TopRank Marketing

Cannes Lions made it clear that creators are here. For many B2B brands, the untapped opportunity isn't creators, it's executive influence.

B2B buyers don't just evaluate companies, they evaluate the people leading them. In an AI-powered search landscape where expertise, credibility, and trust drive visibility, executive voices are much more important marketing assets.

To help you learn more about what building influence from within your B2B brand might look like, today's post by our CEO Lee Odden outlines:
• Research on why executive influence is becoming a competitive advantage in B2B from LinkedIn, G2, Forrester, Profound, Ascend2, and TopRank Marketing.
• How executive thought leadership and creator/influencer programs amplify each other
• 10 practical ways to build an executive influence strategy that scales
• How authentic executive content strengthens buyer trust across every stage of the journey

The brands that win attention in the kind of discovery environment we have now are not relying on corporate messaging alone. They're building the visibility, credibility and decision confidence capability of leaders whose expertise both buyers and AI choose.

Get all 10 executive influence tactics plus 3 B2B brand examples: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/b2b-executive-influence/

Is B2B brand blogs still relevant for AI search visibility? Here's what the research says:

With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI powered answer engines reducing clicks to websites, it's easy to assume blogging has lost its value.

The research tells a different story.

As was discussed in our recent podcast interview with Rand Fishkin, traffic is no longer the only measure of success. The B2B brands that get chosen in AI search are publishing the kind of credible, structured, expert content that AI systems can understand, trust, and cite.

Here are the facts based on research:

✅ 86% of Americans say they don't trust AI-generated information without clear attribution, reinforcing the importance of authoritative, citable content. (WordPress VIP / Talker Research)

✅ When Google displays an AI Overview, users click traditional search results only 8% of the time versus 15% when no AI summary appears. (Pew Research)

✅ Only 1% of users click the sources cited within AI Overviews, highlighting why marketers must measure visibility beyond website traffic. (Pew Research)

✅ Research shows AI-optimized content that incorporates credible citations, evidence, and clear structure can improve visibility in AI-generated responses by over 30%. (arxiv)

The question isn't whether blogging still matters for B2B brands. It's whether your business blog is creating the kind of original, trustworthy knowledge that AI systems want to reference.

To learn more about how, read today's post by Nick Nelson on TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/blogging-ai-search/

Our 2025 B2B influencer marketing research revealed everything from budgets to best practices and use of AI but 2026 is different.

2025 data showed challenges are consistently finding the right influencers (48%), measuring and reporting results (47%), and managing relationships with influencers (40%) which are important challenges to solve given that 82% of marketers report the most success when using an always-on approach which is relationship dependent.

As for budgets, 2025 data found 72% of the most advanced teams have a dedicated influencer budget they expect to grow which synchs well to a recent prediction from Forrester that 75% of enterprise B2B brands will increase their investments in B2B influencer relations this year.

But what about B2B influence in 2026?

AI has impacted everything from how influencers create content to how audiences discover and interact with that content that are very different than in a year ago.

Commoditization of content has elevated the importance of trust, authenticity and genuinely unique perspectives - all of which are hallmarks of the best influencer marketing programs. The opportunity to create impact with influence in B2B marketing is much greater now.

My firsthand experience is that we are seeing more demand from B2B brands for influencer marketing than ever. I am having conversations with B2B marketers at mid-market and enterprise brands every day and the challenges they're trying to solve have evolved.

I'm pretty sure those challenges are felt by many marketers in the B2B space. Since a rising tide lifts all ships, we're continuing our efforts to bring data to the market about all aspects of B2B influence from strategies to tactics, budgets to operations and certainly the impact of AI on content and the intersection of influence with search and AI discovery.

If your B2B brand is working with B2B influencers and creators, I invite you to take a moment to complete our survey for the 5th B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report for 2026: http://survey26.influencermarketingreport.com/

Your responses will help us continue our efforts to elevate the practice of B2B influence, highlighting what works, what doesn't, where to invest and how to measure results.

57% of B2B marketers are already using AI for content creation (Ascend2/TopRank) but...
..if every marketer has access to the same AI tools, what actually makes a brand stand out?

We asked 12 of the top social media marketing leaders from B2B brands including Adobe, HPE, Slack, UKG, RTX, Cohesity, Cision, and others to help answer an a timely question:

With AI use accelerating, what role will human creativity play in the future of B2B social media marketing?

The answer was amazingly consistent.

AI can help B2B marketers move faster. It can scale ideas, accelerate workflows, and improve efficiency.

But imagination, emotional intelligence, cultural awareness, editorial judgment, and the instinct to create something genuinely memorable still belong to humans.

As AI-generated content floods social feeds, originality is becoming one of the scarcest and most valuable assets in B2B marketing.

The brands that win won't be the ones producing the most content. They'll be the ones creating content that makes people feel something.

In this article by Lee Odden, top social media leaders from some of the world's most respected B2B brands share their perspective on where AI ends and human creativity begins. And why that distinction matters more than ever.

https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/b2b-creativity-ai/