You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT.
But in case you’ve been living in the woods and just returned to civilization: AI is eating the world. Tech companies are projected to spend about $400 billion this year on infrastructure to train and operate AI models.
Marketing has been wholly swept up by the new zeitgeist. Suddenly, all any marketing leader or any exec wants to talk about is those big two letters: AI. How can it make us better, faster, leaner.
Here at BT, we’ve had plenty to say about AI. We’ve dedicated blogs to the topic. More than one. Actually, more than two.
But today, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to talk about what marketing leaders should give a s**t about, besides from AI. Because despite the hype and the froth, our em-dash-addicted overlords aren’t everything… yet.
Here are three trends you shouldn’t take your eye off if you want to be ahead of the B2B marketing game.
- The Migration to Private Networks
Public reach is shrinking. LinkedIn engagement is down. X is a wasteland of bots, porn and conspiracy theories. Facebook is grandmothers posting their cats.
Meanwhile, real buyer conversations have moved behind closed doors — into Slack groups, WhatsApp threads, Discord servers, and niche communities.
If you sell to professionals, odds are your next customer is already asking peers for vendor recs in a channel you can’t see. These are the new trade shows — small, trusted, and human.
Smart marketers are learning how to show up there without spamming: joining communities as contributors, sponsoring with value, and listening before piling in with their pitch.
All responsible B2B brands will need to keep doing traditional social. It’s the bread and butter, it’s keeping the lights on. But the new reality of social networking is less like a broadcast network, and more like a coffee shop with conversations you should be trying to slide into. - The Great Middle-Funnel Collapse
Here at BT, we’ve produced a thousand pretty funnel diagrams over the years. Not long ago, we always had a nice fat oblong between awareness and intent. That oblong is shrinking.
Today’s buyers binge everything – analyst reports, Reddit threads, your case studies, your competitors’ case studies – all in one sitting. They hash it out with ChatGPT while they’re sat on the sofa. They self-educate until they’re nearly done buying, then only then do they show up.
And what they want is a white-glove demo… not a nurture sequence.
This means the classic “brand vs. demand” divide doesn’t hold up. Everything you publish now has to do both. A blog should build credibility and drive conversion. A case study should both educate and sell.
The companies still separating “awareness” from “pipeline” are already losing ground to those who treat the entire buyer journey as one continuous conversation. - The Human Voice Strikes Back
Here’s a mindblowing fact: every word of this blog was written by a living, breathing homo sapien.
And guess what? People seem to like it.
Before ChatGPT burst onto the scene, people were already tired of buzzword-heavy, over-polished B2B content. And now, what are they really, really sick of?
“In the ever-evolving world of innovation and growth, we’re proud to be at the forefront of revolutionizing the digital landscape — empowering businesses to delve into the complexities of transformation with confidence and clarity. #Innovation #Leadership #Growth #Synergy”
Yep. Everyone now sounds like ChatGPT.
The brands people actually want to engage with? The stuff people actually want to read? It sounds like a human. Why? Because it was written by a human.
Not Everything is AI
Okay, right now most things are. AI will keep dominating headlines for time to come. Maybe it will even liberate us all. Or destroy us all.
But not every meaningful shift in marketing has a GPT behind it.
The fundamentals still matter: where people gather, how they buy, and what kind of voice they trust.