B2B marketing is entering a transformative two-year window. AI is rewriting the rules of search, content discovery, and buyer expectations, while new behaviours on platforms like LinkedIn are reshaping how brands build authority and generate demand.
The organisations growing fastest in 2025–2026 are those reshaping their systems, content engines, and sales alignment around these six emerging trends.
1. AI is changing how buyers search, learn, and evaluate brands
AI search is no longer an experiment – it is the default experience for a growing percentage of queries. Google’s AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot search, and embedded AI assistants across devices and apps are changing how buyers research solutions long before they speak to sales.
AI shifts the centre of gravity from rankings to answers
Traditional SEO was built around optimising for Page Rank. AI-driven search now rewards Answer Rank for the clarity, authority, and structure of your information.
Buyers are increasingly consuming:
- Summaries of your content rather than your actual pages
- AI-curated comparisons that blend insights from multiple brands
- AI-generated recommendations based on trust, authority, and structured data
- Zero-click insights, where the answer is delivered directly in the AI interface
To be cited by AI systems, brands need:
- Clean, direct answers to key questions
- Structured content (schema, tables, metadata)
- Clear author authority and brand credibility signals
- Comprehensive coverage of related questions (query fan-out)
The brands appearing inside AI-generated summaries will have disproportionate visibility even if users never click.
2. Marketers must optimise for both humans and AI systems
With AI intermediating discovery, content now has two audiences:
Humans
People want:
- Clear explanations
- Immediate value
- Visual formats
- Short, skimmable sections
- Proof they can trust the brand
AI Systems
AI models favour:
- Strong schema markup
- Structured data via APIs
- Consistent author profiles
- Fact-rich, source-backed explanations
- Highly organised content architecture
The new mandate: Dual optimisation
Winning brands design content that:
- Reads naturally for humans
- Parses cleanly for machines
- Positions the brand as the credible answer
In practice, this looks like:
- Modular content blocks that AI can quote
- Defined taxonomies for your topics
- FAQs built around high-intent queries
- Content clusters that reinforce authority
This dual optimisation will determine which brands AI selects, cites, and recommends.
3. B2B buying is now a team sport
B2B decisions no longer depend on a single “persona”. Buying groups of 6–10 stakeholders dominate complex purchases, and they each bring different questions, risks, and motivations.
The implications
Marketing must now deliver:
- Multi-message, multi-format journeys
- Role-specific value propositions
- Personalised versions of core assets
- Insights tailored to KPIs, responsibilities, and objections
AI makes scalable personalisation possible
The emerging workflow:
- Create one strong master asset—a narrative, guide, webinar, or proposition.
- Use AI to version it for each stakeholder segment.
- Deliver tailored content across email, events, outbound, and LinkedIn.
This gives buying groups what they need:
- Clarity
- Alignment
- Faster consensus
The brands enabling internal alignment win deals earlier.
4. Video and personalised experiences drive the highest engagement
Across platforms, video has become the fastest-growing B2B format. Why? Because it meets buyers where they are: flooded with content and short on time.
Video outperforms because it:
- Accelerates understanding
- Humanises complex solutions
- Works across every channel (LinkedIn, website, ads, nurture)
- Produces a library of derivative assets (clips, hooks, summaries)
Personalised experiences intensify impact
Buyers increasingly respond to:
- Personal video follow-up from SDRs
- On-demand demos
- Role-targeted explainers
- Custom landing pages
- Tailored post-event sequences
High-growth teams pair video + personalisation to cut through noise and increase meeting conversion.
5. LinkedIn can convert, but you need to understand the new rules
LinkedIn remains the most important B2B platform, but the 2025 algorithm update changed what works.
The algorithm now prioritises:
- Topic relevance
- Profile-to-content alignment
- Recent interactions
- Dwell time
- Saves, shares, and comments
- Clean, high-clarity visuals
What performs best:
- Posts with a clear hook in the first 3 seconds
- Tall, text-first visuals
- Carousels with big fonts and minimal branding
- Outcome-focused narratives
- Content that teaches, not sells
Newsletters and events are conversion engines
- Newsletters reach all followers + connections via email
- Events with pre-recorded content + live chat outperform live webinars
- On-demand content increases conversion speed
- Attendee data can feed ABM sequences within 48 hours
LinkedIn is no longer just a top-of-funnel channel; it’s a full-funnel ecosystem when used correctly.
6. First-party data and reporting automation are becoming non-negotiable to keep pace
As privacy regulations tighten and platform tracking weakens, first-party data becomes the foundation of every high-performing B2B engine.
Winning teams are building:
- Unified reporting systems (often Google Sheets + CRM + finance)
- Automated pipelines that refresh data without manual effort
- AI layers that detect shifts, trends, and anomalies
- Alerts for sudden performance changes
- Multi-source attribution models
Real-time beats reactive
Instead of monthly reporting cycles, leading teams run:
- Daily data refresh
- Weekly insight synthesis
- Always-on anomaly detection
This gives marketing the ability to adjust budgets, creative, and messaging before performance slips, not after.
7. Lead generation is about context and qualification, not volume
Lead generation has changed fundamentally.
Buyers don’t want to fill out forms, attend hour-long webinars, or receive generic outreach.
Modern lead gen principles
- Context > quantity
- Qualification > collection
- Insight > identity
High-performing models now include:
- Intent-driven qualification (behavioural + firmographic)
- Short-form, instantly accessible webinars
- Resource hubs that support buying groups
- Rich context passed to sales teams automatically
- Personalised ABM sequences based on real signals
Outbound is shifting too
- Outreach volume is rising
- Response rates are falling
- Personal video messages outperform text
- Engagement works best after warm interaction (polls, events, comments)
The emphasis is moving away from “generate more leads” toward:
Generate the right leads, with the right context, at the right time.
The Playbook for 2025–2026
To stay competitive, B2B organisations must reshape their marketing systems around:
✔ The rise of AI-driven search and answer engines
✔ Dual optimisation for humans and AI
✔ Buying groups and stakeholder-centric journeys
✔ Video-first, personalised experiences
✔ LinkedIn as the core content and conversion platform
✔ Automated data insights and first-party intelligence
✔ Context-rich, qualification-heavy lead generation
The brands that adapt now will set the pace for the next era of B2B growth.
