The B2B Buyer Has Changed. Most Marketing Hasn’t. 8 B2B Marketing Shifts Leaders Need to Act On Now.

I attend a lot of industry events, but the 2026 ANA Masters of B2B Conference in Chicago easily holds the top spot for me this year. * Association of National Advertisers

It was smart, thought-provoking, and genuinely useful. The kind of conference that makes you come home with better questions, sharper thinking, and a few ideas you actually want to act on.

One message came through louder than anything else:

Most B2B marketers are still optimizing for a buyer journey that no longer exists.

We keep talking about AI, attribution, channels, and content volume. Meanwhile, buyers are doing most of the real work long before they ever show up in our CRM.

Buyers are asking AI for recommendations. They’re talking to peers. They’re reading reviews. They’re checking LinkedIn. They’re validating vendors in private conversations, buying committees, and internal Slack threads we will never see.

The journey is still happening. It’s just harder for us to see. And that expands our job description as marketers.

We can’t overindex on capturing demand anymore. We have to create confidence before the buyer raises their hand.

Here are the eight shifts I think matter most right now.

 

#1. Buyability Is Becoming The New Growth Metric

Something I kept hearing at the ANA B2B conference was that the companies growing fastest are the ones creating confidence. They’re visible, yes, but more importantly, they’re helping buyers feel safer in their purchasing decisions. In other words, successful b2b brands are more ‘buyable’.

Buyability is the collective emotional and social confidence buyers need to choose and defend a vendor. In a world where trust is harder to earn, easy justification is extremely valuable.

No one wants to be the person who backed the wrong purchase. It goes way a long to be able to answer key questions like:

• • Can I get this approved?
  • Will my colleagues agree?
  • Can we manage the bumps along the way?
  • Will this partner make me look smart or expose me?

Something noteworthy about building trust and confidence (or easing fears and anxieties) is it shows us B2B buying is becoming more emotional, not less. That may sound counterintuitive. People assume AI will make buying more rational because more information is available. I think the opposite is happening.  AI can help narrow the list.  But people still have to defend the choice.

 

JK Take

B2B marketing has to get sharper. Awareness is important, but the real work is to make the buying decision feel easier to understand, easier to defend, and easier to say yes to. That means brand, media, PR, content, website experience, sales enablement, and performance have to work together to create confidence.

 

#2. Search Has Moved From Rankings To Recommendations

The old SEO conversation is too limiting now. Buyers aren’t just searching and scanning anymore. They’re asking AI tools to explain categories, compare providers, summarize options, and recommend who should make the shortlist.

By the time someone reaches your website, they may already have an opinion about your company.

That opinion may have been shaped by your own content, or by reviews, Reddit discussions, analyst reports, LinkedIn conversations, competitors, or third-party publications.

Try asking AI about your own company.

Does the answer accurately describe who you are?

Visibility today isn’t just about ranking.

It’s about being present, trusted, cited, and recommended wherever buyers are looking.

 

JK Take

This shift is one of the reasons we’ve developed our Search Everywhere approach.

It’s a growth system for understanding where buyers discover your brand, how AI describes your company, what sources influence those descriptions, and what proof strengthens your credibility.

The goal is not traffic alone. It’s becoming easier to find, easier to trust, and easier to recommend.

 

#3. Brand Clarity Is A Risk Reducer

Brand is back in B2B. For years, it was treated as the “soft” side of marketing—something to revisit after performance campaigns were optimized.

Today, brand serves a much more practical purpose.

It reduces perceived risk.

A strong brand helps buyers quickly understand:

• • who you’re for
  • why you’re different
  • what you believe
  • why they should trust you

Sameness is expensive. If buyers can’t clearly distinguish between three vendors, they’ll default to the safest option. Or the cheapest. Or the one they’ve already heard of.

 

JK Take

We should talk about brand as growth infrastructure. Not a campaign layer or a logo refresh.

I like to think of it as Infrastructure. Brand shapes how people interpret everything else: the website, the sales deck, the media plan, the search result, the AI answer, the customer story, the event, the ad.  If the brand is unclear, everything works harder.  If the brand is clear, credible, and distinct, the whole system performs better.

 

#4. AI Will Expose Inconsistency

One of my favourite observations from the conference was that AI doesn’t create trust. It amplifies what already exists.

If your organization tells five different stories across five different channels, AI will expose that inconsistency. So will buyers.

For years, brands competed for attention. Now they’re competing for interpretation.

Ask yourself:

• • Can the market understand us?
  • Can AI understand us?
  • Can sales explain us consistently?
  • Can our proof points travel across channels?

If the answer is no, that’s a growth problem.

 

JK Take

This is where marketing has to become more connected.  Brand, content, PR, website, media, search, sales enablement, and reporting cannot keep operating like separate workstreams. They all need to point in the same direction. The brands that win will be the ones people and AI systems can clearly understand.

 

#5. Hidden Buyers Are Reshaping The Deal

We still build too much marketing around the visible buyer: the person who downloads the guide, or attends the webinar, or the person who talks to sales. But complex B2B decisions are shaped by people we may never see. All the others including: finance, legal, procurement, IT, operations, senior leadership, end users.

These people may never click an ad. They may never fill out a form. They can still stop the deal. ‘I’ve never heard of them’ can immediately disqualify you from the shortlist.

 

JK Take

Marketing needs to move from lead generation to buying-group influence. We know this, but very few marketers spend the necessary time and effort to actually execute against this.

This broader audience consideration really changes the questions we ask. Who creates risk? Who needs proof? Who needs confidence? Who needs language to defend the decision internally? Who never talks to sales but still needs to believe? The best B2B marketing does not just generate a lead.  It builds confidence across the account.

Just because the hidden buyer is hard to connect with doesn’t mean they are hard to profile. It’s why our JK Proxy panel (our AI synthetic audience testing tool) has been helping our clients land messaging and creative with the most discerning buyer.

 

#6. Most Content Is Being Created For The Wrong Job

A lot of B2B content is still designed to capture leads, but buyers are trying to answer questions. Those aren’t the same objective.

If content is meant to educate, build trust, improve discoverability, establish authority, and help buyers compare options, we should seriously reconsider what remains behind forms.

One organization at the conference described an internal initiative called Operation Freebird, focused on removing gates from high-value educational content.

Their reasoning was simple: Buyers can’t learn from content they can’t access.

AI can’t reference content it can’t see. If your best thinking is hidden behind a form, it may be doing less work than you think.

 

JK Take

Content should be treated as infrastructure, not inventory.  The question needs to move from “what do we need to publish this month?” to “what does the buyer need to understand in order to move forward?” That shift changes the whole content strategy.

 

#7. Trust Is Moving Closer To Home

There was a lot of buzz at the ANA event around the latest findings from Edelman’s Trust Barometer, because it points to something marketers should not ignore.

As uncertainty rises, people look for trust signals that feel closer, more familiar, and more accountable. That does not have to mean geography.

It can mean:

• • Industry expertise
  • Peer validation
  • Employer trust
  • Local relevance
  • Community presence
  • Proven relationships
  • Human proof

People are looking for signs that a company understands their reality.

This also matters for AI messaging. People are not automatically rejecting AI. They are asking who benefits. If AI sounds like cost-cutting, people get suspicious.  If it sounds like better customer experience, stronger employee support, human oversight, and improved service, it has a better chance of building trust.

 

JK Take

Brands need to make value obvious. This means articulating your points of difference in a human-to-human way.  Show proof, show relevance, show the people, standards, expertise, and commitments behind the work.  The brands that win will not be the ones shouting “AI” the loudest.  They will be the ones making buyers feel safer and smarter for choosing them.

 

#8. The Funnel Is Being Replaced By A Growth System

This is the shift beneath all the other shifts. Most companies are still optimizing for a path their buyers no longer take, the classic model we all know so well: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. But real life is messier.

Buyers move through:

• • Search
  • AI
  • Peers
  • Creators
  • Reviews
  • Communities
  • Private research
  • Internal conversations
  • Budget pressure
  • Procurement requirements.

The influence points are scattered, and a lot of the most important moments happen before marketing can measure them. That does not mean measurement is dead. It means the old dashboard is incomplete.

 

JK Take

The goal is not more marketing; it is a better growth system. One that connects brand, trust, content, search, AI visibility, reputation, media, customer proof, and demand generation. Because the buyer is everywhere before they are anywhere we can measure. The more I look at AI, search behaviour, buying groups, and trust research, the more I come back to the same conclusion. The job has not become less human. Quite the contrary, it has become more human.

The companies that win will not necessarily have the biggest budgets, the most content, or the most sophisticated technology. They will be the companies that make decisions easier to make. To go deeper? What I mean is easier to understand, easier to defend and easier to trust.

That is where B2B marketing is heading.

 

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