This year marks thirty years as a marketer. You would think after this investment of time, I would have mastered all the tricks of the trade. Not so. Perhaps if I had stayed in finance, where the technology changes but the fundamentals hold steady. Marketing is different. It’s biologically linked to the changing behaviors of buyers, and buyers refuse to stand still.

Three decades hasn’t made me a master. It’s given me a rich, fertile ground from which to make sound judgment calls on strategies, tech stacks, and campaigns. That distinction matters. And honestly, these steep changes are precisely why I’m as enthralled with the profession today—maybe more so—than I was in 1996.

There’s no black or white in marketing. It’s a fluid evolution toward strategies that work better while not abandoning everything you’ve built to date. With that in mind, here’s what I see evolving as we move through 2026.

The Inversion of Power

Think back to 1996. Information lived in trade publications, printed brochures, and the minds of salespeople. A typical buyer’s journey began with a trade show booth visit or a cold call. Buyers requested information packets delivered by mail, scheduled in-person meetings, and relied on salespeople to explain solutions and competitive differences. The process was linear and predictable: awareness came from print ads or direct mail, consideration happened through sales presentations, and decisions were made after reference calls to a list the vendor provided. Marketers controlled the narrative because we controlled access to information.

That world is gone. Today’s B2B buyers complete 70 to 80 percent of their journey before ever contacting sales. They research through search engines, peer review sites, social platforms, podcasts, webinars, and online communities. AI tools synthesize information and provide recommendations. The journey is nonlinear, involving multiple stakeholders, dozens of touchpoints, and constantly evolving channels.

This means cold, impersonal outreach is functionally dead. Spam email, spam InMail, spam SMS, spam calls—all of it. B2B buyers don’t need to be sold to. They have all relevant information specifically tailored to their needs through AI queries. Companies using old outbound playbooks and looking for quick hits will receive a very chilly reception, and regulations have been increasingly blocking unwanted advances for years.

But here’s what’s worth noting: relationship-based, consultative sales will always have a place. In this increasingly digital world, genuine human connection will be valued even more. The impersonal dies. The authentic thrives.

Beyond Keywords: The New Currency of Content

Even as recently as three years ago, content strategies were developed by asking ‘What keywords do we want to rank for?’ We would look at short-term targets—high intent, low competition, high relevancy—and long-term targets, then build our editorial calendars accordingly. When buyers used Google to research, ranking for keywords meant visibility.

Today, AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews synthesize answers from multiple sources. Buyers get solutions without clicking through to your content. There is no ‘page one’ to rank on when AI delivers a consolidated response.

The new imperative is becoming a source AI trusts and cites. That requires depth, originality, and genuine expertise—not content reverse-engineered from search volume data. Keywords still matter for discoverability, but they’re table stakes now, not strategy. The question has shifted from ‘What should we rank for?’ to ‘What can we uniquely contribute?’

The currency in this new realm is what I call ‘information gain.’ Generic content—the kind that restates what everyone else is saying—gets ignored by AI because AI can generate that same content itself. To be cited, your content must provide original data, proprietary research, or expert analysis that the model cannot find elsewhere. This is actually good news for companies willing to invest in genuine thought leadership. Authentic expertise finally has an advantage that can’t be gamed.

Teaching Your Website to Speak Machine

For as long as I can remember, most B2B websites were built in WordPress leveraging themes like Elementor to make them easy to update. Add a picture—easy. Add a new page—no problem. You have a catchy hero image, then a section underneath, and another after that. There’s the resources section that nobody really visits from the homepage. Visitors might enter the site from a blog ranking on Google, then bounce off.

That model is becoming a liability. Websites must evolve from static, menu-driven libraries into machine-readable knowledge repositories optimized for what’s being called Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization.

The technical requirements have shifted significantly. Just as robots.txt governed the crawler era, a new standard called llms.txt is emerging. This file acts as a curated map for AI models, directing them to your most authoritative content so they ingest correct information rather than guessing. Sites must also use server-side rendering rather than client-side JavaScript to ensure content is immediately visible to AI crawlers.

Content architecture matters too. An ‘answer-first’ approach—where sections begin with concise, direct answers followed by supporting details—helps AI extract what it needs. And structured data markup, which many of us treated as optional for years, has become essential. It turns your website into a database that AI can query with confidence.

As traffic shifts to ‘zero-click’ interactions, the goal changes from maximizing page views to securing citations and share of voice in AI responses. The visitors you do get will have higher intent—they’re coming because AI sent them.

The End of Blending In

Two decades ago when I started Marketri, many of my lower middle market clients would say ‘We don’t need to set records. Just put us on par with our competitors.’ It was a strategy that somewhat worked in the early 2000s, although I never fully agreed with the ‘blend in’ approach. These were local firms with strong relationships. Marketing played a supporting role, not a lead role.

That strategy has hit its expiration date. Millennial and Gen Z buyers are less relationship-and-location-first compared to Gen X and Boomers. They care deeply about digital proof points: reviews, positive sentiment on social media, where and how companies show up on Google and ChatGPT. Because AI synthesizes consensus, the only way to stand out is through radical differentiation.

Your brand’s voice, values, and original perspectives are the only things AI cannot hallucinate. How you show up matters. What you share matters. What you say matters. Your customers become brand evangelists who advocate for you in reviews, testimonials, and case studies.

The evolution from ‘being like all the rest’ to ‘be uniquely you’ has, in some ways, brought marketing full circle. We’re bringing originality and creativity back. That feels right.

The CRM Becomes the Heart

Much like marketing departments were separated from the heartbeat of organizations in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—siloed off to churn out brochures, support events, and take orders from sales—the CRM system was treated much the same way. A database loosely kept up with, containing some good structured data like names and emails, maybe needing some cleanup. Good for the occasional email blast.

The CRM now needs to be the heart of an organization. Rich data of all kinds—including unstructured data like customer inquiries, surveys, and full conversations—must flow into the CRM so it can pump personalization into every touchpoint.

Not knowing your clients? Not knowing your prospects? That’s now a growth death sentence. It’s expected that you know them. Your marketing, sales, and customer service must have the CRM top of mind and at the center at all times. From this data will come enhanced pipeline reporting, predicted customer churn, micro-segmentation based on more than company size, industry, and title. The CRM is the source of truth. From it, companies will have the bloodflow from which to grow.

The Marketing Department Must Evolve—Or Flame Out

This is where I’ll be direct: all in-house marketing departments—especially those lacking AI-enabled, strategic marketing leadership—will flame out rapidly. I don’t say this to alarm anyone. I say it because the complexity of what marketing now requires has exceeded what traditional department structures can deliver.

It takes a village of cutting-edge marketing specialists across every area to enable marketing to be a growth lever now and in the future. B2B buying is forever changed. The complexity of mapping marketing to this journey is beyond the capabilities of a few humans, even if those humans are supported by an LLM. The technology helps, but it doesn’t replace the need for deep, specialized expertise across multiple domains simultaneously.

The evolution requires leveraging a modern fractional team with deep knowledge of strategies, exceptional creativity, and the judgment to know what should be human-driven versus AI-produced and human-verified. Marketing departments will need access to AI consultants and developers capable of building automations and agents to streamline routine work, reimagine processes, and collaborate alongside frontier models and purpose-built agents.

To evolve, 2026 needs to be the year of great change in how the marketing function is  staffed and operates. This isn’t optional. The companies that evolve fastest will have a competitive advantage, and it will be very difficult for those who lag behind to ever catch up. The gap will widen, not narrow.

Wisdom Over Mastery

After thirty years, I’ve stopped expecting to master this profession. The landscape refuses to stand still long enough for mastery to mean anything permanent. What I have instead is judgment, pattern recognition, and the creative agility to navigate continuous change.

The marketers who will thrive aren’t those clinging to tactics that worked five years ago. They’re the ones building machine-readable knowledge repositories, prioritizing genuine insight over keyword volume, treating their brand as a verified entity in the digital knowledge graph, and rethinking how their teams are structured from the ground up.

The future of marketing isn’t about shouting louder. It’s about engineering your presence so clearly that the smartest machines on the planet cite you as the answer. That’s not a revolution to fear. It’s one that rewards exactly the kind of substantive expertise and authentic differentiation that’s always mattered most.

—