B2B has its own influencer infrastructure — and it runs through LinkedIn and podcasts, not TikTok. The playbook for founder publishing, practitioner partnerships, podcast appearances, and measuring pipeline impact.
The MQL has lost strategic relevance. Account-Based Marketing has replaced it — treating target accounts as markets of one. Here's how the discipline actually works in 2026, from 6sense and Demandbase to the AI buyer layer.
The Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has been quietly undermining B2B marketing effectiveness for nearly a decade. In 2026, with complex buying cycles and anonymous decision-making, the MQL is no longer a performance indicator but a comfort blanket. This article argues that B2B marketing must evolve beyond MQLs to embrace more honest measurement frameworks and build genuine presence where buyers actually spend time, before they are even buyers. Otherwise, marketing teams will continue to produce pipelines that consistently underperform.
The platform has gone through several phases. The early professional networking era was about resumes and recruiting. The middle period — roughly 2015 through 2020 — was about content marketing, with brand pages doing most of the publishing work. The current phase, which has been
Performance marketing has become expensive, crowded, and harder to measure due to rising acquisition costs, signal loss from privacy changes, and audience saturation. The Demand Equation explains that performance marketing efficiently captures demand but poorly creates it. This article details why brands overpay when asking performance marketing to do both and how to reallocate demand creation to more effective channels.
LinkedIn dominates B2B social with its professional context and algorithm favoring substantive content. Learn what strategies work, such as executive presence and long-form content, and what doesn't, like pure promotion and engagement-bait formats. Discover how to optimize your LinkedIn presence for B2B success.