B2B Content Strategy: What's Working (and What Isn't) in 2026

—do like successful marketing, blog posts work.

Executive-led content is really moving the needle.

I said, do not call me. This is only research. Don't waste your time. I'm not a lead.

He goes, I have to. Executives who are out there talking about what they're doing, what they're observing, trends they're seeing, are starting to be able to generate leads for their teams. You try to reach out to somebody within an hour of them requesting information from you, your chances are 21 times massive difference. Is your 2026 marketing plan prioritizing the content that's going to drive qualified leads? Pathfactory surveyed nearly 400 marketers at B2B companies to find the latest content marketing trends and what makes business content binge-worthy. In this podcast, we're gonna show you all the data. Welcome, Annemarie. How are you? I'm good.

Thanks Raj for having me. I thank you.

And I'm so excited to talk about this specific report from Path Factory that goes into details. 400 marketers that you surveyed, all B2B companies, and you found that 95% of them are increasing their budgets. A third of those— well, first of all, 95% is almost everybody, right? And then a third of those are increasing it significantly.

What, what's driving that increase? Yes, I think the increase is really to be more surgical in their marketing and in their targeted tactics. But I also think it's AI. I think a lot of people are starting to play with new feature and functionality, and they know that that technology is going to cost money. So they've started to increase their budget so that they can use that to target the right audience with some, with some new technologies and some new feature and functionality.

What kinds of AI tools are people looking at?

Yes, most of the time what we've seen is consumers like B2B consumers are acting very similar to B2C consumers and they expect that same experience inside of B2B that they're getting in B2C. So what that means is that you have to understand who your consumer is the minute they hit your site. So the right message at the right time, um, you know, in the right channel. And it's very hard for humans to do that, so you really need a technology tool to do that, like AI. And if that experience is subpar, that consumer is gone. They will leave you in 2 seconds. Um, so a lot of the tools that we're starting to see is not just backend workflow tools, but actually frontend AI-driven tools. So, and not just AI tools like in chat, they're truly AI engines to drive personalization, to drive content creation, to drive, you know, targeted, you know, messages, you know, to, to certain audiences. So we're seeing tools on both sides, but people are really leaning into this technology and what they're trying to decide is what tools don't I need anymore in my tech stack? So what marketing tools can I get rid of? Because this tool is going to do more. I may pay more, but I'm going to have a consolidated tech stack. Yeah.

I mean, to, to, for, for almost everybody to be increasing their content budgets, it's a clear signal that content is working. And one of the things that's so fascinating about Pathfactory is you can tell where people are binging on content and actually encourage them to binge on content. So when you look at the data from your tools, what kind of content are you seeing to be the most binge-worthy?

Yep. Um, it's interesting, blog posts are still king, right? Everybody loves a good blog post. Um, secondary, you often see, um, I would say white papers, case studies, um, you know, infographics, like, you know, one-page infographics seem to be secondary. The last thing, which was kind of surprising to me, Raj, was like ebooks and just white papers seem to be the least amount of content people are spending money on. Interesting. Which I— maybe because people want more of a narrative, right? They want stories when they are coming in now. And I actually think that goes back to how we're being trained on the consumer side, right? We're getting information so quickly that like you— and you want to trust someone to talk to you about the product. And therefore, that's why blog posts are so helpful, right? It's a story, it's a narrative. And that's why case studies are so helpful. So those are still king. Webinars are up there. So I think if they're in rank order, it's blog posts, it's case studies, it's webinars and videos, infographics, and then last is white papers and ebooks.

Wow, that's a really good marching order for executives who want to figure out where they should be putting their money to develop content. Tell me more about the blog post because sometimes you hear people saying, well, I don't read blog posts. And my personal experience has been if I go to a website and I see the word blog on it, I probably don't click on it. If they simply reworded that to best practices or how-to, suddenly I'm much more interested. Yeah. It's the easiest fix in the world. What do you see as blog content that actually drives interest? Yeah, it's exactly what you're saying.

I mean, some of it's dependent on industry and by persona, which is why you need a product that can tell you who's clicking on what, what persona, what's the topic of interest, because certain people are going to be interested in, in different types of format, right, or different types of content. But typically in the B2B space, a blog post isn't someone's personal narrative. It's truly a, um, story around a how-to, best practices, how might I make this product work right with this environment, what's happening in the marketing space. It's not a blog post that you would see on the consumer opinion side, which is just a bunch of your thoughts and opinions within a story. These are actual tactical insights that allow you to take action. That's the blog posts that work in B2B.

Now, your survey said, reported that blog posts, 74% of companies are still producing blog posts, but their binge rates are significantly lower, 11%. Case studies and webinars closer to the 21%. Um, so does that mean that people should be producing more case studies first, more, uh, webinars first, even though blogs are still one of the most popular things they use or read?

Yeah, I think you'd have to go by channel. So even though you have, uh, webinars and, uh, case studies that are probably performing better, you also have to look at the channel. So webinars and case studies are— they're easy to consume. People tend to, uh, to go to them and sign up for them, and then they are delivered to your email. Like, they're just— it's a more tactical approach to marketing. Blog posts, I think, have to be surgically used, right? Like, I think you have to decide when you're going to use a blog post and how. So a blog post might be something that's really great to put on a social media site, right? On a LinkedIn, right? Or if you're using some sort of Instagram or something like, I think that's probably a better place for it versus blasting it with an email because email boxes are so noisy. So I think it probably depends on the audience. But when you're looking at social and LinkedIn, which is really still reigning king to like successful marketing, blog posts work. I also think I know before this call you and I were talking about LMS and, and Agentic workflows and everything that's out there and how people are searching. I think blog posts tend to be a little more searchable by an LMM sometimes than a webinar, right? So I think you'll start to see it being used almost as a, as bait for a search from an LMM, right? Versus actually being used to, to draw in a direct consumer.

Yeah. And when you think about it, the cost is so much easier to just scan a web page because, you know, the AI companies, the biggest limiting factor for them right now is hardware. And bandwidth, and that's what drives up their cost. And so if they have to look at a webinar, they've gotta pull video, maybe they've gotta analyze to create a transcript, and then, oh, it's so much more token counts, right? So it gets much to be much more expensive. Whereas I think if I hear what you're saying correctly, if you put a blog post out there and, and we're seeing things like using lists, listicles they call them, and, uh, and FAQs, those tend to be much more easily consumed by the LLMs. They're easy to digest because you've already laid out the tagging, the formats, and so on for an LLM to map what they need to answer to somebody who's typing in a prompt. So that makes, that makes a lot of sense there. Let me talk about silent intent because that's something that I think everybody wants to find. Who is out there thinking about something that I do so that I can try to, try to pull them into my orbit? What kind of signals give off silent intent?

Yeah, you know, this is where Path Factory really plays well. It's the core of our product. So it's being able to understand that anonymous visitor and what their intent is using first-party content data. So it's great to get third-party knowledge and interest around products, but it's usually pretty vague. It's— anyone could be searching anything at any point in time and it becomes a signal. Where they're like, oh, they're searching a CMS system or they're searching email. That's all good, but they have nothing to do with what they're really interested in. We hear about this silent intent. What you really want to know is what does that mean for me, for my company, and for my revenue? And so having the ability to identify what an individual is actually consuming within your own orbit, known or unknown visitor, is key to understanding silent intent. So if someone comes in and maybe they start to come in to look at a security product, right, but then they quickly shift to a cloud transformation product, then they're quickly shifting to 5G, whatever it is within your product suite, you can hone in and they haven't identified themselves, but you can see that IP string and what they're looking at. You can quickly hone in on what to talk to them about next when they show up. And get them to identify. People aren't going to identify who they are and tie it to that silent intent until you give them value. Right. And that value has to be something they care about. And that, that what they care about is the personalization of knowing what I want so that you're making it easier for me to say yes. So I think silent intent signals to me, I think first-party data is super important. If you're not collecting it down at the individual and content and topic of interest level, you're probably missing the boat. Third party is still important. It is still important to understand when someone's searching outside your site. But think of them— I often think about this like fishing. Outside third party sort of intent signals that are silent just tell you the area you should be thinking about going fishing, right? There's a great lake over there, but it's not telling you anything about What kind of fish are in that? What kind of bait do you need? What kind of pole might you need? Do you need a boat or can you use a rowboat? Is there a dock? Like, it doesn't tell you any of that. That's what first-party data gives you and those silent intent signals that are on your site. So I often tell people, like, it's good to have both, but you really need that first-party intent data or you're not really going to be able to make that sale.

And I find that there's a timing issue too, because I've used third-party intent data and sometimes it's a month old and the person has already gone on and made a purchase or something like like that. And even if you try to get it live, it's maybe cycled after 24 hours. Whereas the— there, there are reports that show if you don't connect with somebody who's interested within an hour of their entry, that you've kind of lost them. Every hour after that, they get colder and colder and colder. And I remember Salesloft did a study years ago where they found that if you contact somebody within— or you try to reach out to somebody within an hour of them requesting information from you, your chances are 21 times more. Not just 21%, it's like, that's a massive difference. You reach out to 'em a day, a weekend later, they won't remember who you are. And so that's very interesting about first-party data. It makes sense that it's very important. It brings up another question. To gate or not to gate?

What should you do? You know, this is the forever debate of gating or not gating. I think there is a fine line. So when I recently looked at data, there was a study that 83% of marketers gate, and of those, 65% say it drives a majority of their leads at a, I think it was a 53%, right, lead generation. I think there is room for gating, but I don't think you can gate off the bat. I think people need to come in, they need to get a taste of the content. Then you pop a form to ask them to fill out that form and then allow them to consume multiple pieces of content after that. Don't wait. The word— it's kind of like, I think New York Times does this really well, right? They give you a snippet of a really great story and then you have to fill out the form and sign up, right, to get the rest of the story. They don't give it to you all. But once you do, you get the story and then you get like 6 others that are relevant to that. So I think there is room for gating. I just think that gating shouldn't puppy guard all of the content. Like after you fill out that form, because what happens today, most people, you fill out the form and then they say, well, Peter, we'll email this to you, and then they email it to you and it's one piece of content, right? It'd be much better to have someone come in, let them consume a little bit of content, get a taste, a sample, kind of like Costco. You go and get the free samples. And then once they fill out that form and identify and raise their hand, let them consume all those other pieces of content. Why would you guard that? Let them have it. That will get you much further and you'll understand someone's intent. Because how often do you— are you doing research on something and you fill out a form and you get that PDF, you have no intent of buying, it's one PDF, and you get that call from the SDR? Like, in fact, I will tell you a story. I will not name this very large enterprise company, but I was doing research. I filled out the form. Because I really just wanted this one piece of content. I got it. And in the form I said, do not call me. I am just doing research. I am not a prospect. 2 minutes later I get a call. Within your hour. He must have read your report. And I said, uh, in the form I said, do not call me. This is only research. Don't waste your time. I'm not a lead. He goes, I have to. I am measured on every call I make, on every, every piece that comes in. I'm like, then why then why bother? Because you're getting a bunch of unqualified leads. Like, that's what's happening. So, um, I do think there is room for gating. I just think that that gating should happen, um, in a very thoughtful way, and it should allow you to have multiple pieces of content, not just one.

Yeah, that— and that makes sense too. I know I get very frustrated. I, I sometimes hesitate. Oh, do I really want to fill out this form? Yeah, I know the phone's going to ring in a minute. And so, um, so yeah, that, that kind of changes the game. But, but, you know, you— it's interesting you say sometimes you— well, you want to get them in without getting content. Is there a way to detect silent intent before someone fills out a form?

First-party silent intent? Yes, there is. So if somebody is coming into your site and you're able to track them, or even just by an IP string, they've come in, you can see that they're engaging with your content on your site, your website, within a blog, right, multiple times, and then you pop up some sort of— or you send them an email, or you pop up some sort of piece of content that's really valuable and ask them to fill out a form. I think that makes sense, right? Because they've already shown intent, silent intent, by visiting your website, by engaging in that content. You may not know who they are, but you know they've been there before. Then when they've come past a certain, certain threshold— and every company is different, Maybe that threshold is 5 minutes, maybe it's, I don't know, 20 minutes. It's whatever it is for that particular company and the content you're serving. Then maybe you pop a piece of content that's really valuable and ask for the information back. Again, it goes to that value exchange. People, people need value, right? They want to know that you are giving them something of value for them to give you that name. But as a marketer, I don't want to I don't want a bunch of leads that are just going to be invaluable, right? If they're just a bunch of names that never have intent to buy, why would I ever— what, why do I want to do that? That's just the vanity metrics around marketing have changed. It used to be back in the day that you wanted to gate everything because what mattered to marketing was how many names you got, how many leads. I don't care if they're qualified or not. I just want leads. The more the better. We're smarter now. It's not the amount of leads, it's the quality of those leads. And marketers who really have to become data specialists and probably revenue growth specialists, what they're being measured on is not how many leads, what they're being measured on is how much revenue are you really delivering to the bottom line? So did those leads actually, did those leads actually return revenue and/or are you increasing a velocity of sale? Is it a— is it within my ICP or a bigger sale, a bigger bucket? Like there's different measurement now. Like, so the rules have changed, so we need to change. But a lot of companies haven't. I still go all the time, Raj, to sites, and the first thing when I go to touch a piece of content is fill out this form and they don't even let me see the content and I just go away. I'm like, no, because you know what? I'm just going to go to ChatGPT or Manus or Perplexity or Gemini, right? And type in the information I want and I'll get it there. I don't need to actually fill out that form anymore. I can just get it someplace else. Yeah.

What I find interesting is that when executives like CMOs or even CEO, they lean into content, they know the content works, so they start investing in content, but they look at it as a checkbox item. Okay, we've got a blog. Okay, we've got case studies. Okay. But then when you look at the actual content, It's thin and you're like, I'm wasting my time with your company. I don't— I'm not getting anything out of it. The company might have a fantastic product, but the depth of the content isn't there. How would an executive know? Um, because sometimes what they'll do is they'll make a decision saying, oh, blogs don't work for us. You read the blog and you understand why it's terrible content. So how would an executive know if, uh, if the content that they're producing just isn't Like what, like how would they know what to do to make it better, to make it change?

Yeah, I think that you, I think this is where data comes in. I mean, you know, you and I share a love of data. And this is where I tell marketers, you, it's not enough to just be a marketer that's good at understanding like a campaign or how to write content or brand strategy, right? You have to be a data first. Specialists. Like, you have to think, I am a data company first, right, in a marketing model. So you have to live in that data and say, okay, every day I'm going to look at these, at the engagement with this particular blog versus this webinar versus this, um, you know, white paper. And I'm going to understand a bunch of things. How not only who's clicking on it, but how deep are they going? Is what's the topic of interest? How long are they spending on it? How is this measuring up against any other piece of content? That level of data, that engagement data, has to go far beyond someone visited it and clicked on it. And, and even I would say like heat mapping, right? It has to go beyond that. You have to go down to the details of who it is, what is their role, not only how long are they spending on it But what's their scroll depth? What's the content? Like, what's the topic of interest that they're really trying to get in? Put up other pieces of content so that you can understand, are they continuing to click? Because if they're continuing to click down a certain path with a certain topic, then you can gauge that interest and start creating more in-depth content around that. It might be that CFOs really, really, really like white papers, even though we said white papers are at the bottom of the list. But CFOs tend to like white papers, right? But someone who's in a security role or marketing role, wherever, may really, really like case studies, right? So it depends on who it is and what you're doing. Now, the level of that content and whether it's good or not, I think, yes, you can measure it on engagement, um, and, and to see how many people are engaging with it. But that's also a little bit of— it's— think that's still nebulous for people to know, like, how good is my content, right? Is it— all you can measure is, is it really engaging people at the level I need them to engage in? And is there a threshold, or are they bouncing within seconds? Um, I think that's what you, you probably have to measure right now. Yeah.

Now, your report says 87% of marketers are confident that they are measuring ROI properly. Um, especially with all of these different types of, of content people can consume, How are they measuring it? What's behind all that confidence? 87% is a lot. And so it's a high number. It is.

Can you talk to that? Yeah. You know, I work with a lot of enterprise clients. And for example, I've seen this trend in Oracle and Palo Alto, in Cisco, where they have now— it's not— it used to be that there were silos. Marketing was in a silo and only measured this piece. You had sales in this silo only measuring this piece. Those barriers are now gone and they— there are systems now in place to be able to measure from first touch and click all the way to the actual sale and beyond that sale. So when you hear a marketer saying, I'm confident in ROI, it's not the traditional ROI metrics that we had in marketing that we talked about earlier, which is I sent out this piece and there's a bunch of clicks. What they're really doing now is they're connecting the dots between sales and marketing in a way that we haven't seen before. That says I am sending out these pieces of information, I'm measuring in detail who it's— who is the persona, what's the click, how are they interacting with it? Is it a qualified lead, which is more important than quantity? And is that qualified lead actually leading to end revenue? Is it faster? Is there a velocity of speed, which means that you're getting revenue in a year? Is it a higher deal size? Is it in my ICP? Like all these measurements are now available from first touch to end. It used to not be that way. It used to be that marketing just had the ability to measure the front end and sales kind of measured the back end. Those systems are now gone. Everyone's measuring not only effect on pipeline, but effect on bottom line revenue. And then all of these other measures, which are velocity, size, ICP, they're more important metrics. So when you see that number go up, It's because the measurement has changed and the technology to measure it has changed. Yeah.

Uh, there's so much to unpack here and I wanna start with something that you alluded to, which is how that person consumes content. So what you've described is going down a customer journey, the, a pre-sales customer journey. So they're aware they're trying to solve a problem, they're starting to consider things and then they're at the decision stage. So everybody wants, everybody like who's looking at the decision stage, the 5% of the universe that might be ready to buy. Right now. Oftentimes they ignore the other 95% that is in research phase or awareness stage. So how do you decide how much content you need to be creating for each of these stages? And then how do you map that content? Because sometimes I've seen marketing teams create content by sitting down and saying, what should we write about? Well, I got an idea. And then you start putting stuff on a board and then like, okay, yeah, looks good to me. Good. Let's go start writing it. And unfortunately, that's a That's a disaster. But, but, but you and I have both seen that happen. So describe to me how you create that, that journey.

Yeah, I'll, I'll talk a little bit about like how we do it, and, and we're very similar to probably how our clients do this. There are certainly people that do it the way that you say, right? It's, it's a little bit of a archaic way, right? That's kind of like, hey, this looks good, let's just do this. We're going to target these people in financial services. I think they really just care about about this. Um, we don't need to do that anymore. We have data, right? So everyone should be utilizing a data-driven approach to determining what content you need to deliver at what stage— top of funnel, mid-funnel, bottom of the funnel, and post-funnel. Everyone forgets about post-funnel. It's just as important.

Biggest untapped opportunity to grow an account.

Yes. Yeah. In the first 6 months, a company is probably more likely to buy from you than any other time. And it's the time that people tend to really ignore it because they're like, shh, sales done, they're onboarding. Like, but that's the time they need you the most, right? It's the time that they need to hear about new things and they're open to new things happening, right? Um, so getting back to your question, I think data— you have to use data to understand your audience. And again, these go back to those intense signals you talked about, the, the first party, the third party, the silent, the known intent signals. So you can look at what others, what other people that looked like this industry that I'm targeting, or these personas I'm targeting, what are they interested in? What are they looking at? What types of content work there? What might I need there, right at the front? And you, we at Path Factory and our clients are very big believers of customer-led journeys. So instead of creating very manually rules-based marketing efforts and campaigns anywhere in this funnel, why not let the customer decide that journey? Have the content ready, utilize an AI product to then recognize who's coming in, either by, I know it's Raj, or I know it's someone from this industry, or I think it might be similar to this. And then let the system start to push the content to them that they're interested in. And as they click, it gets smarter and delivers the next best piece of content based on what their interests are. Then you can move them down that funnel faster. Now, there are different marketing tactics that we utilize for in-funnel acceleration versus top of funnel. They are very different. And I think the personas in that— so if someone, to your point, is in-funnel, and say they're in their past evaluation and getting ready to go to contract or sale, right? They're in that decision point. There's new personas in that. There's procurement. There's usually an IT person or security person. It's not just the main point of contact anymore. That buying committee has grown. So it's not only understanding the content that you have and how much of that content you need. I don't really think that's the conversation because I think you can use AI to deliver the right content. It starts to come down to who's also the persona in the buying cycle, how big is it, and who do you know and not know, and how is it changing. There'll be a few that are the same, but if you're not seeing that buying group grow at each of those stages, then something's wrong. And if you haven't created content to speak to those different personas, yeah, then, then you're probably going to be starting behind, you know, behind the block.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest things that I've seen happen throughout my entire career, because when you're selling to somebody, you've got the user, and all they care about is, am I going to be able to do my Then you get the manager who's like, is my team going to be able to benefit from this? CFO is going to say, is this a good ROI, good use of our funds? All kinds of personas come into play. And then to your point, procurement comes into play, contracts, legal comes into play. What's going to make their job a lot easier? So talking to all of those, I think, are really important. You know, like the CISO is going to at some point come into play as well. So that's really fascinating. How do you know? When it's time to actually engage with somebody? What are the signals when someone's been bingeing on content that say, time to pull the trigger, we've got to either call them or do something?

Yeah. So the way that we do it within our product and with our company and our clients do it is we have thresholds of content engagement. So remember, we are measuring content engagement at the individual and account level across every channel. Doesn't matter to us what channel you're coming in, whether it's a LinkedIn ad, an email, a website, an event, right? All of that's being captured and we're understanding exactly how long you're spending on content. Are you moving down that journey? So it's not just that you came in and you spent 5 minutes on one piece of content. It has to have multiple measurements. Are you consuming multiple pieces of content? Like, what's the bingeing behavior? Is it in one session? Is it in multiple sessions? Are you getting smarter? And is that topic honing in on one topic versus 10 topics, right? So there's a couple of measurements that you put in here to get to a threshold, what we call a binge threshold, right? A content threshold. Every company is different of what they think that threshold should be, but in Path Factory, this threshold is, is created. And then when someone hits that threshold, it immediately sends out alerts to both sales as well as marketing to say this person is ready. This person is ready for a conversation. And not only are they ready for a conversation, this is what you should be talking to them about. And in fact, it goes even a step further to say, and here's the next best pieces of content that you should be sending them to get that conversation. And then there are some where you're like, nope, these guys aren't ready. They're not hitting this threshold, but they're still engaging. Keep them in the nurture campaign, right? Here's, here's a, here's more content to be giving them in the nurture campaign when they come in. But it's okay. If you reach out to someone too early in the cycle, you most likely will lose them or you're just wasting your sales time. So wait till they get to a point where they're consuming multiple pieces of content, their journey is honed in on the topic, and then they're ready and that the buying group might be growing a little bit. That's the time to reach out to them. Yeah.

When you look at all the benchmarks that you've got in the report, what's a surprising insight, something that you think that executives maybe currently aren't paying attention to but should be?

That's interesting. I mean, I, I think we are talking about AI, but we're not really talking about AI, right? So we're all talking about AI and how it might work, and all of us are focused on the workflows of it, which is something we talk about in the report. But one piece that I think is not necessarily talked about in the report, but, but that I feel pretty strongly about is that we have to change the way that we create our content for these new agentic models to read. So if the, if the consumer is changing, we have to change our marketing practices to meet the consumer where they are. And these consumers are using these AI models to do all the research, right? So they're, they're going in, they're using some sort of chat feature to look at, to look at the information before they get to you. In fact, McKinsey's newest report said that consumers are 90% down the sales cycle before they'll even talk to you because they're using AI models or using some sort of chat model to do the research ahead of time. Now, the problem is that information is, is not always correct because your content isn't written for an LMM. Your content is written for a consumer. It's written for B2C, right? Or B2B, but like a consumer in the B2B space. It's not written for a B to an LMM. To then the audience. And so we have to shift how we think about content and how we write it. That is something that I think hasn't completely come out in that, in that study, but that I think when we talk about AI in that study and how it's being used, it's the next step that we have to look at. I think another piece that I just found really odd, uh, and I actually don't know how it's going to be used as virtual reality, like the fact that that's at a 20% as like the different variations of marketing tactics you may use. That was surprising to me because I just haven't quite figured out like, well, what does that mean? What does that look like that virtual reality is being used? Like, what's the medium? Like, it's not an email. Like, so how are you delivering it? Like over the top, like through some sort of like over-the-top functionality to get it? And how many people have the ability to see virtual reality? So I know that was kind of surprising to me just in general.

I will say— I gotta wonder, like, what are you selling that virtual reality is gonna help you sell? I mean, unless you're maybe, you know, a government contractor and you're selling, you know, flight simulators that you just stick on a headset and you see everything. I don't know. I mean, I'm just like thinking out loud.

I think about it though. Instead of doing videos, so here's the way that I would look at virtual reality and I think is that it's entertainment. So instead of doing a video that shows like a how-to video, everyone's got them kind of the campy how-to video on their product. You can immerse someone in it. Like you could send them a virtual reality where they're like right in the middle of the fun, like video that you're doing. If it happens to be like a how-to video where two people are talking and then they kind of have you there showing you the product. So I think you're going to see that bubble up in a really different way. I'm just not sure how it's delivered. The other piece that I found surprising, that's not in the study, but I will tell you I have heard in the market, and this is mainly because so many channels have stopped working because it's so much noise. Like, there's so much email, there's ads everywhere, everyone's got their own, um, you know, blog or podcast or whatever talking about their product. Like, people have kind of tuned out. And like, events are coming back up, but you know what else is coming back up, which I was so surprised? Direct mail. Like, people are going back to direct mail. And someone who's emailing—

you gotta— like, half the people are working from home.

Maybe not They're mailing it to their homes. And so I'm so surprised by this because I just didn't think direct mail was ever going to really come back, but it is now the emerging trend. So it's not necessarily in the report, but again, I do lots of research on what are the emerging trends in marketing. And yeah, direct mail seems to be making a comeback as well as events in virtual reality, apparently.

Yeah, that, that's really interesting. So we've talked a lot about what a marketing team can do to create the content. That's not the only thing that's working right now. And I mean, the whole purpose of the podcast that we've got here is it's called Executive Signal because executive-led content is really moving the needle and in such a big way. Executives who are out there talking about what they're doing, what they're observing, trends they're seeing are starting to be able to generate leads for their teams. Are you starting to see things things like that percolate and what are you seeing and how is that being tracked? Because you talked about attribution.

Yes, I agree. I think that executive-led marketing lead generation is still key. People like to speak to people and they still— they like to speak to people in power, right? They like to speak to the top and it makes them feel great and makes them feel important. We, we utilize that at Path Factory as well, but in a very— what, when you talk about executive-led marketing, it has to be surgical. It loses its potency if you do it everywhere, right? So I think the days of sort of buckshot marketing, like you kind of scattering the market with all sorts of things, is over. Being extremely tactical, very thoughtful about where you utilize that, where you don't. Is the way that executive-led marketing works. But I think every company should be utilizing executive-led marketing. And yes, and I don't think that just means blog posts. I think that means an executive actually calling people, right? And having a one-to-one conversation. It could be emails, it could be a thought leadership piece, um, it could be podcasts, uh, but I don't think it's just executives in the company. I also think it comes down to boards. Like, I think there is something around activating people at the highest level that are experts in the industry to talk about their expertise. It's not necessarily that they're out there hawking their product. What they're utilizing is their expertise in the market to talk to people about their strategy in a consultative way that then allows them to be open to the conversation about that particular company's product. That will probably be done by someone else. So the way that I look at executive-led marketing is they should be used in more of a consultative and expertise mindset versus a go out there and drive leads, right? It's more management consulting for them. Yeah. And that almost opens the doors for then marketing to fly over with their own marketing underneath that. And then for sales to come in and open that door to an actual product.

Next conversation. I, I've seen that same strategy work for years, and I just think it's now really becoming very popular as a technique. Because when I would talk to audiences and I explained, here are the things that you need to be looking for in this industry— and, you know, I used to run an email marketing software firm, and we created this benchmark report similar to the Path Factory report, except we did it for email. And we tell people, here are the best days of the week to send, here's the best time of day to send, here's— and Tuesday Yeah. And, and, and you know, nowadays you see all of this data everywhere. Uh, we were actually the first company to, to put these out and that we got ranked on Google is number one for email marketing metrics. The Direct Marketing Association used to publish our data too. And it was a great way to, to pursue it. And when I talked about that, not about our product, I would suddenly get calls from DuPont, Toyota, all these big companies, just because there's an executive talking about the industry. And that's such a different thing than an executive hawking their product.

I love the way you put that. Well, you also see this being used really, really well. I would say that Google does a great job of this with industry experts, right? They have their sales teams, they have their engineering teams, and this is like Google Cloud, right? The business side of it. But then they have these experts in logistics. In mobility, in the Internet of Things.

Everybody's trying to figure out what they want to do for 2026. As people plan their budgets right now, where should they be investing? What kinds of things should they be looking at? Is it more content? What kind of content? What kind of tools? What's your prescription for executives for 2026?

That's a great question. I think everyone's trying to figure this out, especially where we are today. Um, I think the first thing is you have to be data first, right? So you've got to make sure you have the right data to be able to even drive any kind of engine. So make sure your data is clean, make sure you have that data and a way to measure that data. The second would be make sure that you have the right marketing tools to actually enable personalization at scale. So I don't care what tool you use, but it has to be a tool that allows you to utilize the data to then drive those marketing campaigns and decisions in a way that is automated at scale to the right audience at the right time. And then that, the results from that have to be connected to your marketing tech stack. So whatever marketing tech stack you have, you have to have the ability to connect it so that you can make the right decisions. The last piece I would say to start thinking about is you have to start thinking about your content to make it LLM ready. You can't think about content in the way we used to in the past, which was really more brand content, or maybe it was even lead generation content. It doesn't work that way anymore. You have to get in front of this and talk about how do I create my content and structure it in a way that can be read by these new models that didn't exist 6 months ago or a year ago, right? It's completely different game. So if you are not creating that content in the right way, I would say all of you have to go and check your content. You have to make sure it's written correctly, it's tagged correctly, and not for search, like Google search, but for an LLM search.

It's quite different. So repurposing existing content that's good quality, but just tagged differently. And as we talked about earlier in the podcast, lists, listicles, frequently asked questions. I think those are great ways to repurpose content. I've also found, um, just other techniques which would be stories. Stories seem to really resonate as well. They do. Because the content that's already in the databases, people can just find. But if you have a unique story, a customer example, those kind of use case example, those tend to be ones that get more traction. Humans are storytellers, right? Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, you know, I saw it used to be a lot of reports about Reddit and Quora being used as sources to validate that you have authority and expertise. And in recent weeks, those have started to plummet in terms of their use by the LLMs. So it remains to be seen what's going to happen next. And so it's one of those things that everybody's watching really closely.

Yeah. Yeah. It's anyone's game, right? But I would say that the concept that at least you could control control it. And maybe to the point of like where you're using those, uh, the executive-led marketing and those blog posts, that can be an authoritative source, right? So maybe using those as authoritative sources to pull into that LMM too.

That's what we're finding to be very effective. Uh, and, and that's actually why we built our tool Make Media, is to help executives get onto LinkedIn in a safe and authoritative way. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you, Annemarie. Great conversation. I think a lot of people got good information out of it.

Good. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you, everybody, for the watching the Executive Signal podcast. I'll see you on the next episode.