Let us begin by saying that many of us here at Browndog are just as sick of hearing about AI as everyone else in marketing. However, we understand that if 2025 was the year that we all learned to experiment with AI, then 2026 needs to be the year that we learn how to use it to our advantage or risk (dare we say it) getting left behind.
In marketing, the challenge we’re facing with AI, isn’t necessarily just about getting left behind, it’s about continuing to stand out, and that’s what we’ll be discussing in this year’s guide to planning your B2B marketing strategy.
Amongst your many objectives and goals, the key will be learning how to maintain a genuinely human connection, using AI to support productivity while remaining authentic and true to your human values.
Here’s our guide on how to plan your 2026 marketing strategy, keeping in mind advances in AI, while holding humans at the heart of your business.
Review and reflect on 2025
Before planning anything new, take the time to understand what worked in 2025, and what challenges you might have faced that will impact your 2026 planning. Consider:
- Lead quality: Which activities brought in leads – focus on quality, not quantity.
- ROI: Did your spend match your return? Look at metrics you can actually track, and understand if they were worth it.
- Attribution: Have you got the right tracking in place, and are you up to date with first-party data gathering as third-party cookies phase out?
- Market changes: Were there any big changes in your industry this year? Have you kept an eye on competitors and understand how you’re performing in comparison?
- Our thoughts: we’ve experienced so much change this year, and one of the main places we’ve seen uncertainty for our clients has been in search results. While the main principles of SEO are still strong (if you’re not familiar, read our blog on E-E-A-T), we’ve certainly had to pivot our efforts to make sure our websites are still showing regularly in search engine results – and now, importantly, in AI answers.
As a result of the recent changes and progressions in AI, some websites are seeing huge drop-offs in traffic because responses are given in the AI summary, directly within the search engine. We know this is scary, but we also must remind ourselves that if your website wasn’t there providing those answers, you wouldn’t be mentioned at all. We’ll continue to evolve and navigate these changes throughout 2026, keeping you updated as we discover new tactics.
Re-invest in your brand
In a year when AI can generate almost anything, your brand personality is what keeps you recognisable and trusted.
Ask –
- Does your message still reflect who you are now, not who you were a few years ago?
- Is your visual identity consistent across your digital footprint?
- Do your tone and values still resonate with your audience?
Why is it so important?
The use of AI – and its capabilities – advance daily, so it’s essential to cut through the slop and get to the stuff made by real people. Fortunately, we can already see that consumers are noticing work that has been produced by AI and have begun favouring real, human, authentic content. However, there’s a long way to go, so making sure your brand is authentic and maintains a brand voice that can’t be replicated, is what will keep recognition and resonate with your audience.
Collect your own data
As we transition away from third-party cookies, this will affect how B2B marketers can target, track and personalise campaigns. Here’s what you can do now:
- Collect first-party data – if you haven’t already, build a strong CRM system that helps you collect your own data. This could be through things like gated content, webinars and events, or newsletter sign-ups.
- Use other platforms for targeted campaigns – LinkedIn continues to be a recommended platform for B2B marketing. In addition to building an organic following and posting schedule, you can use it to target specific audiences without relying on cookies. Afterall, it’s so much better to be promoting campaigns to people who have opted in/shown an interest in your content.
- With that in mind, make sure your privacy and data management policies are up to date and clearly visible on your website.
Don’t replace your team with AI, support them with it
We’re still learning what AI can genuinely help with in business, and where it’s removing personality – our advice is to tread lightly, but focus on figuring out how it can support your team, rather than replace them.
AI can’t replace human creativity or instinct, but it can help build on ideas and streamline processes. A key takeaway that we’ve learnt this year is that you should think of using AI like a sandwich – there should be a human at the top of the process and again at the bottom.
Here’s where we think AI can help:
- Research (always ask for sources)
- Analysis
- Ideation
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Chat functions on your website
Most importantly, if you’re going to use AI, you should learn how to give the best prompts to get the best results.
Keep investing in helpful, human content
If we were going to cite 2025 as the ‘year of’, it would be the year that people used AI to churn out SEO content. While this might have saved time for some, it’s come as a cost to others. People and search engines have quickly become accustomed to seeing and immediately discounting this content, seeking out genuine, authentic content that demonstrates experience, expertise, and most importantly, trust. Search algorithms have adapted and now reward depth and understanding, setting a high bar for content that shows in-depth knowledge.
In 2026, focus your content around:
- Quality over quantity – skip the churn and instead produce something that really speaks to your audience, targeting their challenges with truly helpful content.
- Human storytelling – case studies, insights, and thought-leadership pieces that build profiles on the people in your business. Some of our best engagement comes from animal content – so if it’s relevant, don’t discount that either!
- A mix of media – short and long form video with a mix of written content provides variety and meets your audience where they’re at.
- Write for humans, not bots – let AI help with structure and planning, but always make sure your content comes from the heart and is aimed at people.
Optimise, optimise, optimise!
Your website should be an engaging platform, not just a digital brochure. Think about:
- User experience – keep the navigation simple and clearly guide the user through their journey.
- Lead generation – use forms, CTAs, and live chat functions to provide a useful service that ultimately leads to enquiries/sales.
- SEO – provide a mix of content that answers visitors’ questions and demonstrates authority, expertise, experience, and builds trust. Understand how your audience actually searches – and optimise for it.
- Integration – make sure all of your systems work together – think about data collection, customer communications, sales and invoicing, as well as reporting.
Paid search – is it worth it?
We understand that budgets are tighter than ever and return is under tight scrutiny. This doesn’t mean you should cut your spending, but you should make sure it’s working as hard as it can. That means:
- Working with specialists to test and refine campaigns frequently
- Using the right data to build the right audiences in each platform
- Aligning your search prominence tactics so they work together – get your SEOs and PPCs talking to each other!
- Figure out if it’s worth it for your business – keep in mind that ROAS doesn’t always mean being able to attribute an exact return – sometimes it’s simply about visibility and raising brand awareness.
Build relationships
Relationship-based marketing is more important than ever. We know you’re probably sick of reading this, but people buy from people – so building relationships is vitally important to getting new and returning customers. Putting emphasis on returning customers is a great strategy, because it costs far less to retain a loyal customer than it does to acquire a new one.
Every marketing strategy should have a plan for customer retention; here’s some things to consider:
- Segment your data – keep your email campaigns laser focused (you only get one chance because once a person unsubscribes, you can’t contact them again).
- Keep your content regular and helpful – nobody wants to be constantly bombarded with sales messaging
- Build communities – use forums, groups, webinars, events, etc. This can result in added benefits such as user generated content, word of mouth referrals and free feedback.
- Understand your teams – marketing is not sales, but the two need to work closely together.
Measure what actually matters
It’s too common to see senior leaders asking for metrics that don’t matter – it doesn’t matter how many leads your campaign has generated if the leads aren’t qualified and of value. It doesn’t matter how many people visited your website if they bounced off immediately because your content wasn’t right for them.
Focus on what matters to your business:
- Measurements such as lead quality, conversion rate, lifetime value, and acquisition cost.
- Use a range of tools to give the full picture – GA4, SEMRush, CRM reporting, Google Ads data, real-life feedback.
- Create dashboards for visibility and make sure everyone works to the same goals and objectives – marketing cannot operate and succeed in a silo.
Be realistic
As always, we encourage you to set SMART goals. Review and adjust them regularly rather than annually – you need to be open to change, being flexible and responsive to market changes.
In case you’re not familiar, understand setting SMART goals:
- Specific – make sure that your objectives are very specific to your goals, for example, if you want to achieve xx number of visitors to your website, think about why. A more specific goal would be to think about the quality of your visitors; so consider goals for your conversion and engagement rates instead. Having thousands of visitors looks great on your figures, but what you really want is high quality, engaged visitors that are more likely to convert.
- Measurable – what are goals if we can’t measure them? Consider how you can measure your success, whether that be through tracking codes and analytics or positive customer feedback.
- Achievable – it’s important to consider objectives that are possible. We’d all love our campaigns to go viral, but we can’t guarantee that. Instead, you should consider incremental improvements. So, think about increasing your social media posting by one per week for example; or implement a regular newsletter but consider how much time you have to dedicate to it, and instead of beginning with a weekly edition, set yourself a goal to share an update monthly.
- Relevant – we know marketing is often a ‘catch-all’ in business, but your objectives should be relevant to the work that you do. Make sure that the objective aligns with your team and wider organisation.
- Time-Bound – give yourself a realistic and achievable deadline for meeting your objectives. In marketing, it’s important to remember that results are not instant and they’re not always linear!
Planning ahead for 2026 is half the battle, so we hope this guide has helped you to consider where you should focus your efforts next year.
