How B2B Brands Can Win Attention in 2026 (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Who is joining us today. My name is Kendall. I am the community market community manager here at Riverside. And we have a really special session set up for all of you today. We are going to be talking about how b2b brands can win attention in 2026 because we have just started off this new year. There are so many different trends so many different things that we as marketers as entrepreneurs. As just people that are working within any industry need to keep up on. But as we're entering 2026 I think that it is just the right time to be talking about where you should be focusing if you really want to win that attention online. So that is why we brought you all here today. So thank you so much for joining us. As you file in would love to hear in the chat a little bit more about you. So where are you tuning in from and what product or service does your company market sell promote would just love to hear more about that as we are beginning the session. And before we begin I'll just for anyone who is new to Riverside give a little bit of a rundown. So Riverside is a end to end content creation platform so you can record edit transcribe create clips even host a podcast all through Riverside. And so it opens up a lot of amazing opportunities especially if you are looking to get more into video in 2026 which we will be talking about during the session because there is a lot that you could be doing with video to help win that attention especially if you're a b2b brand. So I'm very excited to be diving into this. I am joined today by Neal over here. Neal hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you are in the world. Yes. And just before we begin and as people are kind of starting to join would love to hear a little bit about you before we begin the session and then I know that you have a ton of really actionable insights that you're going to be sharing. I got a little preview of it before and I'm already like trying to think about all the ways that I could apply it to Riverside strategy. So I want to hear from you just a little bit about you before we start.

[00:02:15] Speaker 2: Sure. Well I am a fractional CMO author speaker focusing on digital social media content influencer marketing. My background before all of this before social media was actually b2b sales and business development. So I do have a b2b background and I love b2b marketing. I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. And I just see more and more that b2c marketing strategies are equally applicable to b2b but not a lot of people are talking about it or giving advice on how to do it. So I'm hoping today to bridge that gap. But I think most importantly I am also a proud Riverside user. I use Riverside for all of my podcast interviews and the short form video clips that you'll be seeing coming out from my social media profiles over the next few weeks. They were automatically created and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the webinar. But it's always awesome to be on a partner webinar with a partner whose technology I use every day. So yeah excited to get started whenever you and the audience are ready.

[00:03:13] Speaker 1: Yeah. And thanks you for that shout out. Really appreciate that. And we'll just say that like I really think that when you think about winning attention you think about video in b2b and outside of b2b. I think that a lot of people are very intimidated by the idea because video can be in a lot of people's minds something that's so difficult to really pull off and do it well. But I think that the session is really just about how approachable it actually is and how how it's actually not as hard as you think to be creating some really great video content that really speaks for your brand. So with that I think I think we're ready to go.

[00:03:49] Speaker 2: All righty well let me share my screen real quickly here.

[00:03:54] Speaker 1: And as we're doing that I will also just mention that our live chat is going to be open throughout the entire time. So if you have a question leave it in the chat. We will either get to it as we go through the session or we'll have a Q&A at the end. Also just want to plug here that this session is recorded. So feel free to just sit back relax watch and if you want to take some notes you can but this will also be recorded so you can always refer back to it later. You'll be getting that in your email for anybody that has registered.

[00:04:21] Speaker 2: And with that handing over to you. Hey Kendall just a quick sanity check you can see my screen correct? Yes I can. Yeah I hate getting five minutes in and then I hear that no one can see my screen so okay.

[00:04:35] Speaker 1: No actually you didn't share your screen.

[00:04:39] Speaker 2: All good all good. Okay well yeah so let's jump right into the topic of today. Really it's about B2B marketing and where I recommend you focus your energy in 2026 and beyond. Very briefly I already introduced myself but I am a fractional CMO. Work with a variety of industries variety of sizes of companies. I've been speaking since 2009. I teach at a few universities in the United States but also in Vietnam and I've taught in Europe. The author of six books and I well I was talking to Kendall before we started but I am fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese so I try to bring a global perspective. As an American sometimes we only look at our own market but obviously social media digital content marketing there are some similarities depending on your country but there are some differences as well and I try to incorporate those. And really the advice wherever you're turning into from today I am hoping that it is equally applicable and if you don't think so I'd love to hear from you on that note. So let's begin with the topic of trust. We all know that people more and more tune out ads. More and more tune out sales pitches. I don't know about you. I'm here in the United States. I simply do not answer the phone anymore because of all of the robocalls trying to sell me on something. I will go through you know emails any gmail.com sales pitch I get I immediately report a spam and I think even LinkedIn messages that are obviously trying to sell me on something I will block. And I think more and more of us are doing this. The consumer the buyer is in control right. On the other hand where are we placing our trust. We're placing our trust in content and in people that are sharing viable information that aren't asking for anything right. So this is a shift we've seen happening in B2C consumer behavior for some time but it's also happening in B2B and I believe over the last year or two it is really accelerated. So when we talk about B2B marketing now a lot of B2B organizations and I used to work in one there's a topic of sales and marketing alignment. We're not going to go into deep details about that but there are some B2B organizations where the marketing is always second priority to sales and therefore sometimes they're still working off a very old playbook because they don't have the budget to be able to upgrade to what they should be doing in 2026. So a lot of these old tactics that some B2B companies are still doing just do not work right. The cold outreach that gets worse and worse response rates over time. I would say even 5% is extremely optimistic these days. We also know on the other hand that just like we are going to Yelp, we are going to Reddit, we are going to all these places to Amazon to look at reviews, to search for information, chat GPT before we make a purchase so is the B2B buyer even more so because obviously it's their responsibility to find the best solution and they could lose their job if they don't. So there's a lot of data that suggests there are 10 to 15 content touch points before purchase. If you're really curious about the psychology behind this number, do a search for Google's zero moment of truth or ZMOT. You can get more information on how many hours the average buyer consumes before they decide to purchase. But there is a lot of online searching in social media, internet, AI looking for information and that is why today it is said that content marketing gives you three times more leads than those outbound efforts that really don't scale. Whereas your content obviously lives forever on the internet, in social media, what have you. And therefore content marketing and really using a modern digital marketing playbook for B2B marketing is said to be 62% more cost efficient than traditional tactics. And I think intuitively we all understand this and this I would say is something I could have talked about a few years ago and it wouldn't have changed. I want to move beyond this today with more detailed advice. So as I hinted at, today's B2B buyers are in control. They are doing self-education. They call it the dark funnel and the number varies that 70% of the purchasing decision has already been made before they reach out to you. The other important thing about the buyers being in control is not only the self-education where they're online, but they're also more and more following people that are sharing this advice. They're not necessarily following company pages on LinkedIn, but they're following influencers or the term we tend to use now are B2B creators. They are trusting their peers over the sales pitches. And once again, they are deciding before you ever enter into the conversation. So how do we control what we can't control, right? And that's going to be a topic I'm going to give some advice on momentarily. So today, these are the areas I want to talk about in order to get attention in 2026. I'm calling it the new B2B attention engine. Begins with organic social or social media without advertising. I'm going to talk about user-generated content, about B2B creators, employee advocacy. These are things that have been talked about a lot in B2C and employee advocacy. We've been talking about for more than a decade, but it has never been more important than today. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the tactics we can use and why they're important. And right now, you're probably thinking, Neil, what does podcasting have to do with any of this? And I think as I go into the presentation, you're going to see that it is a vehicle that can deliver on the promise of gaining attention. We're going to talk about webinars. How meta is that, right? We are on a webinar today, and you are here. Webinars still attract people, but there's more value above and beyond the live engagement that we're doing right now. And then we're going to talk about AI-powered video repurposing. And I'm going to have a little bit more advice about AI, but we can't talk about digital marketing in 2026 without talking about AI. And indeed, it can be very, very useful in helping you gain this attention through all of the tactics that I will be teaching you momentarily. So you need to be where your customers are. Believe it or not, for any of you who have ever been to the Bay Area and you arrive at San Francisco International and you drive north on the 101 to San Francisco, you will see billboards of startups, of technology companies, not consumer-based companies. This is obviously AI-generated. But the point is that there are still technology professionals that are on that freeway, which is why tech companies have billboards there. You need to be where your customers are. That's why we cannot ignore social media is the point I want to make here. You have to be there, but it is a challenge for B2B brands to get any traction there. And the reason is, and I've been saying this for more than a decade, is that social media was made for people, not for businesses. Businesses are invading the turf of people. They are disrupting the conversations that people want to have. We see this even more so on B2C social media, like a Facebook or Instagram. But it's the same with LinkedIn, right? People want human connection. And when humans post on social media, it's very different than when companies post. Companies tend to have this policy messaging, scripted campaigns, sales-driven content, link-based content, brand announcements, impersonal pitches. When you compare that with the human connection of what's being generated by people, you see how difficult it is for brands to win attention. Because of just the DNA of you're a for-profit company and you need to do social media, it's just sort of a natural thing that businesses have been doing for more than a decade. But that needs to change. And the companies that are changing that are the ones that are winning attention today. So my conclusion to all this is that businesses need to think like content creators. Businesses need to become content creators, right? Instead of your campaigns and your disruption, think about authentic storytelling. Think about unique perspectives, adding value, and an audience-first focus. It's not in their DNA. They're not wired to do this. But a content creator is wired to do this. A content creator knows that their value is in the content and the advice and the unique perspectives and the behind-the-scenes stories that they offer to their audience. And this is a mindset that I think is very, very difficult. I'm not saying that every business needs to do this because I know it's very difficult. But this is the competition. And the competition has only gotten better. And yes, AI has raised that bar even higher. As your competition and creators use AI, it makes it even more challenging to be able to compete with them.

[00:13:34] Speaker 1: I do just want to jump in really quick because Jeremy said this in the chat that they've been saying this for years. When I was looking through this presentation before, this connected with me so much that the idea that social wasn't made for businesses, it was made for human connection. And so the way that you can break through that. I mean, I think that everybody in this audience, sound off in the chat because I think that everybody in this audience can also even agree in their own social media habits that there is such a, it's almost like a commercial break that happens when you're scrolling through social media and you see a brand posting. That really disconnected with me about the idea that breaking through that is by being more human. And I think, yeah, that is really, I'm just going to say as somebody that's going through this and taking as much as I can from it, that that point really just connects with me.

[00:14:23] Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much. And you know, there's a lot of people who talk about marketing online, right? One of the things I have is I've been doing this since 2008 and 2009. So there's historical perspective that I try to bring to the presentation. And there are some things that are truly evergreen. And if you keep that as your North Star, that social media was made for people, not businesses, it is a great North Star that should guide what you do. So the next question is, well, then what can you do if that is the case in your business? It's really about looking at social media, not as a marketing platform, but as a relationship building platform. And I'm going to give you advice on how to do this and how it delivers ROI. This isn't just like wah-wah fluff stuff that I'm talking about here. This has serious ROI, and I'm going to get into the numbers shortly. But if you think about every post building relationships, building trust. So how do content creators do this, right? They show their work. They share real projects. They share real thoughts. They share behind the scenes thinking. Transparency builds credibility. They're consistent. Now, this is something that even B2B creators, even myself, struggle with, but they are posting regularly. Now, a lot of businesses that are posting on social media, you have your social media scheduling software. You're probably posting regularly, but are you posting regularly with authentic insights, or are you posting regularly because you're a slave to the editorial calendar? And you don't have to answer that honestly, but I've been there, and I know it is easy to become a slave where you feel the need to publish X times a week, and you're looking at your recent corporate announcements and press releases and blog posts. But are these giving the authentic insights, or are you just trying to drive traffic back to your website? That's the question to ask. And then it's also engaging. So company pages on LinkedIn, and obviously this is going to be LinkedIn-centric because it's B2B, you do have the ability to comment on other people's content. You do have the ability not to post to share a link, but to post to start a conversation, to build real relationships in the feed. You can like and engage like others do. And I wish more companies would take advantage of it. I see very few companies that are actually engaging, and I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And this includes connecting with people, your community manager being active on LinkedIn like they would be active on an Instagram or a TikTok or Twitter or any other social media platform, and making engagements either from the brand or through the community manager should you have one. So I believe the challenge is also the opportunity, that at the end of the day, people trust people, not brands. So social proof is going to be ads every time. Real stories feel real. Sorry, I have a special video camera that actually blocks a little bit of my screen there. Attention is earned and not bought. Expertise builds trust. Trust moves through people. It's this people-centric view, especially when we look at social media, but really all of your marketing and your business, in all honesty, should be people-focused or people-centric. But just another North Star concept of just remembering that is really going to help you consume and actually implement the advice that I'm going to give you shortly. So I talked about B2B creators, and I think there's a concept that I teach that I want to share with you to give you more of how all this relates. So we talked about you need to be where your customers are. They're on social media. We need content, but we also want to be able to build influence. And this is what B2B creators and content creators have been able to build because trust will drive that influence. We know that influence drives action, but people can't like you if they don't know you, and you can't build trust if people don't like you, and you can't influence people without trust. So I like to say that social builds the know. By being present in social media, you get known. Content should build the like in an ideal world, but it's the authenticity in your content that builds the trust. I know this is a lot to consume in a 15-second explanation, but another North Star. Social builds the know. Content builds the like. Authenticity builds the trust. Something I want to keep in your mind as I continue to go through these slides. Another interesting thing, because we talk about B2B marketing, I talk to a lot of companies, we want to be the thought leaders in our industry. And all this is related. This is actually a definition that I found online that I'm sharing with you, highlighting some of the things that basically equates influence or an influencer with being a thought leader. And it comes down, I want you to look at the highlighted in yellow words, expertise and perspective, reliable source of insight and information. These are the hallmarks that I think B2B companies should be sharing a lot of content, but is the content really sharing perspective, expertise, reliable source of insight and information are the key things here. And by doing this consistently, you over time achieve this sort of thought leadership in your category where people tune into your company first before they go elsewhere. And this is really what we want to get to. Now, I now want to shift gears to how do we get the word out about our company? And the best way to do this, you are a brand on LinkedIn, you have one LinkedIn company page, but if you have a thousand employees or 50 employees, those are 50 different channels compared to your one channel. And those are 50 personal profiles where if they were to talk about your company, you're going to get a lot more coverage in the algorithm versus you talking about your own company. So when we talk about B2B social media marketing, it really comes down to looking at your existing ecosystem and leveraging it. Now, more and more companies are doing this. I don't think there are many that are doing it that well. I think there's always opportunity to do better, but it's really about the concept that you don't necessarily need to engage with influencers or B2B creators. You already have creators in your network, in your community, in your community of those that have brand affinity for your company. They're just not activated yet. And 10 years ago, this may not be the case, but as millennials are now a majority of the workforce, at least in the United States, and as more and more Gen Z come on board, and it's not going to be that far in the future where they have management positions, we have more and more digital natives that are working at our company. Digital natives, I look at my kids in high school and college, especially in high school. Any high school that they went to, there were always a few bonafide influencers, like YouTubers had 100,000 subscribers or Instagram entities that had 100,000 followers there. So we have more and more of these people in our company that are already creating content natively. So our employees, subject matter experts, sales leaders, product managers, who are the people that are doing webinars for your company? Who are the people that are on sales calls for your company? Who are the people that are engaging with your customers? Who are the people that go to conferences speaking and networking and telling stories on behalf of your company? They are already creating content. That content just hasn't been translated into the online world where it can be leveraged as part of your social media. So it's about building a program, and I'll touch a little bit more on this later, that empowers them to share their insights publicly, but also in parallel, helping them build their personal brands. I get invited to speak at companies on LinkedIn because the companies want me to help their employees improve their personal brands so that when they share information about the company, it is going to get that much further engagement because they built that personal brand to support that narrative. So you have your employees. This to me is an absolute no-brainer, but guess what? You also have your customers, right? Happy users who love your product. And this goes beyond just asking for a review on a site like G2, which is a great idea. Don't get me wrong. And we know that LLMs are citing a lot of these review sites. But it's also about not just asking, but making it easy to share case studies, testimonials, success stories. And there's a great way to do it, which I'm going to introduce to you shortly. And then depending on your company, in B2B, we have a lot of ecosystem marketing, agencies, system integrators, resellers. What can we do together? We might attend conferences together or do webinars together with these companies or entities. What more can we do in social media, in digital marketing together with them? And that's something I want you to think about. So it's really about building a program that equips these voices with frameworks, templates, and sometimes, yes, incentives. It doesn't have to be a free iPad, but a little incentive can go a long way here so that sharing becomes easy and repeatable. And I will tell you, I have been to some B2B marketing conferences where there were some B2B well-known Fortune 50 brands that were giving out swag in exchange for a G2 review. So you don't have to feel slimy about this or feel cheap. It is a legitimate thing because the value of that is way more than the swag or the $20 Amazon gift card or Starbucks card that you might be giving away. So everyone I mentioned on that slide before has brand affinity with you. And in the B2C world, what's happened over the last decade is that companies immediately reached out to influencers before tapping into their customers. And B2C brands now are correcting that. We have a lot more of what we call brand communities. Well, I want to go the other way with B2B. We should start with those that have brand affinity with us. But now I think it's time, and I'm not going to call them B2B influencers. I'm going to call them B2B creators because it's truly a new type of influencer that we see in the B2B world and on LinkedIn that are sharing a lot of valuable advice and perspective. And when you see them on LinkedIn, they are gaining a lot of following and a lot of engagement. And once again, B2B buyers don't necessarily follow brands, but they definitely follow people, and they are listening more and more to these individuals. So what makes a B2B creator? They have deep expertise in a niche. They are consistently publishing content across platforms. They have an authentic voice and point of view, and they have a community that trusts them, and that's how they influence that community to drive action. In other words, they're earning attention through value, not ads. And we have some stats. These come from the LinkedIn creator marketing research report just last year. 79% of B2B buyers are engaging with creator content, and 87% prefer creator insight over brand messages. And these are the exact same numbers you would see in the B2C world as well, that we trust UGC or user-generated content way more than the content that brands are putting out there. So we have our employees, our customers, our partners. We can add B2B creators to that mix as well and really try to accelerate all of that word of mouth that's going on around us, but translate that into word of mouth on social media. So everything I'm talking about here is not brand-generated content. It is user-generated content. Some people will say, well, content from your employees is employee-generated content, or from customers, it's like brand advocacy, or B2B creators are influencer marketing. It's all user-generated. It's all being created by users at their own discretion. And this is a quote that I hear often. I don't trust what you say about your product. I trust what your customers say about it. Ask any Gen Z, when they want to buy a product, they'll go to TikTok looking to see if anyone's talking about it and what they say about it. We go to Amazon, et cetera. Same thing with B2B. UGC works because when people talk about your product, it's social proof, right? Real customer results cut through the noise. It is authentic. It is unscripted. And every story reaches a new network. In other words, there have been some famous studies of people, for instance, employees. If we were to look at the connections that your employees have versus the people that follow your company page, there's usually very, very little overlap. The number's like between 2% to 8%, meaning that when user-generated content is published, it not only is building trust and attention, but it's also reaching a new audience. Sometimes 90% of the people who see it might have never heard about your brand or are not in your brand affinity and following your brand today. And now I did not study psychology at university, but social proof and user-generated content is really fascinating. And there is a lot of psychology. I'm not going to go into this and geek out about it. If you studied psychology or you were a psychology major, God bless you because it absolutely translates to what we're talking about today. So I'm not going to go into this, but there is a lot of science that proves why this works and why you can be really successful. And really, I would sometimes show a slide up here that shows a brand being self-promotional and getting five likes versus someone sharing an authentic experience, talking about the brand, getting a hundred likes, right? And when you see a post that has a hundred likes versus five likes, it captures our attention. It also means we tend to trust that more than the post that had fewer likes. This is social proof, right? And I think it's part of our brains. It's part of our DNA. And it works in really, really weird ways in social media, but it's what drives the value of this user-generated content. It becomes so much more valuable because of that concept of social proof in human psychology. Kendall, we're about halfway through. Do we have any burning questions?