sleep in the office. These are kids that have grown up with AI, and they don't know a world where AI hasn't existed. And they're constantly asking, "How can I do more? We should do things this way. This way of doing things is stupid." They don't understand how we have done things over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years or so. So the level of motivation is sky high, plus the AI fluency is sky high as well. And so if you can, maybe 20% of the hires that you're going for, you're betting on potential. You're betting on these kids that are super AI fluent and have a Very high motor to get things done. So if your team isn't adopting AI, they don't belong in this new world, at least at your company, if you're trying to move quickly and you're trying to do big things. New rule number 2, human plus AI operator model. You're not necessarily looking to just replace humans. You're looking to become an AI operator managing agents. And that's what you're trying to teach your team to do. You want to replace those humans with humans that are AI operators. And that sounds crude, but the way I see it is it's akin to not knowing how to use power tools if you're building a house. It's akin to not using a computer today. Like, why would you not use a computer? Well, you use a computer right now. 'Cause you can do your work a lot faster. You use the internet 'cause you can do your work a lot faster. And so not using AI means you're handicapping yourself. The world that we're moving into right now is a world in which one person can become a 100x employee. So that one person can build one agentic workflow and then stack a bunch more. And so here's an example. At my company, it's very important for us to see what is the number one thing that someone got done yesterday? What's the number one thing that they're working on today? That's actually very important because the number one thing when you're hiring someone is you wanna make sure that they're working on the right thing, they're prioritizing on the right thing because you have a vision, you have a mission for the company. And so we built an agentic workflow that will look at what people are entering in for what they're working on. And then we have a coach that will coach them on, hey, is this the highest leverage thing that you can work on? Or maybe you should be working on this instead. Maybe you should be thinking about this instead. And that worked really well for us when we first launched it. The key thing is when you launch these things, you want to make sure that you're continuing to iterate on these. One person now can become a 100x employee. And when we take that into a B2B marketing context, there's one example of an agentic workflow that we built. When we have leads come into our website, we use Perplexity to enhance those leads. What is it that they're looking for? What does that person do? What does this person tenure? What is this person interested in? So look at their X, look at their LinkedIn as well. And that data, that enrichment will then be surfaced over to our sales rep that will then get on the call with them. And then they'll realize, hey, what is this person's title? How has this person trended over time? What are they interested in? So that sales rep can build more of a relationship with that person. And that increases our conversion rates because it shows that we've actually done our research. That's a very simple example of a sales enrichment agentic workflow that you can build. And you can use different products out there to do this for you, such as Lindy or Zapier. So new rule number 3, I kind of talked about this earlier, but cross- Cross-platform authority, so not a single channel move. Because back in the day, you could have just done SEO, but you got to be everywhere now. Your authority might be your blog, your YouTube, your Reddit, your LinkedIn, and all these AI platforms will look at your entire digital presence, not just one website in isolation, which can be a good or bad thing. And so ultimately, what you want to think about is ecosystem, not single pages. New rule number four: B2B CTV. So we're talking about connected TV ads. This is mispriced right now. So we've been running B2B CTV ads, so they're not very competitive right now. Inventory is great, it's very affordable, and the ROI is way higher than B2C. Most B2B companies stick to tried and true. They've never really tried the original new stuff. And if you're willing to take a shot, carve out a 10 to 15% fun budget. There's a multi-trillion dollar company that we're talking to right now that thinks exactly like this. We just spoke with them last week and they said, you know, 10% is our fun budget. We want to try new things. And I talked to another company. This is a multi-billion dollar company and they're like, yeah, we're trying new things all the time. We want to try influencer. We want to try channels like AppLovin. We want to try new things, right? So just keep in mind that we're talking about CTV, but ultimately what we're talking about is trying new things and experimenting because Most of your experiments, 90% are not going to work, but 10% will. And that 10% is going to drive a lot more growth than your tried and true channels in the future. New rule number 5, creator-led B2B, LinkedIn plus content. So yesterday I just did a webinar with Adam Robinson. So Adam Robinson is one of my friends. He has a company called RB2B. He drives all of his pipeline for his $7 million ARR company called RB2B. He just has a lot of LinkedIn posts that he does. Being able to drive all of your pipeline from LinkedIn is very powerful. So when you're creator-led B2B, Like Adam Robinson, or you can even hit other YouTube channels as well. There's a lot of great examples around this. Like I have companies such as Meta, Snap, Adobe hit me up to do influencer deals. So the number one benefit of being a B2B creator is that you're able to drive pipeline and real business for whatever it is that you're trying to build, whether it's a product or a service. That's the first thing. Now the second piece is creating content is very expensive. And so I know for us at the very least right now, we're spending about $22,000 a month on content, which is way too expensive right now. It is way too much money and we're struggling to see the ROI on it. But if you're struggling to see the direct ROI from all of the work that you spend on content, What I will say is that business creators are getting lots of pitches. I'll give you an example. There are publicly traded companies that have paid me anywhere from multiple 5 figures to do one video. There's like 2 or 3 that hit me up this week and they're willing to do deals. And when we tell them immediately fee is $25,000, they just try to push them away. Oftentimes a lot of them will say, hey, we can do it, right? I talked to someone recently who works at a PR company. They work with Meta to work with influencers, and Meta is often willing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 to work with influencers. So my point of saying this is that Sure, creating content as a B2B operator is expensive. That's number one. But you can offset those costs as you start to grow using these influencer deals. And but the other piece too is that you are going to drive pipeline and this pipeline compounds over time too. And so you don't want to sleep on living this new world of being a B2B creator because it works really well. Now, that being said, influencer deals can offset the cost, but the way you're going to make the most money when you have more reach over time is let's say you're making a YouTube video. You want to have mid-rolls in there where you're promoting your own stuff. That's where you're going to have your best ROI. But I think you can do both. I used to be of the mindset that you shouldn't take these Brand deals. But now I'm like, okay, the content costs are just so much right now. Now we're getting to the point where we're just like, hey, should we just like cut a lot of our content costs? But if you do these influencer deals, you can offset them. So that's how you can play this game. Real quick, if you are looking for a new gig and you're into marketing, we are hiring more AI-forward people at Single Grain. So we're looking to hire AI-forward paid media people, AI-forward SEO people, AI-forward salespeople. If you're looking to join a tech-enabled services business, which means a combination of technology, so SaaS, and agency, then Single Grain is the company for you. So all you need to do is go to singlegrain.com/careers. You can refer your friends as well. I guarantee you this is going to be the best place for people to grow who want to be AI-forward and who want to be cutting edge when it comes to marketing. So again, singlegrain.com/careers. All right. So we talked about a lot. Here's what you actually need to do Monday morning. If you're a $10 million marketer, hire a disruptive marketing team focused on AI efficiency. Don't expect departments to disrupt themselves. Have one team dedicated to finding AI wins. Roll out wins across the organization. This is exactly what we do at Single Grain. Now, if you're a founder, You have to trumpet AI adoption from the top. Champions need to happen from within the organization, and then you spread the positive AI virus throughout the organization. And then you have to make sure that you hire people who are willing to learn. So an example here is when we're hiring people, I often will ask them, hey, how much are you spending per month out of pocket on AI right now? If you say $0, you're out. If people are saying they're spending $100, $200 a month or so on AI, that means they're testing a lot. Then I ask them, hey, what have you built around AI that has affected a KPI? Give me an example. Tell me a story. And if they can't give me a good story, we're also not going to hire them. The other thing too is you got to stay on top of your team too, because your team's going to try to cut corners because they're always going to want to throw people at the problem. But if you're not a leader in the company and you're not clamping down on who you're bringing in, that means you're opening up your company to a lot of different attack vectors. You don't want to let that happen. So you got to be iron-fisted about the people that you bring in. And if you're iron-fisted about AI, this is a really easy way to see people that who want to learn, right? And then we got to talk about the speed advantage because most marketers right now, they're still using a 2023 playbook. Time is compressing. Things are moving a lot faster now. All the keywords, backlinks, cold email blasts that worked in the past that didn't have a lot of thought— not saying they don't work today, but they require a lot more thought. And the meta, the most optimized way of playing, has changed. So you've got 6 to 12 months before everyone else catches up. Same thing happened with SEO in early days. Early movers captured 10x value. You don't want to wait. You want to capture all the value right now. You just got to move a lot faster. The way I see it with B2B marketing now combined with AI, you've got 6 to 12 months before everyone else catches up. The same thing happened early days with SEO. The ones that moved very quickly, they accrued a lot of of traffic, a lot of conversions. The ones that were too slow, it got way more competitive and it became a lot harder to do SEO. So early movers tend to capture 10x the value. So you don't want to wait right now. When you look at things such as ChatKit coming out from OpenAI, you look at the App Store that's coming out, you look at Apple opening up the App Store where you can have mini apps in there too. There are a lot of opportunities coming with B2B marketing, and it's very exciting if you move quickly. So those are the 5 new rules of B2B marketing in 2026. Quality over volume, AI operators, cross-platform authority, CTV ads, creator-led But here's what I didn't tell you. Most of these tactics require tools and workflows that didn't exist six months ago. If you want to see the exact AI tools and automations we're using to execute all of this, just click this video where I break down our complete B2B marketing stack for 2026. I'll see you there.