This is the third of a three-part series on the impact of AI in B2B marketing. Part 1 examines what’s changed in the past year, Part 2 takes a closer look at why, and Part 3 explains why the organizational structures at some companies make it hard to correct for this. I wrote this myself as one should always do, so don’t be fooled by the presence of em dashes. I’ve overused them for the past twenty-five years and don’t plan to stop.
If vendors have misused new AI tools to flood the market with mediocre marketing that all looks and sounds the same—and if people are feeling pressured to impulsively go this route—then it would follow that this is a great time for everyone else to step back, touch some proverbial grass, and figure out how they can do better.
The great news is that there’s never been a better time to stand out and make things really good. Quality and craft are, after all, the only defense against slop—and I think we can all expect to see more slop over the next few years.
Of course getting good is easier said than done. This is especially true because when you open up the hood and look inside some companies, you’ll see that marketing teams are operating with misaligned incentives. The result being that they’re tasked with work that isn’t designed to solve the problems that need solved.
Let’s take a closer look.
Determine what’s needed in the first place
Every company has to be clear about what marketing work they’re saying no to.
The challenge is that there exists, more or less, a certain sense of what an ideal B2B marketing function can and should look like in a perfect world. I’m referring to everything from the organizational structure to the tech stack and the categories of deliverables. People just kind of know what works at this point. Checking all of those boxes doesn’t mean you’ll get award-winning marketing, but you’ll probably get marketing that’s pretty decent.
Of course it’s expensive to do this. On top of that, every company is at a different stage in their journey and may not need a full-blown marketing function.
In the case of some startups, there may not even be the budget to hire a full-time CMO or VP who then turns around and wants to hire a team. And even if they could, there might not be enough work to go around. That’s why it’s problematic when some startups raise more money than they know what to do with and find it easy to start playing house, hiring too many people and generating a lot of busywork.
The reality is that marketing should always be proportional to whatever communication challenges a company is trying to solve. Anything in excess of that risks being a waste of time and resources, and anything insufficient risks underselling your company and limiting its growth.
You have to strike the right balance, and that means saying no to some things that might be nice to have. In a way, you have to try to figure out what activities are likely to be the 20% that deliver 80% of the results. That might actually be something as simple as arming your sales team with the right kinds of case studies, or building the right cadence of the right types of PR. Or in the case of some vendors, maybe it’s creating a series of repeatable reports that start a conversation within your industry. Not everything needs to make a big splash though, and more attention doesn’t always get more contracts signed. But you do need to at least have a vision for what’s needed, and why, and what activities are likely to compound over time and boost your company’s reputation.
That starts with company leadership actually being a part of the discussion.
How marketing gets misaligned within an organization
There’s a particular vendor I’m aware of that’s bleeding customers right now.
I won’t name names or get into specifics, but given what I know about them—and the negative conversations I’ve heard other retailers having about them with their own prospective customers—I’d say they have a massive problem on their hands. It’s something that needs to be addressed right away.
Which is why I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe—just maybe—filling their blog with listicles written for LLMs shouldn’t be a priority.
Call it AEO, GEO, LLMO, or whatever you want to call the process of juicing LLM results the way SEO juiced Google, but these articles clearly aren't written for human consumption. They have that sort of weird, uncanny vibe that’s irritating everyone these days, and they're packed full of the kinds of observations and recommendations that could have come from any of their competitors. Whether this approach ultimately proves worthwhile is a separate conversation. The point is just that they've published nearly twenty of these in the past month.
So you have to ask: why would they spend marketing resources to solve a problem they don’t actually have, while ignoring a massive problem that they absolutely do have?
Most individual marketers aren't trying to make bad decisions. Like everyone else, they’re going to respond to the incentives that result in keeping their jobs. If their bosses want more content, then they’re going to produce more content. If they’re told to generate leads for the sales team, then they’re going to do whatever looks defensible. If someone in company leadership was convinced by a consultant that AEO is going to Change Everything™, then they’re going to work on AEO even if they personally think it shouldn’t be a priority. Marketing managers tend to want to look productive, directors want to show that their team is productive, and VPs and CMOs want to justify their budget. At every level of the organization, people want to demonstrate value to the people above them.
The problem is that these incentives don’t always align with the communication problems the business actually needs to solve. Especially when the function is judged by certain KPIs that may not be directly tied to those problems, forcing marketers to optimize around metrics regardless of the impact on the business.
That’s why leadership can’t treat marketing strategy like it’s beneath them, or blindly hand it off to whoever leads the marketing department. They have to actively participate and define what they want the marketing team to accomplish—and be clear about why that is. If they don’t, people will optimize around whatever’s easiest to defend in their meetings rather than whatever work is actually likely to change how the market perceives their company.
And candidly, I think that’s how you end up burning resources on listicles for LLMs when your customers are out there telling your prospects why they’re leaving.
Let’s make it really good
All of this is to say that I think it’s time for companies to get more intentional with their B2B marketing.
I’ve explained how the old trust signals are breaking, as companies misuse new AI tools and flood the market with low-quality content. I’ve also touched on why some people feel pressured to do this, and why some companies struggle to focus on what even needs their attention in the first place.
Personally, I think this is good news for everyone who wants to do better. The companies that stand out in the coming years will be those who understand what marketing is actually for. Not the companies with the largest marketing departments, not those with the most sophisticated tech stacks, and definitely not whoever generates the most AI content. People who get serious about doing better will run circles around all of them.
That’s why I started Konbini Strategy. This industry has never had—at least to the best of my knowledge—a dedicated B2B marketing and PR firm that helps companies navigate and solve these challenges. Whether it’s fractional work, advisory services, marketing execution, or something else entirely, there’s a big opportunity to step in and help companies stand out.
All you have to do is stop sounding like everyone else and make it really good.