#489 4 B2B Founders Share the Best Marketing Strategies in 2026

Sam Dunning: B2B marketing has changed like crazy. But luckily I'm um, here to share exactly what works in 2026 and beyond. Not only that, but I'm joined by three other founders. So four B2B founders in total, sharing exactly what's working their playbooks today. Tactics, strategies under the bonnet so you can get 100 transparency, so you can just copy this for your SaaS or your B2B service company and just run the playbook, start driving pipeline and revenue. With that, uh, let's dive in and intro the founders.

Jordan Hayes: So my name is Jordan Hayes. I run a company called Haze Media. What we do is we help e commerce brands scale and the way that we do that is we do meta ads and email marketing. So we work with a lot of fast growth e commerce brands, brands that want to go from seven figures to eight figures in revenue and they want a team to come in and manage a lot of the customers, some acquisition and retention for them. Been doing this since 2020. Before then, I was a freelancer running my own Facebook ads for different types of businesses. Excited to share what's working for us today. Not just for my clients, but also myself in terms of getting clients for the agency.

Shanmukovac: My name is Shanmukovac. I run a YouTube agency focusing on B2B service and SaaS companies. We are currently servicing over 40 clients. And what we do just in simple terms is we focus first of all on helping them become authorities in their specific space, but then on the other hand actually generating leads from the videos we create and not just focus on vanity metrics. So I'm excited to share what I'm seeing best right now when it comes to content systems. I'm Arnel.

Arnel: I run a marketing agency called Loudface. So we primarily do web design, but we help companies grow organically in the B2B SaaS, uh, market in the US and the way that we do that is through SEO and getting the mentioned for AI models working mainly B2B SaaS. Happy to share this table with these gentlemen and share what works for us.

Sam Dunning: So before we dive into strategies that each of us are seeing work today, let's talk about what we're seeing and how we feel. B2B marketing has changed over the last few years. I'll kick it off what I think before, especially on platforms like LinkedIn Organic, where a lot of us are posting daily to kind of build awareness, build demand, build trust and mind share with our prospects. I feel like in a world where you can pump out a ton of AI content, similar for SEO you can do the just the same on your posts. I feel like the differentiation is really sharing under the bonnet. So literally in my case, running an SEO and AI search agency, leaking the full strategies we run. So for clients like RB2B, we'll share the full playbooks, we'll share video breakdowns, we'll share what worked, what didn't. For my own agency, I'll share kind of the highs, the lows, what did work, what marketing experiment we ran that flopped like crazy, what works super well, and everything in between. So it's almost like you reach this level of transparency where people either think you're an idiot or you actually know what you're talking about and you'll kind of repel the people that you don't want to work with and you'll attract the folks that think actually this, this person has something cool to share. They're kind of being super open. They're not doing generic stuff like all the other competitors in the space. They have a good idea of what they're talking about. So I'd say kind of unique point of view, adding your own angle, your spin on it, that basically doing the stuff that AI can't replicate and almost being kind of radically transparent and almost a bit weird, kind of attract folks that build the extra layer of trust. So that's probably where I'd start.

Jordan Hayes: So I'll give a different perspective with regards to what we're seeing with our own clients in E commerce because we do a lot of ad creatives and meta ads and I believe that a great marketing channel for anyone is running meta ads. If you have a strong offer and you have product market fit, it can be a really, really good channel to scale quickly. So a few things that I've seen change with meta ads pretty much in the last year. Andromeda Update is top of mind for a lot of people. The biggest changes that you need to focus on with that is your ad creative. Ad creative is the game. Media buying is becoming more and more easy to execute. The focus is on variety of creatives and getting very, very specific into your avatars. So what you should do with your customers is you should split your customers into many, many different buckets regardless of, uh, you know, whether they are even in the same job position or not. Because the likelihood is, is that they face very, very specific problems. And the more specific you can get with your ad creatives, then meta is going to like it more because they can deliver a very specific message to a specific user. And of course you're going to get a higher conversion rate as well, because you're being more specific if you're running meta ads or you're thinking of running meta ads, don't overlook the creative game. It is as much of variety as it is volume. For we're pumping out 50 different ad creatives per week. And for clients that are really scaling, that is even more. And a lot of this can be done with AI. You can come up with ad creative ideas with AI. You can build Personas with AI, you can build scripts with AI, and you can even actually produce the ad creatives themselves with AI. So it's a way to play the creative game. Get a lot more leverage from the time of your team or yourself if you're running the ads yourself. And then just make sure that you're driving that traffic to a page on an offer that is also specific to them. So if you're targeting someone in a specific job position and you're targeting B2B and you're talking about their specific problem, just make sure that where you're driving them is also mentioning that specific problem and is not just somewhere generic that you're driving all traffic to. So don't send people to the homepage. Build a specific page that is specific to that audience and you're going to see your strategy work much, much better than if you were to just keep it generic and broad and open. And yeah, I'd say that's most of the game. If you can nail those two areas, it's going to put you ahead a lot of other advertisers out there.

Shanmukovac: So I would say the biggest shift I'm seeing right now is trust. So what I mean by that is like some people call it trust inflation and I guess that's a real thing. I'm definitely seeing more and more companies. What this means is with the rise of AI content, with the rise of competition on social platforms, more and more people are creating content, more and more people are, uh, putting stuff out there. And also more and more people have been burned by these people that they believe on social media bought something from them, you know, sign up for their service, etc. And what that results in is that trust is at an all time low. And that's sort of the game. Like you just have to kind of get used to it and like adapt to that new environment. And I guess we'll get into like how to do that later in this video. But the biggest thing is just really focusing on the content formats that just build the most amount of trust and that are the hardest to replicate. So in my case, like a lot of it that we do with clients and most of it is YouTube and that's really what we focus on, on creating long form content and video content, which makes it very hard to replicate because there are people seeing your face, people hearing your voice, and you're talking for 10, 20 minutes about a specific topic. So it's very hard to replicate by your competitors, by other people. And that's how you kind of build emotes and stand out still in that sort of environment where there's just trust at an all time low, that's what I would say is the biggest shift right now that I'm seeing.

Arnel: So in the B2B SaaS space, I'm um, definitely seeing AI having a big disruption. Especially when we look at the clients that we're working with. I'd say that we've had experiences where companies want to go very aggressive with SEO and what they end up doing is launching, for example, a bunch of programmatic content which is very thin and provides very little value, which in a very short period can give you this very quick hockey stick growth in your traffic. But as soon as Google catches on, it absolutely tanks your traffic. Month four or five. I think another leader of that happening is this inflation of gurus online. So a SaaS founder might see a post of someone saying, well, if you do X, Y and Z, this will be your golden ticket to growth in SEO. And we have too many of those happening online where people just fall for it. And I think we have two little people that are real sources of trust that you can rely on, that provide reliable tips and tricks that you can actually lean on. And it gives reliable growth. So I'd say two things, AI making a disruption and people just leaning too much into it. And I'd say the other part is the inflation of gurus that mislead people into making the wrong steps. I'll definitely talk more about it as we dive into this discussion.

Sam Dunning: Real quick. If you want to start fueling your sales team with a steady stream of leads, demos or booked calls from SEO and organic search, uh, across AI and Google, why not grab a call with myself over at breaking b2b.com we can chat through exactly how SEO could potentially help your business drive a steady stream of inbound through organic search. Head over to breakingb2b.com hit the link in description below. Right back to the video. So now we're going to share one specific strategy or playbook we're seeing work exceptionally well right now and B2B marketing, mine's probably going to be not looking at things in silos. So for example as a SaaS SEO agency some folks might come to us on sales calls, discovery calls and think that SEO is going to be the route to solving every single problem and just drive them insane amount of inbounds. And whilst it can see an uptick, leads, trials, demos etc, I'll often explain to folks it's way better if you look at it as a B2B eco ecosystem. For example, with our own inbounds a breaking B2B we run something called the deadly trio. We get found through people looking for services like ours through SEO and AI search and LLMs M. But then usually they'll credibility check us on LinkedIn. So you might look at my content there, my posts, company posts and beyond. They might even go to YouTube and look at some of our breakdowns a bit like we're doing now guides how to case studies, results and much much more on it. Especially if you're selling a high ticket solution. So you're not selling a sass that's like I know 15 bucks a month, but something that's several thousand a month takes a lot of consideration. No one's going to see your solution product service for the first time and sign up by they're probably going to maybe find you on AI search or Google, flag you up with their execs, maybe then check you out on LinkedIn for a while, maybe forget about it, then maybe watch some of your YouTube content, forget about again and then eventually think oh, we actually need to solve this problem now maybe go straight to your website. The how did you hear about us? Field might say AI search, but when you speak to them on the discovery call they might say well I've followed your YouTube content, your LinkedIn content, seen you on AI search loads of times are thinking about things rather in single silos but realizing that B2B marketing, SaaS marketing is uh, an ecosystem and making sure you're covering at least kind of three core touch points, your icp, your dream clients hang out on is my biggest one.

Jordan Hayes: I'm going to latch onto your point a little bit Sam, because when it comes to meta ads, if you're running meta ads as a B2B SaaS company, you need proper tracking in place because meta ads is extremely effective at uh, getting you into cold audiences. But the person might not convert through a meta ad. They might go and see what are you posting on LinkedIn or they might search for reviews about your company on Google. So meta ads is one part of a wider strategy. And if you want to scale quickly, meta ads is great. But it's only as good as your reputation because you're going to get found out sooner or later if people search and they see the search service or whatever they're selling isn't that good. So I would arguably say before you scale your meta ads, make sure that those things are in place. Make sure that your online reputation is good, that you have good personal branding, that if someone looks and sees if you're active on LinkedIn, that you are active on LinkedIn, your meta ad strategy is going to work much, much better. The other thing I would say, and it's something that we see with ecom brands, is you need authority and trust. And if it's just you yourself talking about your products, that only goes so far. So if you can bring in, for example, customer testimonials as ways that you can then advertise that content. Or another thing, if you're selling B2B SoftW to other founders, get the founder on camera. The founder should be recording the ads. If you're selling to VPs in marketing, get a VP of marketing on camera. Because people see themselves in ads and there's disconnect. If you're a founder talking to people in marketing, right. They might resonate with some of it, but it's not going to hit as hard as someone who is facing the same things that that person is facing on a daily basis. So if you nail that, it's similar to what I was saying earlier about being very, very specific. Put a lot more effort into that. And that part of the strategy, it does take more work, but you're just going to get way better results. Going back to the tracking, if you have allows you to do multi touchpoint attribution, something like triple whale or north beam, where you can even track things coming in from YouTube or things coming in from LinkedIn or SEO to just see how is meta ads feeding into that. Because your meta ad customer acquisition cost might be unprofitable, but it might be funneling a bunch of new leads into the other things that you're doing. So you need to really look at this as a whole ecosystem and not just, you know, different parts in the puzzle.

Shanmukovac: Yeah, 100% agree. Like that's the exact thing we see with our most successful clients is if they treat all of their marketing channels as one big ecosystem and let's say we do YouTube content for them, they use it across all of their other channels, they promote it, they repurpose it, they redistribute it, et cetera, and just treat everything as like wannabe ecosystem. That's really the way to go. I would say the biggest thing for me that I'm seeing like winning B2B companies in our sort of portfolio of clients do, is focusing on the right content formats. What I mean by that is like there's a huge rise or there was a huge rise a couple years ago of like short form content, you know, TikTok, Instagram, even like the LinkedIn posts are mainly like short format and that sort of stuff. And that's where most companies are, that's where most companies think that if I just focus on that sort of content and just get a lot of eyeballs and that' the way to go to like really crack content and generate a lot of leads from that. And what we've seen is because of the like the trust inflation thing that I mentioned before, like you can't ignore the content formats that build the most amount of trust and just really are the hardest to replicate. What I mean by that is long form content. So this can be newsletters, longer form blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, these. Like if you don't have these in your content arsenal and you're only relying on LinkedIn posts or you know, reels or whatever, you won't make it at the end of the buying journey. Like you won't get people at the end, you might get people at the beginning and catch them at the top of funnel, but you won't get them at the end where they actually buy. And then like the other formats, it's not necessarily just long form but like video formats. The reason I say this is sure there are AI tools that do video, but like, it's still kind of tricky, but there are definitely AI tools that do text and most people just start using that. So there's a lot of slop, a lot of overpopulated sort of LinkedIn, uh, feeds and everything. Just a bunch of text posts. When it comes to video, there's a lot bigger barrier to entry. A lot more people are down to do that and have the time or expertise to do that or just they don't put in the effort. So that this kind of the long form aspect and the video aspect is where you can like make the differentiation. So that's what I would say would be the long thing for me.

Arnel: So I definitely say that get rid of abstractions that have always been popular such as, ah, if we look at the web, Design space. Abstractions like framer or WordPress are abstractions to make website building and publishing management simpler and easier, but rather lean into and adopt AI tools like cloud code to build your website for you and manage it from there. The reason I'm saying this is because I believe the abstractions like webflow and Framer and WordPress might be slowing you down more than helping you. One example is that we've seen some of our clients moving completely from platforms like that to a cloud coded website, which yields them the ability to be able to update much faster. So a page that would might take them two days to build and publish takes any person in the team, whether engineer or not, about 10 to 20 minutes to publish that page into a publishing ready quality. So another advice that goes along with this is that you can launch programmatic content much faster. So because you're on cloud coded websites, whether it's next year or whatever the case might be, you just tell cloud, hey, I have this CMS set up and I want to launch a thousand pages in, you know, with this type of content, it can set all that up for you and launch that strategy for you. One more thing I'd say is what we've done at least is that we have skills and rules that audit the website periodically. So as we launch new stuff on the website using cloud code, it's easy for cloud code to drift and make mistakes and hallucinate. What we do to bring it back in is to have skills and rules that make sure that it follows best practices and standards in SEO and ao, to make the site crawlable, to make the site fast and performative, and also to make the site look good in terms of design. So long story short, I'd say don't hold on too long on abstractions, move to cloud code sooner, uh, rather than later and um, you're going to move much faster.

Sam Dunning: So, last off to wrap up, we're going to talk about some of the biggest mistakes we've made ourselves or that we're seeing in the field when it comes to the marketing side of things for B2B and SaaS. So I think my one is, and this is something I'm guilty of myself, is focus. So I think it's easy, especially as a, uh, founder, to get distracted by the new best thing, whether that's an AI marketing system, whether that's running some kind of new paid program, doing something with your own SEO, trying some kind of new cold outreach program, trying an influencer program, trying to do events. So it's almost like the shiny object syndrome. Like you see someone post about on LinkedIn or you see a friend or a peer talk about it. It's like, I need to try that. When really it's the two or three things that work super well that you should just double down on. Or maybe it's less, maybe it's only one. So just working out, like, what have I done so far? What's actually what have my marketing or my outreach strategies or my advertising strategies have actually brought me? The best clients have the problem we solve, are motivated to solve it, have cash to easily invest in our offer, and are actually keen and motivated to get the job done. And then realizing like what are those core channels? Just doubling, tripling down on those. I realize myself, I neglect that almost day to day when really sometimes you just need to go back to the basics. Look at your pipeline, look at your sales CRM, um, how have you brought in some of your best, most profitable, enjoyable to work with clients work out what were those top and they probably only will be 1, 2, 3 channels. And then just think, I need to stop messing around with these other things and just triple down by 10x down on these. Exhaust that if it's an ad spend, exhaust the ad spend if it's SEO, do everything you can with SEO, if it's something else, and then worry about kind of expanding into new markets, channels. And I think that's something I definitely overlook and I'm sure a lot of our clients kind of when they ask for advice on other things, overlook as well. So sometimes it's just the simple things that get overlooked, I'd say.

Jordan Hayes: So my biggest mistake is not building a personal brand earlier. I think that it's one of the most powerful things in B2B to build a lot of trust. So my, my biggest mistake and also the biggest mistake that I see other B2B companies make is also the same one, is to not to build personal brand. So as the founder building a personal brand to get the company off the ground or to increase the growth of the company, I think is key nowadays. But then even a step further to get your own team to build their own personal brands. So if you have other founders, for example, if you're a team of three founders, you should all be posting content because you can get three times the reach or even more reach, right? It's better than just one person posting. And that's it. Step further than that is you get your managers, your leaders to post content and then you get your whole team to post content. And now you have a bunch of persons, brands. There's a lot of software companies out there that are growing faster with this, a lot of B2B service companies that are growing fast with this. And for me, I've also experienced the same thing. So start today if you haven't done this yet and once you have done that, then get other people in your company to do it. And two years from now you look back and you'll be glad you started now. And if you are doing personal brand now and you're not doing YouTube, maybe it's time to give Samu a call. Because in B2B you can build so much trust through video content. And I believe Samu touched on this earlier. Is anyone, someone can put up a post on LinkedIn or X AI written? Right. I think people have uh, an AR radar right now so they can see when content is AI generated and it's a taste thing. But if you focus on video instead and you can get all your ideas and trust across in that format. So that's what I'd say. Double down on personal brands and content.

Shanmukovac: Yeah. For me, I would say my personal biggest mistake so far, I think in business was not getting very clear on who I want to work with and my ideal client. I was struggling with that, ah, for a long time. And not only that I wasn't clear. It's more like I wasn't intentional with who I was choosing. Because you want to always, I think, think a step further. Like, okay, let's say you have an idea of who your ideal client is, but like you want to think a step further of what happens if you get all those clients. Like let's say you get a bunch of them and you build your whole business with that ideal client. You're thinking about what will happen after that. Will you be able to like make it sustainable? Will you be able to get good margins and scale it further? Will you be able to kind of dominate that niche? Or will it be a niche that maybe runs out of people? Or it won't be sustainable to give specifics. For example, for me, a year ago or a bit more than a year ago, I was a lot more focused on people. Not in necessarily the B2B space, but more in like the info space, B2C offer and that segment of the market. Sure, YouTube can work very well for them, but in my case, like, they're not sustainable businesses. They come along, they go away, they become scams, they change business models. It's not nearly as sustainable as something like B2B and then on the other hand, also in B2B, people are a lot more serious. And the shift that I made was just focusing on B2B, which ended up becoming a great decision long term because it was actually something that was able to build a consistent business off of and be able to stack multiple clients, build authority in that way, one specific space, and actually have like, yeah, sustainability in my business and predictability. So I would say like, not necessarily just getting clear on your icp, but then thinking a step further and thinking about, okay, what will happen if you actually are able to get a lot of those ideal clients on board and what will happen if you build your business off of that? Like, will you be at a good place or will you be in a better place if you were to focus on something else? And if that's the answer, then you should definitely focus on the other segment. So that's what I would say.

Arnel: I'll definitely say that my biggest mistake has been not being consistent with my organic distribution. So I've been very on and off with YouTube and LinkedIn and X and trying all kinds of different channels and even though they got going for a while, I cut back just because I didn't have the bandwidth or resources to do it. And in those instances, rather than cutting back completely, I should have invested into having someone help me out with it. Again, this is why Samo is the guy for this. I would have asked for help if I knew better. As for someone to come in and help me get those organic socials going. So that's my biggest mistake that I've done. When I look at the market, especially the B2B SaaS market, and the biggest mistake or most common mistake that's happening there, I probably say something very similar, being inconsistent with your organic distribution. So there's a lot of companies out there and founders that uh, turn SEO on and off depending on how it performs, uh, a couple of months into the engagement, thinking that it is something akin to paid ads, you just turn it off and turn it on when you feel like it. SEO is something that has to be done consistently over months and years to have it build up and compounding. So being consistent with that will yield. We just have to stick with it even if it hurts in the beginning. Investing in something that's not giving direct returns like ads is it will yield and pay off eventually. And what's being missed is that this is a exit multiplier opportunity. If you're exiting company that has good organic distribution, that adds a bit onto the exit valuation. Not Doing it early will leave a lot of money on the table. So to summarize my biggest mistakes not be consistent with my personal organic distribution. The second one is what I see the market and that is that companies are making the mistake of not being consistent with their own organic distribution. If you need help with SEO and getting more mentions on AI models and your B2B SaaS company based in the US please do feel free to reach out on Loudface Co or to Arnel at Loudface or if you just want to follow along and see more content from me posting about tips and tricks for B2B SaaS founders, follow me on arnelbukva@LinkedIn.

Shanmukovac: Yeah, if any of the stuff about building authority and building trust and focusing on long form video content home or always relevant to you, then yeah, feel free to hit me up. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn which I guess will put a link for that in the description and then also if you want to book straight up, just a call with me. KS Media Co is our website and yeah happy to chat.

Jordan Hayes: So I'm actually building a software company Yander I.O. and and we help companies find a player talent with AI. So if you are hiring if you need talent for your next growth stage or if you need talent in the background for new positions that you will be filling in the future, head to Yander IO and you can actually tell Yander who you want to hire and Yander will go out and find those candidates for you. It'll actually culture fit those candidates to your own company's culture and we can even help you retain that talent with our own Pulse feature which makes sure that that talent stays engaged within your company and make sure that they're not disengaged and slacking off. So yeah Yandere IO by the time we're watching this we might be out of wait list and yeah check us out.

Sam Dunning: And the best place to start with us is if you're tired of seeing competitors consistently recommended above you in ChatGPT, AI search or ranking above you in Google Organic Search. Meaning they're stealing Mindshare demos, pipeline and inbounds. Best place to start is head over to breakingb2b.com hit the newsletter tab and you can instantly unlock our 90 days to revenue playbook and video guide. That's over@breakingb2b.com or we'll chuck the link below. Cheers Tuning in. Catch you on the next one.