The Power of Proof in B2B: Todd Lebo on Original Research, Influence, and AI Discovery

Hello and welcome to the Beyond B2B Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Lee Odin, CEO of Top Rank Marketing. And today our guest is someone with a long history of working in content marketing leadership roles from his time back at Kiplinger to marketing Sherpa, Mech Labs and marketing experiments to the last 12 years where he's been CEO at Ascend2. Now, Todd's gonna tell you more about Ascend2, but Basically, they conduct original research for companies that want to use data for marketing and thought leadership content.

And we've partnered with Ascend to several times for client engagements. And recently we partnered with Todd and his team to survey nearly 800 senior B2B marketers on the intersection of uh original research, of course, and influence and content and the impact on full funnel thought leadership marketing. So welcome to the show, Todd. thank you.

Pleasure to be here. I look forward to digging into this research. uh It's always a fun experience for me to kind of help marketers connect the dots of the research to the application. So thank you for inviting me today.

Great. Yeah, it's great to have you. And it's kind of fun to be able to talk about this thing that we've been working on together for a while because there's a lot that has gone into it, obviously. A lot of thoughtfulness has gone into it, a lot of analysis and a lot of validation.

And it's kind of exciting because it's quite timely. So it's kind of meta, I think, that we're doing original research on the idea of original research. But there's this premise that a lot of B2B brands, and we found this, but I think we know this intuitively because of our work. A lot of B2B brands are confident about the idea of research-driven content, research-driven thought leadership, but there's some questions like how well are they doing it?

Are they doing it well? um Are they optimizing for the full impact opportunity? um What are the top performers doing that everyone else isn't? And I'd love for you to talk a little more about some of the hypothesis that went in, that we worked on that went into this conducting this research and surveying all these BDB marketers.

Yes, well, know, intuitively, and I've had, like you said, a lot of experience in both marketing and marketing, publishing and research. And so over the years, and really why I started Ascend2 with my partner was back when I was at Marketing Strip, I saw the power of research to uh influence marketing programs. But it's, you know, kind of a hard skill. A lot of times companies don't have that skill internally.

So we started a SEND2 and we wanted to make the research actionable. And I think that was kind of one of the concepts that we had was, you know, we were interested in having high quality research, but also the story behind it, you know, and trying to figure out like, you know, what's the story and how can the story help the reader? And so that was kind of like, how we got started with a sense of you. I think the hypothesis of this study was, we know research works well.

It's a great way to engage audiences. You we always want to compare ourselves to others. Like, you know, what am I doing in my marketing program? What are others doing or not doing?

You know, how do I rate compared to other marketers in my industry? So we're curious. We want to find out those answers because it helps influence what we do next. And so I think the hypothesis for us was, you we know it works, but what are all the details of how it works and why it works so well?

And, you know, for that, like, I'm glad that we got the partner together because we both kind of brought our departments together to really think through that before we started formulating the questions and going out and getting answers. You know, we had to kind of think through that process. Yeah, think that insight of you thinking about the end in mind as we architect the questions, it's kind of, I'm biased, but it lines up very well with this idea of this framework, best answer, marketing framework that we put into market about there's a hunger for insight and direction and sources of truth and trust, you know, and so original research is a great way to provide your audience with, you know, data.

But the packaging is storytelling, isn't it? Right. uh And so it's been a great exercise. It's funny.

There's a recent I think it was a Wall Street, Wall Street Journal article that was talking about, you know, marketers are businesses are hiring storytellers storytelling is important again. Well, it's always been important. Right. uh And, you know, So let's kind of get into it.

you know, a lot of, I think we can agree that a lot of B2B brands are challenged in their efforts to market right now, because, you know, the business world, the world in general is just, it's a different place. And at the same time, uh AI is simultaneously transforming and disrupting uh a lot of what's involved in terms of content and content discovery. And there's just... you know, this sort of a paradox of choice or information overload thing going on where, you know, people that work at companies that are looking for solutions are, you know, I guess what is it they're, um, you know, they've got too many choices, right.

Um, and, and it's hard to make a decision. And so there's just a challenge that is solved for by providing, uh, data informed thought leadership, data informed content. And so that was sort of, know, that all that wraps up into, you know, part of what the, the state of B2B thought leadership in 2026 is all about. So I want to ask you about some of the findings that we surfaced or that your team surfaced by doing that research and kind of get a reaction to it have a conversation about it.

So there's certainly some optimism. around the idea of using original research. 93 % of marketers said that it's effective at driving engagement in leads. That's impressive.

48 % say it's very effective. So I'm curious, are you seeing this kind of optimism with the other companies that you're working with? You know, we are, and I can gauge that by a couple of different things. One is, you know, new people coming to us on a pretty regular basis, you know, to uh discuss research topics, and then also clients who come back year after year, you know, and a lot of times, you know, part of that is, you know, seeing success and then a lot of times wanting to go and like, hey, let's make this more of a trend report.

So we can see over time the changes that are happening because that two things, one is as you build the data year after year, you have different stories you can tell, not only the current one, where are the shifts going, the changes going. Maybe we can predict the future a little bit better by knowing the past uh is one of the topics. But you see the aspect of the companies wanting to. show that they understand their industry, they understand the industry, they're making decisions based on the industry, they're not just new trying to figure it out themselves.

So yeah, we're seeing a lot more. think, Leah, I think it also goes to that aspect of, and you can probably attest to this, is it's harder and harder to have compelling content. that people want to engage in. And research definitely is one that meets that criteria.

Yeah, I mean, that this opens up a conversation around what sorts of data sources are being rewarded with visibility through AI search and traditional search, AI overviews and that sort of thing. And distinctive, differentiated, unique data sources are the kinds of things that rise to the top. so research can help fuel that. I think another thing you touched on real quick there is I think there's two sort of value props that really come out of research.

One is that everyone's looking to benchmark themselves, right? So if you're a business and you want to build trust amongst your audience, you want to create value to warm that 95 % of the market that's not in market just yet, conducting original research, uh producing then data-driven content. uh can help them compare themselves, their customers' excuse me, their audience with that benchmark and kind of understand where they are. And so obviously a brand who commissions research can provide uh opportunity for their customers to sort of benchmark themselves and see what the gap is, right?

And then that company can hopefully provide technology or services as a solution. The other thing is the cyclical or uh the... you know, the annual report, you know, making it a cadence of uh research that they can then compare themselves to again, another benchmark for the year, but also trends over time. I know our we've partnered with you multiple years on our B2B influencer marketing report.

And I can't tell you how, you know, I mean, just search for B2B influencer marketing, B2B influencer marketing agency, for example, you know, like we're we're cited everywhere, because not because of doing the report once but over multiple times, multiple years, not every year, um five, or 26 will be our fifth year doing the report. And it's a huge return cumulatively. So the longer you are employing that tactic, the bigger the gains, at least that's been our experience and experiences of some of our clients who do repetitive um reports.

think there's also, you touched on value proposition. And a lot of times I have these conversations with my clients about the one benefit, a secondary benefit, maybe not secondary, maybe a primary benefit of research is it can reinforce the value proposition of, we're a data-driven company. We make decisions and we course direct based on data. not just opinion.

And I think the research helps to support a value proposition. When you're starting to include research in your content, you're reinforcing that value proposition that we're a data-driven company. that's almost a requirement now with almost any type of company. You know, there, there's another stat I want to run by you and that's the, there's sort of an impact disconnect.

97 % of BDB marketers say that thought leadership is critical to full funnel success and yet less than half, only 43 % extend it beyond, you know, know, awareness and discovery or awareness discovery engagement to post sale. So You know, I'm just thinking, not using thought leadership over that full customer lifecycle seems like a missed opportunity. What do you think? It is, and this probably goes, so I don't know if I told you this before, Lee, but when I started my career and I was actually in publishing and we were, I worked with newsletter and magazine publications and we looked very closely at acquisition, acquisition and then retention.

And in that model, the, you where you really made your money was in retention. But from the marketing perspective, typically that was the less interesting, less sexy part of the job. And everybody looked at the acquisition. And I was a newbie.

And so they gave me like the dregs of projects. And one of the projects I got was a renewal project. And as I started digging into the numbers, I realized how valuable uh the renewal part was and how like a little change could make a big impact on the bottom line. And so anyways, long story short, I had done this one project and it was a huge success, just like a small change.

And it really made me remember like the aspect of the full funnel and not to forget like that second part of the experience with the client or the customer. Right. And so yes, we see that in our research all the time, where a lot of times it's top of the funnel, uh but other areas. And we try to encourage our clients to look at as many ways as possible to what we say is maximize the value of your research.

Are there ways that you can incorporate it into other parts of the funnel that maybe you're not thinking of? It can be everything from your executive team when they're going out and doing presentations, incorporating the research into those presentations. It can be a reinforcement in some of your training or ways uh you have your client base engage with your product after they've purchased it the first time. There's a lot of different ways.

A lot of that's just sitting down with your team, strategizing on, have this great content and these great data points. Where else can we incorporate them in a strategic way? yeah, I mean it clearly, you know, there's a very top of funnel awareness uh focus for a lot of thought leadership or research driven content. But obviously, you know, those data points can also be used in sales enablement and then post sale.

You know, you've got benchmark information you could give to guide people, customers as they're onboarding, right? Or post sale, um you know, you can have those that data that those insights can be informative for. you know, how to get more value out of your service, out of your technology. And so, you know, that content can provide value um cyclically, right?

Not just sort of like this idea, this sort of archaic full funnel. And I know we use that expression, but what we mean is that ecosystem or the journey, whatever form that might take. And it provides a signal credibility, a signal of, um you know, validity. for the thing that is being educated or that is being communicated uh to that audience.

So it's just a missed opportunity not to have made this investment in research into getting data about trends and best practices and what the leaders are doing compared to laggers or whatever, and not applying that throughout the entire customer lifecycle of brand and client communication. And a lot of times a practical way to make that happen. So we have a discovery call with the client. And I think we even did this with you, Lee.

Like we talked about the aspect of, okay, if you could have four or five talking points in your executive summary that would assist your marketing, you what would those be? And a lot of times we'll ask, you know, is there anything in sales enablement, you know, like getting them to start thinking about those other parts of the funnel during that process. And so sometimes it would just be like talking about like, there issues that having data to help support the sales enablement that would, and so then they can go to the sales team and have those conversations.

We can bake it into the questions that we ask. then you have a much higher success rate, I think, of incorporating. Yeah, that's great, great advice, great advice. So another, uh so one of the focused areas for our research, of course, was not just on the value of doing research, but it was also the intersection with influence.

And it seems to be uh quite a interesting, you know, difference between what the top performing B2B marketing companies are doing and everyone else. So we found that 74 % of those B2B marketers who frequently collaborate with influencers reported that their research-based content was very effective versus just 29 % of everybody else. And I'm kind of curious, what do you think it is uh about regular influencer, consistent regular uh influencer engagement that improves thought leadership content so much?

Like, are they seeing such? What do you think or what have you experienced that answers that question about why are they seeing gains and others are not? I know we've experienced this specifically in the research. It's a great way to engage your influencers because we can go to influencers and say, the influencers really assist in taking and making the research actionable.

you can go to influencers, I can go to you and ask specific questions about we found that marketers aren't using their research. throughout the funnel. But it's successful. then that influencer can take data to support their experience and their knowledge in the industry.

So it's a really nice marriage of the influencer can provide the so what factor, right? The analysis. my experience has always been the influencers love that, you know, because now they have concrete data, and then they can provide the, you the analysis. so that's areas that we've seen success.

Yeah. know, so, so certainly providing your audience with data and insights from your own brand's perspective is a valuable thing compared to not doing so, but there, you know, it can come across as, you know, a bit biased, even though it's, you know, statistically valid data. So that third party validation and contextualization uh is extremely powerful. and adding credibility to the brand's own point of view, right?

So you find people who are trusted voices in a market that have expertise and credentials aligned with the research hypothesis and findings, and you invite them to collaborate. You invite them to share authentic points of view, reacting to data points, reacting to some of the findings, and then you collaborate on content together. And what that does is A couple of things, like I said, it adds context. ah It adds validity to the findings, but it also adds a distribution channel, meaning that when the influencer collaborates, let's say on a research report and you include these pull quotes, that's a pretty common thing to do.

But I still see a lot of research reports that don't include any third party contributions at all. uh Their investment in time and collaborating with you on that. that research report is going to be inspiring for them to help make it successful and promote it to their audiences, which arguably you chose that influencer or that creator, not just because they're topically relevant, but because the audience that pays attention to them is also interested in that very same topic. So you can get some great distribution of your brand's point of view.

Yeah, you can create credibility for your brand amongst that audience. It's probably ignoring all your ads and your emails and all the other things we're desperately trying to do to get attention today and create a really qualitative experience. it's a, that's why I think personally that, you know, um, folks who are high performers that regularly work with and collaborate with, uh, expert voices in the industry are seeing, um, so much productivity. out of their efforts versus those that are not collaborating and not collaborating on a regular basis.

Yeah, that third party data, it helps provide the why we're having this discussion. So when a company is engaging with an influencer and you're having this discussion and you want that all to come together, the data can provide the why. it feels a lot less forced than in other ways. And, you the, you gave some practical tips and I wanted to share some with folks listening in and watching that, you know, so how do you, how does this work?

And it's like, well, when you're identifying quite doing question research, that's the point in which you have identified the topics of what you want to cover. And, you know, in our case, we're using this best answer marketing framework to guide. All right. What is it that you want to be the best answer for?

What is, what is that intersection of what your brand, you know, solves for in the marketplace and what buyers are looking for? Anyway, so those topics then are inspirational for the questions we create. They're inspirational for the storytelling we'll employ from the findings, but they're also informative for finding the people that you might want to partner with. So just to simplify it, it's the topics for which you want the research report to in the narratives that you're trying to put into market based on that research.

You want to find people. that are most influential about those same types of things. And by partnering, by association, you're elevating your own influence. And you're also, like I said, you're adding distribution.

it's identifying those individuals early on. And in some cases, you can even make them part of the question research process. They can give feedback and that sort of thing, depending on what kind of relationship you have with them. And then, trust me, they're very, very inspired and invested in helping make that research report or the flywheel of content you might create off of the research report successful.

So let's also. say real quickly, a lot of times too, the influencers really enjoy and value being a part of that process. like giving them like an advanced look at the data is a positive for them as well. you know, that's sometimes we feel like it's a one way relationship, but I feel like a lot of times we bring a lot of value to the influencer as well.

Right. So let's talk also about the opportunity with experience. So we found that, and I mean, content experience or experiential content, as we'd call it. We found that in our research here, that 78 % of B2B marketers that we surveyed say that interactive and experiential content increases repeat engagement, but only 33 % regularly build that.

into their programs. this kind of lines up with some recent research from Content Marketing Institute too. uh In their case, ironically, also 78 % of B2B marketers report allocating budget to experiential marketing, but less than a third um say that their efforts are established. 70 % say that their efforts at experiential marketing or experiential content are in exploratory or developing stages.

So they're not mature at all. and it just seems like another missed opportunity. What do you think? Yeah, it is uh definitely because it's a added layer of work and sometimes companies don't have maybe the infrastructure to do it.

And so we kind of encourage baby steps along the way of even starting with a webinar where you have live polling can be maybe the first step of an interactive uh component to what you do. And then maybe over time, it's having some tools on your website where people can maybe put in three data points of conversion rates, maybe. And so then you can pull in to show how they compare to the audience or maybe a tool on their site where they can write real-time benchmarking or, hey, I'm in e-commerce.

You know, I put that in and it shows me the data points for the e-commerce industry. You know, so there's a lot of different things that can be done. We try to encourage people, like I said, even taking a baby step initially to see kind of like the power of it, the influence it has, and then strategizing, you know, even if you can add on something each time, you know, maybe add on. One little piece each time can be helpful.

Well, I think the core of it is that when you're, well, here's an old expression in sales, facts tell stories sell. And interactive experiences are important for, because the bar has raised in terms of expectations of how content will convey information these days, right? We have so many sources to choose from. We don't have a lot of time.

So, buyers are increasingly selective about where they do allocate their time. So, you know, there may be a topic that's research based that peaks their interest, but if the experience is just read is white paper like, um you know, you've invested all this time and energy into creating really qualitative information. And yet you're not thinking about the experience that you're creating for the consumer of that information. Right.

So that's where, you know, obviously the role of storytelling comes into play, the narratives you're putting into market to help your audience get utility out of that research that you did. you know, experiential content, like as we define it as one of the pillars of a BAM, our best answer marketing is, you know, it's things like video, it's things like, you know, obviously interactive content, audio content, events, real world, or, or, or even virtual, right. But the idea is, you know, pretty much you know, most things outside of just straight up text.

And when you're doing that, obviously you're creating memories, right? And, you know, there's a lot of discussion in B2B marketing about the idea of mental availability and creating memory structures upon which you can, you know, be on that sort of mental shortlist of vendors, shortlist of providers. for those buyers who are not ready to buy, but they're doing preliminary research, right? And so if your research content, if your content is experiential, you know, you've got a much better chance of helping them not just be informed, but actually feel something.

And that is what's going to help differentiate one company from another, especially when we have more content than we could ever consume in our lifetime. That's true. That's true. We don't want to just be another piece of noise in the...

So interactive, I we found data to the effectiveness. 53 % of survey respondents said that interactive formats are the most effective for engagement. So are there any examples that you've seen of research report content, for example, that used interactive elements or experiential sorts of elements? Yeah, mean, we've definitely seen where uh companies use simple tools or on their website where you fill out one or two data points and then it provides like a profile maybe based on the data uh can be very effective.

uh Even, and I know for this report, your team helped put together a more interactive content piece for this research report where it had movement. It uh was less stagnant and a little bit more interactive, which I think was helpful. those are some examples. uh Well, I was thinking too, you know, like I did a presentation as one would do in advocating for recent research report uh at a conference recently.

I had a couple of examples that I thought were pretty cool. uh One of them is from a company called Avanti. It's their 2025 technology at work report. So, you know, this is a data rich interactive website that had, uh I mean, they provided an audio version so you could listen to the research report.

uh They had embedded video of internal subject matter experts contextualizing findings from the report. And it just made it for a more interesting experience. uh There's another example I'd share from Zendesk, uh and it's their CX Trends report for 2025. So again, this is a microsite.

So it's a dedicated microsite, uh interactive uh video. There's video on demand of uh They got a publisher or the CEO of the Atlantic magazine to uh contextualize and create credibility for their findings. you got to uh consume content in more formats than just the standard text there. And then the other example I was thinking of is McKinsey.

uh They had a technology trends outlook for 2025 reports. So again, interactive, they're using uh illustrations. uh There were internal expert videos. embedded, there are external experts videos embedded into the research report experience.

you know, just it just made it a lot more engaging, you know, and and you could hear from a human being. It's one thing to read something and who has time for that. Right. And it's another thing to be able to listen to a 30 second or a two minute clip from someone who's deeply an expert on that thing to help you understand very quickly about a key moment or a key finding.

So I think there's a lot of examples. I actually will be publishing a blog post highlighting quite a few examples of interactive or experiential content as it relates to research reports here pretty soon on the top-rank blog. I like that aspect of a hub. And we've had different clients who've created a hub so they could add the video, add different elements of it, and make some of that.

You have the major research piece, and then you have these small, more interactive pieces that people can pick and choose from based on what they're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that there's a report from Ericsson uh comparing the, and I'm going to mess this up, but you basically the mobile technology infrastructure of different companies.

And so they had a very simple tool where you made a couple of choices and it literally mapped out uh the data that you input or the choices you made, and then sort of benchmark you against the data from all these other countries. And you could do it dynamically and in real time. It was a fun little visualization that was embedded into the report. And I think some of the things that we've been talking about, Todd, really add up to this next question.

And it's something that's on the mind of literally every marketer, every brand that I talk to these days, and that's AI. They do understand that it's something like 93 % or 97 % of search still happens on standard search. 3%, only 3 % or 4 % is AI, something like that. But AI search usage is increasing 100 % a year, right?

So I've never heard of anywhere from 3 % to 15 % of searches is AI search. And so, you know, a couple of things. One, we found that in terms of discovery, of research content, AI plays an important role. 32 % of those that we surveyed said that they do discover and consume thought leadership content through gen AI tools.

So it's kind of interesting, know, we've got this situation where people are using AI search or answer engines or whatever uh to surface this kind of information. But on the other hand, these platforms are definitely favoring research type content to decide what to surface in the first place. there's a, know, so your audience is actually looking for research content. And if you're publishing research, arguably your research content through AI tools, at the same time, there are distinct opportunities for you to use your research and your research content in order to give yourself an advantage on a host of different topics um through AI search because of the distinct, differentiated, and unique information that data brings to the table um and meets the demand or hunger for people that are looking for that sort of thing as opposed to AI slop.

So there's a question here, I promise. Are you seeing clients uh using know, answer engine optimization tactics, you know, with their SEO or anything like that as it relates to, you know, research content. You know, it's really early on, I think. I definitely, what we've experienced is people are having that conversation with us.

And it's kind of a natural conversation because when you think about it, the research and when we have these discovery meetings, you know, we're talking about like, you what are the answers you're looking for? Like we've always been discussing this. even when it was only about like SEO and those types of elements. But we've always been basically having that discussion with our clients about like, what are the answers you're trying, what answers do you need?

Where do you need data to support conversations that you have? um And so we're hearing that, I guess what I'm saying Lee is like, we're having that conversation more naturally. And almost like, as compared to me discussing that with the client, them actually bringing it up to me, you know, from that standpoint, because they're seeing the need for it. They're seeing the need of, to me, it's almost like thinking, for them thinking differently, for me, kind of thinking the way I've always thought about research.

So, yeah, I do. It's so early, you you probably have a better handle on that from the backend than maybe I do from the front end. Well, I can say, know, this project we've worked on, this, you know, a state of B2B thought leadership in 2026, reach report has manifested in this early days for us, because, you know, we still have a lot to talk about over the way into first quarter. So, but, know, if you just go to Google or you go to perplexity or even GPT and you type in, you know, I need, I'm looking for B2B thought leadership report.

where we were not present at all, you know, we're present first page. This research report project that we worked on, it's present first page now. And, you know, there are some other really, really big players that have been publishing research around this topic for quite a few years and to get visibility, you know, within a short period of time and it's earned, you know, it's not, there's no manipulation here. This is just a thoughtful effort to answer questions.

that actual B2B companies have right now about this topic and structuring, formatting it in a way that is useful. um And so it's not just text content, there's this lightly animated sort of report, but there's also podcast interviews where we've talked about it, there's other blog posts, there's video. And so there's the walk in the talk. uh as we go here and there will be interactive uh things coming up here soon.

Some fun uh sort of tools, I guess you will, where you can interact with the data a little more. But it is interesting. someone says, look, we're trying to enter a new market with a new thing. We want to create visibility quicker uh than just paying for ads or as a compliment to running ads on something that people don't know us for.

Then One of the effective ways to do that is to conduct research into that topic, partner with industry experts who have audience attention on that topic and put useful content into market, make sure it's well structured and follows some of the rules for LLMs and bots and whatnot. And you have an amazing opportunity to gain very, very quick organic visibility. I shouldn't say very quick, but just, you know, have an opportunity to gain visibility authentically for those topics.

And it's amazing how much credibility it'll give you uh more so than if you're relying on advertising by itself. Yeah. And that's great, great points. I also would say to the audience of a lot of times questions that people come to me and ask is, know, can I, know, do I have to publish everything in my report?

And it's like, and I'm like, you can, I said, but sometimes, you know, some of the questions might just be for internal direction. And you're not hiding it from anybody. But it's just that aspect of the one benefit of research is, as a company, you can learn also. We think this is the right approach, but does our audience care?

Is that top of mind for them? Are there other problems? Are we messaging it correctly? There's a lot of things you learn from the research internally as well.

oh that's a great point Todd, because I just think about providing something to your customers. Imagine you do original research, you've collected data, and now you can take segments of that data and actually share it with your customers and say, this is insight that's just for you. These elements are just for you, so you can see. And that's a very valuable value add you can provide directionally.

for your clients to help them understand where are we in the scheme of things, what's the gap that we need to close? Because everyone's looking for feedback and measurement is a huge problem as marketing becomes more sophisticated and complicated. In fact, we touched on that a little bit in the research here, of course. And we found, let's see, 41 % of marketers cited that difficulty in measuring performance was the top cause for underperforming content.

yeah, a measurement has become more complex as marketing channels start to diversify. um And I'm just kind of curious, from your perspective, what kind of measurement challenges have you seen articulated by your clients as it relates to research and the marketing of research content? Or uh of course, there's always a challenge, think, with multi-channel, you know, and attribution in that way. uh would also say that a lot of times it's that aspect of connecting it to real dollars.

So, you know, from influence to sales or influence over those sales. So trying to connect the dot the whole way through. And I think that's why the full funnel approach is really important because sometimes if you're just focused on top of the funnel, it's such an easy thing to say, well, we're just going to cut that money because we can't show dollars to it. And so as a marketer, I would say one little input would be just if that's another reason that further down the funnel uh uses because it's closer probably to like what a CFO would look at.

when they're evaluating uh spend and things of that nature. Yeah, you make a good point about, you I mean, there's a full funnel opportunity. So you have a greater opportunity to see ROI because you're getting more utility out of the research investment when you are going through, you're implementing across that customer lifecycle, right? From awareness, consideration, purchase, and wholesale.

And on top of that, increased effectiveness is available now, especially because of multimodal uh search, you know, multi-channel. visibility and the importance of it, right? So are you the best in our case, we'd say, are you the best answer wherever customers are looking? So, okay, that sounds great, but how do we measure that?

So that's where, you know, in our case, we were talking about unified analytics, being able to bring up to in our case, 400 or so disparate data sources into a single data lake or data warehouse that we can then visualize and create dashboards for the different audiences, whether it's a CEO or marketing or sales or customer success. So I think that's one part of it. And the other is the, I think just the calculation and luckily, um there's a whole book about the ROI of thought leadership called the ROI of thought leadership written by Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall from IBM, from the IBM Institute of Business Values.

So I interviewed Cindy in a previous episode of Beyond B2B and she had some great insights and I highly recommend the book because it's incredible. They did a research on, they did phone surveys, I think it was 4,000 senior C-level executives around the world. And they found that thought leadership is driving 265 billion in revenue each year, globally, 100 billion a year in the United States. And it something like 80 or 90 % of C-level executives say they had made a purchase decision in last 90 days because of thought leadership content that they had consumed.

So. It's possible, everybody. It's possible to measure um the impact. You've to have the technology and you've got to have the expertise, I think, um to connect the dots.

Because the payoff, obviously, is huge because then you understand what's working, what's not, and you can scale those things that are working and see greater success. um So what about the future in investment? uh We found in research, 47 % of the marketers we surveyed plan to increase their use of original research and data-driven content in the next year. So that's less than half, but it's still pretty optimistic.

do you think that optimism is justified? Do think they should be more optimistic, less optimistic? I yes, I guess I'm a little biased, you know, so yes, I guess it should be 100%, but you know, but I do just from the standpoint of, you know, I think marketers are seeing, you know, I think we're all experiencing, mean, I'm included in this from the standpoint of it is hard to find content that will move the needle. You know, it's hard to find content that...

engages audiences, builds brand, and research tends to help. A lot of times, mean, the reality is it probably could be looked at as a more expensive content development initially, but then all the different ways you can break it out and use it in multiple formats. Then I was try to encourage my clients of looking at the bigger value component of it. Because if you're breaking it out and doing these interactive pieces and we plan together like on our report to, it'll have a lot of legs.

It's gonna go well into the next year and then it becomes much more affordable. So yeah, I do see that. I do see a... not a desperation, but I think a reality check that marketers are having of, need to, know, AI is not going away.

There's a shift here from SEO to AEO. uh You know, I better jump on it. And, you know, you and I have probably been around, we've been around quite a few trends. And one thing I've learned about these trends is, you know, you have to be careful about sticking your, just sticking your foot in and not jumping in because I think there is like an opportunity loss of, if you don't, if you get in early, you know, earlier, you can capture, you can capture space much more quickly.

It becomes more more challenging the later you get into the process. So, you know, that's my cautionary tale would be don't be too conservative or you'll play missed out on the opportunity. Well, there's a lot of practical uh insight there, uh especially as it relates to AI visibility, because there's a lot of research uh being done about what are the characteristics of the data sources that are most often cited and included. um brand is more important than ever.

the continuity, or there's a consensus. I think that's how we characterize it. So the length. of time your brand has been closely associated with an idea.

There's a tremendous amount of preference given uh to those sources of information through AI search. so also the consistency of which you are characterized by other entities, recognized entities, right? People or publications, the consistency and influencers. The consistency with which you are characterized uh across that spectrum of uh knowable entities is also a very big contributing factor, can be a contributing factor to your visibility in this new form of search.

So what that means is that the earlier you start to be the best answer for that thing and that you enlist the uh help as it were through you know, people who are influential in the industry about the broad topic also, you reaffirming that, you are, you are a very credible source of information and publications, same thing. And the mechanism with which you can achieve this, of course, is something distinctive like research, right? mean, unfortunately, I've been around for some trends.

So I can go back and think of email marketing. And early on, it was pretty easy to grow an email list. ah But then now, it's hard to grow an email list. It takes like 10 times the effort.

ah And we see that with podcasts or webinars and different. there's advantage of, like you said, getting in there, establishing a foothold, establishing, in this case with AEO, think establishing uh multiple layers of data points and high quality content. uh It makes a difference. Yep.

So we're recording here with 2026 just around the corner. What are some major changes that you see in B2B marketing that folks should be thinking about? Sure. I know from AI, I'll just say from the standpoint, we've done a lot of research on AI.

em I think marketers especially, know, it's quickly going from how does it save money, save time, to how does it influence the bottom line? You know, and I would say that's probably uh something that people are looking at from the standpoint of, you know, we're using it, but it's going to quickly go to this connection of how is it impacting ROI, how is it impacting bottom line as compared to just a savings. So we're seeing that. then we're definitely seeing the aspect of, I think, B2B marketing is becoming more more complex in a way.

mean, AI is helping in some respects, but you know. You have to look at multiple channels. uh Like you said before, there's a constant data issue of how do you bring all the data together? What technologies you need?

So I would say like B2B marketers, mean, uh keep finding good sources of advice and get data to help support the decisions you want to make so that you not only have a plan, but you have some backup to that plan with data points. And that's why we like to benchmark things. So marketers can go into the executive team and say, we want to do this, and here's why. That's a much more comfortable conversation than not having the data.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. folks can get insights. So we've structured this research report according to several drivers for how you can create an answer engine of your own through uh research-powered content, research-powered thought leadership. So I'll have a link so you can download.

You can get access to the ungated report as an interactive microsite. And you can check that out. But I want to ask you, Todd, like, let's say someone's listening to this and like, okay, I get it. You know, I've already, I've been, I've been played with thought leadership or research driven content and thought leadership before.

And, you know, I'm kind of, I see it and like, I, maybe we should make some, have some conversations or make some efforts in that direction here as we are finishing off 2025 and making plans for 2026. What are some of the first steps you think someone, what are the things that they should think about first to get started? Sure. Probably one of the first things you think about is the target audience you're looking to research or survey.

Who is your target audience? When companies come to me, that's one of the first things we talk about is who's your ideal customer so that we can determine, can we survey, get enough people to do something credible? And so like understanding your audience you're going to, and then, you know, the second, like I said, we try to work backward and start with, you know, what are some of the talking points in the executive summary? You know, we, we're not going to manipulate the data.

We're not going to, uh, force, know, force the data, but if we can talk through to find, you know, and it's typically a good conversation you can have with just like talking through, um, what that storyline would be. when you can ask the right questions to hopefully tell that story. So I think that's great advice. I also think that it's one of the thought leadership specifically oh value props is being able to provide data and insight around a major business problem that your customers are experiencing and provide objective direction.

uh So you've got data informed insight. around this big business problem that's relevant to your customers. And obviously it's relevant to your business as a solution provider. But the emphasis is on helping those senior decision makers or those decision makers amongst your potential customers understand the nature of a problem and what their options are for potentially solving it.

And so by doing original research, you can give them very credible sources of information about those sorts of things. uh And then, you you publish a research report or whatever, but then off of that research report, now you've got a flywheel of derivative content that can be applied for demand gen and lead gen and customer success or post-sale types of communication. So I think that's a tremendous amount of opportunity. so starting is starting to understand, like you say, your target audience, but also understanding what are some big business problems that your audience that your customers are actually experiencing now or will experience in the future?

And what research might you be able to do to help give them direction about possible uh solutions or directions in which they can take towards solving for those issues? And then use that as the basis upon which you can execute a whole plethora of other types of multi-channel, multi-format uh sorts of content as well as influencer activations, employee generated content. mean, it can really fuel quite a bit. uh try to help guide people too from the standpoint of one of the things we do, and Leah, think we've done this with you guys on your study and the specific study we did together is look at different ways to segment the data.

And when we have these conversations with clients, sometimes we end up like, we'll ask them questions like, does your sales team experience different challenges? when they're talking to the executive team versus the managers. And so maybe that's a segmentation where we can look at what's the executive team's perspective on an issue versus the managers. Sometimes it's like the managers say, is a huge issue.

This is a huge problem. The executive team's like, so much. We don't see it as a problem. And so that's a really interesting talking point.

Or it could be. A lot of times we have clients where they talk about like, where we have kind of a different program for companies under 500 employees maybe, or in companies over 500 employees. So like, we'll sub segment those to see if there's interesting differences in how they look at a problem or how they solve the problem or what's working. And so, you know, I'm sure you're thinking about like all the storylines that would come out of that, but.

It gives you more content pieces down the road, but more stories you can tell. And so we always try to, uh and also I think for the companies, it kind of provides sometimes when they get the data, that's one of our favorite things, like when they actually get the data and start looking through the highlights, little light bulbs come on. like, oh, this is something we can use. And they typically have these smart ways of using it that we never thought of.

but because they understand the audience, uh it means something of significance to them. Yep, yep, yep. Well, let's wrap things up with a dream career question, as I would call it. If you could be doing anything else as a career option, what would it be?

Oh, wow. You know, growing up, you know, I thought I was going to be a baseball player until until I didn't grow and my talent wasn't there. So every little boy's dream, maybe of of like, you know, a talent like that. So I think, you know, baseball is my first love.

But but yes, but but my my talent did not meet my desire pretty quickly. would you be playing for if this came to fruition? What team would you be playing for? I grew up in central Pennsylvania, so was a Philadelphia Phillies fan.

So back with Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and those days. So I would listen to him on my radio at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. But yeah, probably, you know, probably that. also just, you know, and I hope I do this through my current job.

But, you know, just trying to help people. To me, that gives me the greatest value uh of helping people out, whether it be in B2B marketing or just connecting them maybe to a job opportunity. To me, that's the most valuable thing we can do is helping people and making a difference in people's lives. Yeah, it's one of the great benefits of uh getting some visibility in the industry is then you become a focal point or an exchange of uh referrals.

You if companies coming to me all the time, I think you do too. They'll say, hey, I'm looking to fill this particular role. Do you know anybody? And at the same time, you have other folks coming to you.

like, hey, know, I'm starting to think about exploring other opportunities. know, do you know what might be some good companies just as an example? So, yeah, it's pretty awesome. So where's the best place for people to connect with you?

I mean, LinkedIn, course, or just my email, Todd at AscendTo.com. And those are both probably the quickest and easiest. And I try to respond to everybody.

So to me, it's, like I said, that's part of the fun of the job. Great. Well, uh thank you so much. And everyone, can, again, you can access the report at the URL in the notes uh from the show, or you could just Google B2B Thought Leadership Report.

You'll find it first page on Google above the fold. It's easy to find as it should be. And I want to thank you for tuning in ah to the Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast and make sure you subscribe so you can stay tuned for our next. interesting and exciting guests.

And remember, there's no better time than now to break free of boring B2B. Thanks Todd. Thank you.