The Best B2B Marketing Strategies for 2026

B2B Digital Marketing in 2026 is going through a profound shift. Yes, the fundamentals are going to hold true. You're still going to face a long biogenic on average, the B2B biogenic lasts between 6 and 12 months longer than B2C. And yes, you're still going to have multiple decision-makers on average, apparently there are five to 11 stakeholders between your offer and the final sale. And AI isn't going to change that at least in the short term. What also is holding true in 2026 is that some of the core channels that B2B marketers have come to rely on are still effective. We're talking about driving high-intent traffic through search engine optimization. We're talking about capturing quality leads through Google and Microsoft ads and LinkedIn ads as well, although they can be on the process side. We're talking about supporting decision-makers with authoritative, genuinely helpful content. And of course, once you've generated those leads, we're talking about nurturing through email marketing. Those channels haven't changed. So what's the profound shift? Well, of course, the profound shift is that your buyers aren't just googling. They're not just talking to their friends or contacts for recommendations. They're using AI search. They're discussing their plans with chat GBT. They're finding new suppliers via perplexity. They're going and clicking on that AI mode tab inside Google or they're getting the Google AI overviews. And that means that if your brand isn't being featured in the right content on the right websites or structured in the right way, you risk being invisible to decision-makers using those channels. So in today's podcast, we're going to discuss three proven strategies that helps our B2B clients generate real leads and how those strategies can also help you win visibility in AI search. Let's go. Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Digital Marketing Post. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Digital Marketing Podcast. My name's Tim Cameron Kitchen. I'm the founder of Exposure Ninja. We are a digital marketing agency. We help our clients generate more leads and sales online. And over the years at Exposure Ninja, I would say the majority of our clients have been B2B. Yes, we do incredibly well helping B2B companies apply some of the lessons and the principles from some of the world's most competitive industries, which are often B2C. And when you do that, against B2B type competitors that can sometimes be a little sleepier in their digital marketing approach, you can get some really extraordinary results. So today we're going to talk to three strategies that will help you do exactly that, even if your competitors are a little less sleepy than the average B2B. So we're going to start with an example. I've just run a search on perplexity for a sort of a mid funnel B2B query. I've asked perplexity. I'm trying to choose between HubSpot and Salesforce. Now perplexity, if you haven't used it as an AI search tool, it's fantastic. It's given me a really detailed breakdown of the comparisons between HubSpot and Salesforce. But I'm not interested in the answer. What I'm most interested in is the sources of this information. One of the things that you'll notice, if you watched a video version of this podcast over on our YouTube channel, is that actually HubSpot or Salesforce's websites are not cited in the answer. This answer is produced using third party websites only. And this is an increasing trend in a lot of AI tools. I'm just on profound, which is one of the AI tools that we use. And I've just done an analysis of, to be fair, this is a pretty B2C query, best low cost ETF providers. It doesn't really matter what the query is though, looking across all of the different AI platforms, ChatGbZ perplex, the AI mode, AI overviews, Google, Gemini, Microsoft, Copilot, Grok, a meta AI. And what it's done is it looks at the top websites that are cited in these answers. I, where the information actually comes from. The top 23 websites across all platforms are third party websites. I, they are not the ETF providers own websites. And this is something that we marketers need to get used to, where people are learning about our brand, whether it be B2C, based on AI information that is taken from third party websites. So our job is, of course, to get our brands talked about on other people's websites. Now, there's a few different ways that you can do this from the very straightforward, like getting submissions on authoritative directories a very straightforward way to do it. You can publish insights on your own sort of platforms on LinkedIn or your website, 'cause that's the first party website, or Medium, or sometimes in industry roundups, you can also pitch thought leadership articles to trade media and niche blogs that can be really effective. But another great way of getting B2B coverage on third party websites is through digital PR. Now, there's a bit of a misconception about digital PR for B2Bs and people will say, yeah Tim, but you don't understand where we're really boring. Nobody's gonna write digital PR stories about us. We're not doing some crazy stunt or turning London bridge upside down to sell workout gear. No, you don't need to be, right? Digital PR is about getting attention from the publications that your target audience spends their time on. And if you're in a quote unquote boring industry, those publications are quote unquote boring publications. Let me give you an example. So one of the companies that we own is Pyramid eco, Pyramid eco installs insulation on people's houses but Pyramid eco does this for housing associations. So people who own lots of social housing. So it's a B2B company. It's not B2C, it's B2B. You're probably not thinking, wow, that sounds super interesting. I can't wait to go and research the intricacies of external wall insulation. And to be honest, you wouldn't be wrong. It is not the most exciting space in the world. Of course, anything once you get into it is really exciting. But from an outsider's perspective, it's not the most exciting. But digital PR is something that we use at Pyramid eco 'cause it's a great way of getting attention and providing some thought leadership. So just to give you an example about how you can find angles in industries that aren't necessarily the most sexy and happening, there are often new regulations, often new laws or specifications, maybe products that are being launched or technologies that are coming through. And the publications want to talk about these things because they're top of mind in their readers. But they can't find an angle to talk about it. So in the world of insulation and social housing, there's a new law coming through called A-Wab's Law, named tragically after a little boy who lost his life because his social housing was full of mold. And it led to some health difficulties for him and eventually he died from it. So there's a new law that's coming called A-Wab's Law, which basically says if somebody is in social housing and they complain about ventilation or a mold issue, it has to be investigated within 48 hours. And we spotted that the industry is not ready for this. So we worked with the Exposure Ninja Teams as a Pyramid eco working with the Exposure Ninja Team to identify some PR angles that we could take. And one of the teams came up with a brilliant idea. There are loads of law firms which are sort of collecting leads ready to file big lawsuits against the social housing providers for not exploring these mold and ventilation came quickly enough. And where this shows up is you can see cost per click rising for mold and ventilation claim keywords. They're using companies like Exposure Ninja to run ads to collect leads for people who've got mold issues so that those law firms can then run legal cases, run lawsuits against the social housing providers. Now, even if you're not really interested in social housing, that's kind of a cool angle, isn't it? You know who else thinks that's a really interesting angle? Landlords. 'Cause we're saying, "Hey, look, there's this big tidal wave coming your way and we can see the data." So George from the Exposure Ninja Team reached out to a whole bunch of publications and we got some amazing coverage, including in a bunch of landlord publications where we're talking about this thing that's coming. And every time we talk about this thing that's coming, we've got quotes from Michael, the founder of Pirateego, we've got his face on the website in the articles much to his dismay. And we've even collected some quotes from other influencers in the industry to provide in these articles to make them even more valuable. So it's a way of picking up press attention, giving us something to talk about, something to show thought leadership in a space that can be quite difficult to differentiate. But coming back to AI Search, why does this matter? Well, when these AI tools are going out online and they're doing their searches, they're looking for brands, they're looking for products and services that are mentioned in high authority publications. These can surface in searches and they can be cited in results. But also when these models are being trained the next time based on the internet's data, well, there's a much greater chance that they're going to be talking about us for these sorts of topics because they've seen us referenced in lots of articles about them. So you can use PR in almost any business. We've taken on some of the world's most boring industries and found some incredible PR angles. And this type of thing works really well. It works really well for traditional search and we give you another example. So one of our clients, many, many years, was a takeaway packaging company and they sold takeaway packaging to restaurants. Again, not the sexiest industry in the world at all. What we did is get them coverage in lots of different industry publications and we covered things like lockdowns, staff, we covered trends in the industry. We figured it out on any stories that we could possibly find. It generated some fantastic results because of course, when you're getting this PR coverage you're also getting links back to your website which helps increase your visibility in regular search. In fact, their traffic grew by 361% within just the first nine months of doing this. And because the traffic from this type of strategy is so relevant, the conversion rate on the website was insane 11.1%. 11.1% conversion rate. So this type of thing works really well and it doesn't matter how interesting or not you are. The important thing is to find an interesting angle even if the business isn't particularly glam. So in 2026 and beyond digital PRs only gonna become more important for businesses looking to win in AI search. And again, that is because so much of the reference sources for these AI answers is other websites, third party websites doesn't really matter what you're saying about yourself or the AI tools want to know is what other websites are saying about you. Okay, that's strategy number one. Strategy number two, target problems, not just product keywords. And this is perfect if you offer something niche that not many people are searching for. Let me start with another example. And we're working for many years again with a business in SaaS and HR SaaS in particular. I can't name them, but they sold software that helps its companies with their performance management of their team. Now, nobody really searches for continuous performance management software, which is what this business does. Well, there are some people that search for about 20 people or 20 searches per month in the UK according to semi rush, very high cost per click, 18 pounds per click. So shows us a lot of commercial intent. There shows the value of these searches. But there's not much search interest. And by the way, when we started with them, there was absolutely none. We worked with them to establish this sort of term the first in the market to be using this term. But you're not going to build a huge business based on a search term that's only got 20 searches per month. Are you? So what we did instead was we built the content strategy around the problems that the business solved, not the name of the solution, because nobody was searching for the name of the solution at that point. What people are searching for instead is things like how to reduce employee churn or how to improve employee performance, variations of things like that. Or maybe they're looking for appraisal templates, because they're going through the annual appraisal process, not realizing that actually there's a better way of doing it. Well, all of these search terms have much more interest. There's much more awareness about annual appraisals than there is about the alternative. So we built a content strategy around targeting these phrases instead. Then when someone came to the website to read the content, we then seed that the product that this business sold was the solution to that instead. So think about it, I've just searched for something like how to reduce employee churn. I've landed on a page about how to reduce employee churn through improving the performance management and engaging people more and making sure they've got their goals and that they're working something clear. And then it pitches this software as a solution to that. Well, five minutes ago, I didn't even know that continuous performance management was a thing, let alone it being the solution to employee churn. Now I'm thinking, okay, actually this looks really good and like something that my organization could do with. So that's how you can target problems instead of the solution to get in front of people. This works really well for that business. By the way, they started pulling in tens of thousands of visits through search per month. This was from a standing start. That actually came to us pre-start. And then we ended up helping them secure a $33 million cash exit. So great result for business built purely on digital marketing and mainly through search. So even that though, AI search is changing how we find answers to our problems. I'm just on Google's AI mode here and I've just typed him, I'm getting really fed up with manually managing my team's leave dates. What can I do? So this is a relatively mid funnel query that's basically looking for an HR software solution but doesn't yet know it. So Google's AI mode immediately runs five background searches. It uses the query fan out technique to run lots of different background searches. And it's searched through and analyzed in a region of 60 websites to compile me an answer. Now that's massive obviously. And it's just done a bunch of that research that I was just telling you, the HR platform would provide for its users. So now the AI tool is now doing that research. The AI tool is coming back to me with an answer that says you want to implement a leave management system and it's given me a bunch of recommendations based on firstly, the websites that were ranking best for those underlying background searches. And then secondly, the software solutions that were recommended most in the websites that it scanned to produce its answer. So this is the next generation of this but the principle is exactly the same. Understand the problems that your audience is facing. Make sure you've got content targeting those, positioning your products or service as a solution to those problems and then get it ranked for those keywords that either the human is going to search or the AI is going to search in its query fan out mode. And of course, you need to obey all of the content principles like good EATs or experience expertise or thoroughtativeness and trust. We've got other videos on that. Formatting for easy AI extraction so the AI can understand the content and the format and present it nicely to the audience. And then of course, including any testimonials case studies, any schema markup, anything that you possibly can enhance that content further for the AI tools. So the clear winner from my search in AI mode is something called vacation tracker. Not only is it the top website cited in the answer panel on the right hand side but it's also the number one solution that has been recommended both because it's optimized its own website but because it's got content on third party websites as well, including a video on YouTube which has been cited as a source. If you're listening to this thinking while this all sounds very exciting but also potentially a bit much, then good news, the team at Exposure Ninja can help you. We have dedicated departments inside Exposure Ninja for AI search, content marketing, digital PR, email marketing, web development, conversion rate optimization and of course, paid search as well. So if you need help with this, if you need help building your strategy for 2026 or you're just interested to see what the team at Exposure Ninja would do to help you grow, then you can request a free digital marketing review from the team. All you need to do is go to Exposure Ninja.com/review. That's Exposure Ninja.com/review. Tell us a bit about your business and your goals. We'll then do our analysis online. We'll have a look at your website, the performance across all of these various different channels that we're talking about today. We'll map you out a prioritized action plan over the next 12 months to help you generate more leads and sales online, completely free of charge and we'll even record this in a video which we'll send to you usually within a few working days. The catch, well there is no catch but not everybody is eligible for this. So you need to apply for it at Exposure Ninja.com but it is genuinely one of the most useful things that you can do for your business if you are eligible. So head over to Exposure Ninja.com/review to request your free digital marketing review today. Okay, strategy number three, then for winning a B2B marketing in 2026 and that is to borrow B2C website, design practices and apply them to your B2B website. Now I don't want to generalize, but I'm going to generalize over the last 12 years. We've analyzed, I'm going to guess probably 25,000 B2B websites and because I'm a very generalizing type person, I'm going to tell you most B2B websites fall into the same traps. They're jargon heavy, they have unclear calls to action, meaning when you land on them you don't really know what you're supposed to do with yourself. They've got dull blocky layouts, zero personality and they're really designed for internal teams rather than actual users. Often they talk about the business, think about what do we need to tell the world rather than what does the world actually care about and they don't really have a user centric approach. That is a massive generalization and it's definitely better than it was but still it's pretty bad. In fact, to illustrate this point for the video version of this podcast, I decided one of our company's Elite Renewables works from an industrial estate in sunny Croydon. So I thought, well, we've got a lot of other B2Bs around us on this industrial estate. I'm going to check out their websites to see if I could use them as demonstrations for this video and I was not disappointed or I was disappointed by the standard of the website. I was not disappointed because I wanted websites that proved my point and luckily they all did. All of the ones I checked who were B2B had pretty terrible websites. So yeah, I mean, the first one it looks like it's been designed maybe the last few years. It always says 2019 in the copyright. So it's only six years old, which isn't too bad for a B2B site, I guess. I really want your website designed every three years but there we go. And it's purely about the business. It's purely this is what we do. Here's our look at us. Here are things they weld pipes. They've got welding and insulation for pipes, which is actually pretty cool. Really, you could do a really good video channel on this. Suffice that they have not. But the website as a lead generator is incredibly poor. Firstly, it's very poorly SEOed. So very unlikely to rank for anything. There are no clear CTAs. There's a little contact us button but I don't know what I'm going to get when I contact them. But there are some fundamental conversion blockers namely, I don't know the locations that they serve. I don't actually know why they're different. One of their competitors, their positioning is completely unclear. The next website I was having a look at is I know the guy so I feel really bad. I know the owner of this business so I feel really bad rinsing here. But it is one of the worst websites I've ever seen. It is bright yellow, yellow with black writing and the call to action. There is a contact form on the homepage which is good. We like that. There is a CTA. But unfortunately, the wording in the CTA is basically an excuse for why the CTA doesn't work and why it's pretty pointless filling in the form. Which I've got to say is a real surprise. I've never seen that before where the wording in a call to action form actually discourages the conversion. So it's a new low or a new high depending on which way you look at it. The third B2B website I checked looks very fancy indeed. It's got this sort of, I don't know how you'd say. It's sort of textured background all these dynamic illustrations with the businesses logo. Unfortunately, it's under maintenance and judging by the way back machine it's been under maintenance for some time. So suffice to say not a huge source of leads but nonetheless fairly typical of a lot of B2Bs. Unfortunately. Now your website should be built to generate leads, drive leads and sales. It should be working really hard. You should have higher standards for your websites ability to convert traffic into leads. The new have for your best sales person to convert those leads into sales because nothing happens if you don't have a lead. And I don't care if your website's only getting 100 visits per day, if it's only getting 50 visits per day. If you've got a conversion rate of five, 10% on that you'll be generating a really good number of leads and you can then reinvest in getting some more traffic. So just to give you a bit of a demonstration about how we take this approach, one client that we've taken this approach with recently is a business called transparent, fantastic company. They offer something called procure to pay solutions. So it's a very high ticket B2B offering they work with some really big companies and they offer this service. So when they came to us, they were getting a lot of their sales from referrals and a word of mouth. Very typical sort of B2B lead generation is sort of accidental lead generation if you like, through being really good at what you do, which is a really great place to be. And those leads are going to be phenomenal. But they wanted to grow globally and they knew that to grow globally, they needed to have a website. They needed to be able to drive traffic digitally. So they came to us for help with this. And rather than just jumping straight into the website build, we took the same sort of approach that we might take with a B2C client where we first look at their branding and positioning. We spoke in the last podcast episode about the branding and positioning accelerator. This is one of the things that we do with customers with our clients where we do really deep customer interviews to understand who their customers are, what motivates them and what their profile is. We did, compared to user experience analysis, we did persona and journey mapping. We actually read it all our brand guidelines as well. We worked with them and basically identifying what do we need to say to the target audience and who is the target audience? How do we motivate them to purchase? We did that stuff first so that when we then came to do the website, we knew it was going to work well. When we designed the website, we made it look nice. We didn't make it look like a really boring website. We did things like mega menus. We used trust signals like logos and credibility and embedded videos. We basically did everything that we would want to do if we wanted to make a high converting B2C website, but just for a B2B company because actually the fundamental principles of high converting web design don't really change. We're all humans, even shockingly the people buying in a business context are still humans and they obey the same conversion principles whether they're on the toilet buying procurement software or they're buying shoes. Same conversion principles at play. So we use the same conversion principles in these websites which worked really well for our transparent. They generated 51 high ticket leads in just four months which is a phenomenal result for this business. We actually got shortlisted for the best B2B website of the year at the UK Digital Excellence Awards. We didn't win it though. We got shortlisted for the B2B website of the year. We didn't win it. We did win the B2C equivalent which is great but I really wanted to win the B2B one. Anyway, I'm sure we'll win next year but it works really well for them and taking that approach in 2026 is only going to become more important because we're going to be moving from a world where you've got humans navigating your website to actually you've got AI agents and bots navigating your website. If that sounds crazy, it is already here and it's only going to increase. So what's the key to this? Well, if you're a B2B e-commerce then simple linear checkout process really important. No checkout blockers such as account creation. You want clear product descriptions written in plain text with language that reflects the target prompts that you're targeting. We want drop downs and selectors that are consistent and easy for machines to interpret. We want to make sure that we've got any reviews and pricing data visible in the text so not just embedded images or hidden in scripts. We want to make sure that the page load speed is under a couple of seconds. AI agents just like Google prioritized faster loading resources. We want to make sure we're using schema markup wherever possible for things like product services reviews, FAQs, articles, locations, organizational details. This is how a lot of AI agents understand what your website offers. We want to make sure that we've got really clean crawl parts. It's easy to navigate through your website with internal linking, AI agents follow links to understand relationships between your pages. You want to make sure you've got XML sign maps. You've probably been doing that for 15 years, though. And of course, you want to make sure you're not blocking any of these crawlers using robots.txt to exclude AI tools. I always find it funny when people want to exclude AI tools from scraping their website. I'm like, "Okay, so you just don't want the traffic "from chat to GPs, you know? "Okay, fine, that'll just go to your competitors then." But yeah, you won that argument. So those are the three strategies for you. The fundamentals of B2B digital marketing aren't going anywhere. You've got longer buying journey than our B2C friends and you've got probably more decision makers. The channels that are working are still working. SEO, content marketing, digital PR, paper click, email marketing, and of course, having a really good website is important. But how B2B buyers discover, trust, and choose their vendors is changing. And that is all about AI search and building in AI tools into the buying process. So to get on the front foot with this, digital PR, really important web wide brand mentions in authoritative websites and publications, the boost authority and credibility with both human decision makers and the AI platforms that are scraping them, making sure you've got content marketing, up and running, AI friendly content published on your site that answers real human questions, tailored to your target audiences, problems, not just the name of the solution and of course obeying those web design principles we've just spoken about, making sure we're AI friendly as well as human friendly, making intuitive to navigate and conversion driving. I hope you found this useful. If you've got any questions, don't forget to drop us an email through our website at ExposionInja.com. And if you'd like to work with the team here at ExposionInja who are absolutely brilliant at B2B, then request a free digital marketing review from ExposionInja.com, forward slash review or drop us a message through the contact page. Until next time, see you soon. (upbeat music)