The Three Pathways in B2B Marketing

There have always been three pathways for B2B marketing.

One: just spend money. This works best if you're the biggest in your category, number one or two. Spend on ads, conferences and booths, mailers, extra SDRs, extra outbound, TV, radio. You have enough money that your competitors can't keep up. You don't even need to be original. Just spend.

Two: content marketing, or inbound. For the last fifteen years, this is what almost everyone else has done. You have people on your team, subject matter experts, and probably an agency or freelance copywriters writing blogs, social posts and use cases. Then, and this is the insane part, you hope other companies' algorithms put your message in front of the right person at the right time. You're creating content and hoping a search engine or social algorithm picks it up, indexes it, and serves it at the right moment. Pretty arm's length. You have no control.

And in the last three years even that has collapsed. The largest companies, the ones in the middle and the tiny one-person shops can all produce essentially unlimited content, keyword-optimized and posted on a perfect schedule, because AI changed everything. We flooded every channel, every inbox and every feed. Prospects have tuned out. They don't go looking for stuff anymore. They go to the AI and ask, who does this? How do I fix that?

Three: creativity. Creative marketing, creative ideas, hard creative thinking. Not woo-woo stuff. It was always the tricky one. And the challenge for any company that isn't first or second in its category is that adding more AI and agents to pump out more content gives you no advantage when everyone has the same tool. There's no advantage in doing it faster, at larger scale or higher volume.

But you can't walk into a boardroom and say, we don't have the money the big guys do, content is flooded, so we're going to do creative, inventive marketing so people notice and remember us. Boards, leadership teams and private equity will freak out. It's an unquantifiable risk, and they like quantifiable things. And part of the reason it's unquantifiable is that you and your team probably don't have a track record of hard creative thinking applied to inventive messaging. You also never had enough work for these relatively rare creative thinkers, the iconoclasts who question every little thing: why do we use that word, why do we always say that? They question everything because they know somewhere in all those questions is the next great thing. So they're freelance, or at agencies.

There are agencies that can develop breakthrough messaging, but they're rare, and they should be expensive. And if you don't have a good strategy first, there's no point hiring them. They'll produce something nice and pretty and maybe interesting that blows up. So you need to find outside companies or freelancers, or hire people who think differently and apply that effort to your problem.

You don't really have a choice except creativity and the human factor. It's not good news. I wish I could tell you that if you buy this tool and hire three people to run it, you're good to go. That doesn't exist anymore. Maybe it never did, but now it definitely doesn't.