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Tips for B2B marketers. ⏱ 1:00 minute read ❓ Why more AI tools aren’t creating more impact ⚙️ The infrastructure most teams are missing 📊 Why data is the real differentiator in 2026 As marketers, we love tools. New platforms. Faster workflows. Smarter automation. But none of that matters if you miss the most fundamental question: 👉 Is your AI multiplying advantage, or multiplying flaws? The challenge: You’ve adopted AI. Your team is experimenting. Output is faster. Content volume is up. But performance isn’t compounding the way you expected. 👉 Workflows feel messy. 👉 Prompts aren’t reusable. 👉 Output quality is inconsistent. 👉 Teams don’t share standards. 👉 Data sources don’t fully align. Reality is, AI doesn’t fix foundations. It reveals them. As Alex Bacon, AI advisor, puts it: “What good looks like has not fundamentally changed.” If strategy is unclear, AI accelerates confusion. If ICPs are vague, AI scales noise. And if data is outdated or fragmented, AI multiplies bad decisions. The fundamentals still decide what works. Only now, the consequences compound faster. How to use AI in marketing Most marketers are still using AI like a conversation. Nicole Leffer, AI advisor said: “The vast, vast majority are just chatting back and forth until they get the output that they want. But you can’t do that and scale it.” That’s the bottleneck. Chatting gets you one result. Systems get you repeatability. The shift is simple: Prompts → Templates Templates → Workflows Workflows → Operational capability AI is pattern recognition. Patterns depend on inputs. As Alex says: “Rubbish in, rubbish out.” 5 top tips you can implement today 1️⃣ Break the task before you prompt Don’t ask AI to “do marketing.” Split the work into clear phases (research, structuring, drafting, optimisation) so it supports defined steps instead of vague outcomes. 2️⃣ Turn chats into reusable systems If you refine an output more than once, turn the final version into a reusable prompt template. Prompts should become shared workflows, not one-off conversations. 3️⃣ Feed it constraints, not just requests AI performs better when given audience context, tone rules, and clear objectives. The more precise your instructions, the more strategic the output. 4️⃣ Use AI for critique, not just creation Ask AI to challenge your assumptions, stress-test your messaging, or highlight weak logic. It’s often more powerful as a thinking partner than as a content generator. 5️⃣ Fix your data before you automate If you’re using AI for targeting or personalisation, audit your data first. Clean, connected inputs determine whether AI drives smarter decisions, or just scales mistakes. Key takeaway: If AI feels slow, messy, or unreliable, it’s usually not the tool. It’s the workflow. It’s the data. It’s the operating discipline around it. AI isn’t the advantage. The infrastructure behind it is. Want to learn more about AI in marketing? Check out these additonal resources 🤖 The future of AI and the role of data in marketing in 2026 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/blog-ai-data-marketing/fq18cm/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY Read more from Alex and Nicole on AI-ready marketing 📊 Is your data AI-ready? https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/blog-ai-ready-data/fq18cq/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY What is AI-ready data & how should you assess AI-readiness? First Floor, Holborn Gate, 330 Holborn, WC1V 7QT, London, United Kingdom +44 203 858 0822 uk@cognism.com Unsubscribe from marketing emails https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/unsubscribe-marketing/fq18ct/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY | Manage Preferences https://go.cognism.com/emailPreference/e/epc/488621/eKMfD3o5d8jG7_dXXbf8ILBr9d5C6b1rGyoLzt16tgA/1174/b8d7fd0aab9a5ebf30255dab2ab85e915cc2fdbdb498d877507d4f028c084fbb/1360098744 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/company-cognism/fq18cx/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/cognism/fq18d1/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/c-Cognism/fq18d4/1360098744/h/9odTYnPa2ygTeqsKodMSx-40yFjXP10LoyJr-DkkhMY

Tips for B2B marketers. ⏱ 1:30 minute read 📊 Trends from 17 episodes of Marketing Dilemmas 🔬 3 predictions for dilemmas marketers will face in 2026 🎙️ POD: The wrap up dilemma - Predictions for 2026 with Amy Collins Across 17 episodes of the Marketing Dilemmas podcast, we kept hearing the same tensions from CMOs, demand gen leaders, and brand marketers. They were each at different companies. Held varying roles. But the same underlying problems kept appearing. So we stepped back to answer one question: What are the real marketing dilemmas heading into 2026? The patterns we couldn’t ignore Marketing never stops evolving, because buyer behaviour keeps changing, fast. But our systems, metrics, and expectations are still playing catch-up. That gap is where a lot of modern marketing tension lives. Theme 1: Demand gen is winning, but it’s still judged like lead gen Most marketers now agree that demand generation makes sense. But while the strategy has evolved, portions of measurement often haven’t. Many teams are still being judged using lead gen scorecards. Metrics designed for a very different way of buying. That creates friction because: 🔘 Demand gen isn’t linear. Buyers move back and forth, not step by step. 🔘 Intent isn’t always visible. Some of the most important signals happen off-site or over time. 🔘 Not everything meaningful can be tracked. Influence, familiarity, and trust don’t show up neatly in dashboards. Strong demand gen work can look weak on paper. Progress is harder to “prove.” And teams feel pressure to justify impact using metrics that no longer reflect reality. Theme 2: Zero-click is now the default buyer experience This didn’t start with AI. AI just made it impossible to ignore. For years, buyers have been: 🔘 Researching on review sites 🔘 Learning in communities 🔘 Sharing opinions and recommendations in dark social Most of that activity has always happened off-site. And most of it has never been fully trackable. AI and chat-based search have simply accelerated this shift. Answers now come to the buyer, not the other way around. Buyers can now form opinions about your brand long before they ever visit your website. Which means: 🔘 Traffic is no longer the full story. 🔘 Clicks are no longer the clearest signal of impact. 🔘 Visibility and influence now happen earlier, and elsewhere. And focus for 2026 now needs to be how you can influence LLMs to positively cite your content to get in front of those buyers early. Theme 3: AI is a multiplier, not a fix AI came up in almost every episode. But rarely as a silver bullet. Instead, it showed up as a stress test for existing go-to-market foundations. AI doesn’t create problems. But it does accentuate anything it's fed. And therefore, if the data layer beneath AI isn’t up to scratch, then you’ll never have a successful AI program. In practice, AI: 🔘 Amplifies weak or fragmented data 🔘 Exposes unclear ownership and accountability 🔘 Scales broken or inefficient processes faster The 2026 dilemmas recapped 1️⃣ How do you prove impact when demand gen can’t be measured like lead gen? 2️⃣ How do you build demand when buyers never visit your website? 3️⃣ Do you fix GTM foundations first, or let AI expose the cracks? These dilemmas aren’t edge cases. They’re already showing up in day-to-day marketing decisions. They explain why: 🔘 Good work feels harder to defend 🔘 Traditional metrics feel less convincing 🔘 And new tools like AI feel both exciting and uncomfortable There isn’t a single “right” answer to any of these. Otherwise they wouldn’t be much of a dilemma! The teams that will win in 2026 won’t be the ones chasing every new tactic. They’ll be the ones willing to rethink how they measure impact, putting buyer behaviour at the forefront of decision making, and addressing the foundations that need fixing before scaling with AI. Stay 'looped in' on how to reach modern B2B buyers 🎧 Listen to Amy's episode on Marketing Dilemmas! https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/3IXRKCOxx3-si-d637715ba71247b8/fpqdfr/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 For the full recap on marketing leaders' trending dilemmas 🤝 Learn how we report demand gen activity https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/aybook-reporting-to-leadership/fpqdfv/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 What metrics matter, and how do we present them back to leadership 💻 Read about zero-click SEO and what it means for you https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/blog-zero-click-seo/fpqdfy/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 Featuring Tom Mansell, VP of Organic Performance at Croud That's all for now! Liam Bartholomew First Floor, Holborn Gate, 330 Holborn, WC1V 7QT, London, United Kingdom +44 203 858 0822 uk@cognism.com Unsubscribe from marketing emails https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/unsubscribe-marketing/fpqdg2/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 | Manage Preferences https://go.cognism.com/emailPreference/e/epc/488621/JpPCi1AX-uM8NrMSxGWtMenDTIhZvxmmLGJAuzChAxo/1174/b8d7fd0aab9a5ebf30255dab2ab85e915cc2fdbdb498d877507d4f028c084fbb/1342933609 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/company-cognism/fpqdg5/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/cognism/fpqdg8/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/c-Cognism/fpqdgc/1342933609/h/o2ugBHUyekRFbjd-vERx1Glz3mQ0_UEZgKxGYu5DLL4

Tips for B2B marketers. ⏱ 1:30 minute read ⚠️ Why last-click rules quietly starve future demand 📈 How to track the real impact of LinkedIn on search, pipeline and revenue 🎙 POD: The LinkedIn versus Google ads dilemma with Srikrishna Swaminathan Google Search tends to get marketing teams budget because it’s easy to measure: clear intent, clean last-click attribution, CAC you can defend to a CFO. Whereas, LinkedIn? It behaves more like a digital billboard. Buyers see the ad today, come back via organic or paid search days later, and the conversion gets credited to Google. The demand LinkedIn created never shows up in the report. So each month, marketers walk into a meeting where: Google looks super ROI-positive, LinkedIn looks terrible and budget is pulled from the very channel that’s quietly feeding search and pipeline. Sri’s dilemma: How do you prove LinkedIn’s value next to Google, and decide how much to invest in each? From “brand spend” to demand engine: how Sri measures LinkedIn The challenge Most teams measure LinkedIn and Google the same way: last-click, channel-by-channel. That’s fine for search, but it slowly kills LinkedIn. Because it leads to under-investment, stop–start campaigns, “brand only” bias, and an always-on capture engine (Google) with no demand feeding it. Sri’s approach is to treat LinkedIn as a partner to search, and rebuild the measurement around that reality. 1️⃣ Start with full buyer-journey visualisation Sri maps journeys at an account level to understand how touchpoints work together: Where did they first discover you? (LinkedIn, content, community) What helped them evaluate? (blogs, comparison pages, G2, webinars) What finally pushed them to convert? (search, direct, sales outreach) When you see “LinkedIn view → blog → branded search → demo → closed-won” on a single timeline, it’s much harder to argue LinkedIn “doesn’t work”. 2️⃣ Use segment & funnel analysis to prove impact Instead of arguing from intuition, Sri splits the world into cohorts: Exposed segment: companies that saw LinkedIn ads Unexposed segment: similar companies that didn’t Then he compares: 👉 MQLs, pipeline and revenue 👉 Win rates and sales cycle length 👉 Whether exposed accounts show up more in Google and direct traffic He also builds a simple funnel: LinkedIn ad viewed → visit within 15 days via any channel → opportunity → closed-won. If that pattern keeps repeating, you’ve got a concrete argument that LinkedIn is driving demand that Google later captures. 3️⃣ Run incrementality & lift tests (with real stats) 👉To move past “correlation only”, Sri looks at incremental lift: Baseline: companies that never see LinkedIn ads convert at ~X% Exposed: similar companies that see a threshold of impressions convert at a higher Y% If that uplift is statistically significant (not just noise), you’ve got hard proof that LinkedIn is making the rest of your funnel more efficient, especially search and outbound. 4️⃣ Make Demand Gen own the story (with Marketing Ops as co-pilot) Sri’s view: Demand Gen should own the argument - they’re spending the budget and need to defend it with data, not just intuition. Marketing Ops brings the neutral analytics layer: building the reports, validating the significance, and pressure-testing assumptions. Together they can walk into a CFO meeting with: 👉 Cohort and funnel analysis 👉 Account-level journeys 👉 Incrementality data …instead of “we just feel LinkedIn is good for brand”. 5️⃣ Replace bias with experimentation and consistency One of the biggest internal constraints Sri sees is a baked-in belief that: “LinkedIn is a brand channel we spray occasionally, Google is where performance happens.” That leads to stop–start spend, no learning, and weak creatives. Sri flips it: Treat LinkedIn as an always-on demand engine, not an occasional brand stunt. Keep budgets steady long enough to learn what works. Evolve creative for the channel: carousel, video, and message sequences that match how people scroll and consume, not repurposed search ads. When you update the mindset, you unlock better ads and cleaner data. 6️⃣ Redefine success beyond last-click For Sri, success isn’t “did LinkedIn get cheap form fills this month?” It looks like: 👉 More pipeline from the right accounts 👉 Faster deal cycles where accounts have seen LinkedIn + search + outbound together 👉 Higher reply rates when SDRs email accounts that have already been warmed through ads 👉 A media mix that can be defended to finance with evidence, not guesswork Only then do you adjust the split between Google and LinkedIn, instead of defaulting to 80/20 just because that’s what the spreadsheet likes. Key takeaway Google is great at capturing demand. LinkedIn is great at creating it. If you treat both channels as identical and rely only on last-click, LinkedIn will always look broken, and you’ll quietly starve your future pipeline. As Sri puts it: “If you measure LinkedIn like search, it will always lose. Measure the journey, not just the click, and it becomes one of your strongest levers.” Stay 'looped in' on how to reach modern B2B buyers 🎧 Listen to Sri’s episode on Marketing Dilemmas! https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/SJPwQS2kpd-si-da7a117cf9bc45c7/fpmcwk/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o For his full breakdown on the Google versus LinkedIn dilemma 🤝 How to implement a demand generation paid strategy https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/emand-generation-paid-strategy/fpmcwn/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o Read to learn how to make paid work for long-term demand, not last-click metrics 🤝 Join us for the next Marketing Dilemmas LIVE https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/marketing-live-december-2025/fpmcwr/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o Join Fran and I at 4pm GMT today for a tactical deep dive into what is working in inbound for 2026 Until next time! 👋 Liam Bartholomew First Floor, Holborn Gate, 330 Holborn, WC1V 7QT, London, United Kingdom +44 203 858 0822 uk@cognism.com Unsubscribe from marketing emails https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/unsubscribe-marketing/fpmcwv/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o | Manage Preferences https://go.cognism.com/emailPreference/e/epc/488621/Zs6x7uHbh8IgXK8IGlOytVQ9GtLUrXA7cU8U2zBV0bk/1174/b8d7fd0aab9a5ebf30255dab2ab85e915cc2fdbdb498d877507d4f028c084fbb/1337653921 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/company-cognism/fpmcwy/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/cognism/fpmcx2/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/c-Cognism/fpmcx5/1337653921/h/uCtzH8ust28d2pk5Vc4kPDGrBCY9lSaoOXUc-7Qau3o

Thanks for signing up to our newsletter from Alice de Courcy. https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/2023-10-19/fg3zgg/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4 LEADERS IN PREMIUM SALES INTELLIGENCE Thanks for signing up In The Loop! Hey Maude 👋🏻 Thanks for joining the gang. From now on, we’ll be dropping these newsletters into your inbox twice a month, covering the latest in demand generation. You can expect: Research and insights on changing B2B buying behaviour. New playbooks to reach and convert 'self-serve' B2B buyers A guide on how to transition away from a 100% 'lead gen' strategy (without getting fired). Take note ⚠️ To make sure our newsletter doesn't end up in your junk/promotions folders, add this email address to your contacts. Outlook Click on our name at the top of this message > right click it and choose “Add to Outlook contacts” > fill in the details you want to save in the window that opens > hit save. Gmail Hover over the icon at the top of the email > Add to Contacts Apple Mail Tap on our email address near the top > Add to VIP Any Others Report us as non spam/move us to your primary inbox. Thanks again for joining the gang! Alice de Courcy Group Chief Marketing Officer First Floor, Holborn Gate, 330 Holborn, London WC1V 7QT, United Kingdom +44 203 858 0822 uk@cognism.com Unsubscribe from marketing emails https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/unsubscribe-marketing/fcs4rf/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/unsubscribe-marketing/fcs4rf/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4 | Manage Preferences https://go.cognism.com/emailPreference/e/epc/488621/kCYjTQOSr2IGQwsdEdbCz0Pd1gNUpayrhwCTdycHCqo/1174/b8d7fd0aab9a5ebf30255dab2ab85e915cc2fdbdb498d877507d4f028c084fbb/1333863619 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/company-cognism/c6pmg1/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/cognism/c6pmg3/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4 https://go.cognism.com/e/488621/c-Cognism/fcs4rj/1333863619/h/OKn2pAKnDpdtfQvJUMLnuOmKQGbMU3qhzTCNFcbktc4