AI broke the old marketing playbook. Here’s the new one
The 4 shifts B2B marketing teams need to make, and the ripple effects that got us here
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Two weeks ago I defined a new generalist role in marketing, Gen Marketers, and you all responded loudly (thank you). The takeaway: We need to shift from siloed specialists to generalists who are well-versed in generative AI and ready to handle a generational shift. And it’s not just the team makeup that has to change—we also need a new high-level playbook for Gen Marketers to run.
Since then, summer’s ended and annual planning season is upon us. HubSpot—the inventors of “Inbound,” on stage at their own Inbound conference—declared a new playbook: Loop Marketing. Clay hosted its first Sculpt conference and UserEvidence put on a microconference in Jackson, WY; proving how creative differentiation, big bets, and strong ecosystems drives growth. And Stripe announced a partnership with OpenAI just yesterday to make buying directly from your ChatGPT a reality. Meanwhile, more marketers lost their jobs as leaders bet (wrongly) that AI can do their entire jobs.
All of this points to the same reality: The ground in marketing is shifting fast. The old playbooks aren’t enough anymore, and neither are teams made up of narrow specialists. As AI ripples through B2B marketing, companies need not just a new kind of marketer, Gen Marketers, but a new playbook. Get those right, and marketing becomes your company’s moat in the AI era.
This newsletter explains that new playbook.
But first, a soothing image, and consider this your fair warning because I’m about to say “ripple” 26 times in this newsletter.
In this newsletter…
This newsletter is part short-term history lesson on what AI has done to B2B startup marketing and part strategic advice to handle all these changes in 2026 and beyond.
Direct & ripple effects of AI: From declining search traffic to derivative content overload, inboxes flooded with “personalized” outbound, and blurred GTM roles—AI’s impacts are reshaping marketing. A breakdown of how we got here (so you can be the most on top of it at the next B2B marketing micro-conference or board meeting).
The new playbook: Four strategies to adapt in the AI era: standing out with authentic content, building a proactive account-based strategy, running coordinated high-impact campaigns, and staffing teams with AI-powered generalists. Plus, how to implement them with Krameworks™.
Looking forward: Predictions on what the next ripple effects will be.
Recommended products & agencies
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KlientBoost is a performance marketing agency (paid, SEO, CRO) for B2B. They tailor strategies to your stage and maturity, and even stack rank the most effective channels and tactics (just like I do!).
🎁 Offer: Book a free 30-minute call and get a custom marketing plan built around your goals.
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HubSpot’s Loop Marketing: HubSpot made “Inbound” a thing. Now they’re saying: that’s not enough. So they built Loop Marketing. A smarter way to think about growth today. If you love MKT1 frameworks, this feels familiar in all the right ways.
🧠 Offer: Get the playbook at hubspot.com/loop-marketing >>
Part 1: A look back at what AI did to B2B marketing (so far)
If you feel up to date on how all these changes occurred, jump down to look at what I recommend B2B startup marketing teams do now.
First we saw direct impacts of AI on B2B marketing (green in the diagram). These were fairly obvious results (at least in hindsight). At this stage, AI felt like all fun and games: Look at this blog post I wrote with ChatGPT! OMG, I can get contact data without seven tools and a lot of luck! Look at this fake photo I made with a prompt! Simpler times for sure.
Next came the ripple effects or second and third-order consequences of AI that reshaped marketing (gold in the diagram). These are harder to notice when you’re heads down in the day-to-day, but once you connect the dots it’s clear you need to adapt. By this point, running the old playbook was already an uphill battle.
Here’s how it all flowed…
Ease of content creation
AI removed the bottleneck of production. Anyone can now crank out blog posts, social copy, or images at speed.
〜 Ripple effects:
Flood of derivative content: With everyone publishing more, sameness dominates.
Standing out has become harder, not easier: Audiences are overwhelmed by volume, yet marketers keep churning out more thinking it will save the day.
Shift away from search to LLMs
Buyers are no longer just “Googling it.” They’re asking ChatGPT and other LLMs for answers.
〜 Ripple effects:
Decline of inbound & web traffic: Your carefully optimized website may never get the visit, and your SEO and SEM strategies are flatlining—or at best showing diminishing returns.
Changing customer behavior: You now need to build demand where buyers actually spend time; inside LLMs, communities, partner channels, and social (though beware, social is drowning in derivative content too).
Increased access to ICP data
AI-driven enrichment tools have made detailed company- and person-level data available to everyone.
〜 Ripple effects:
Outbound saturation: With inbound losing steam and AI making account and signal data easy to access, outbound volume has exploded—flooding inboxes and LinkedIn with spam.
Signal-based outreach becomes the norm: Greater access to intent data means you can send more precision-targeted, personalized messages. These typically perform better than generic cold outbound, but everyone is doing it, so breaking through is still a challenge.
New AI-first GTM stack:
A wave of AI-native sales and marketing tools has reshaped not just our stack, but our teams. Keeping up with the tools is a job in itself—and roles and team structures are shifting too. (Feel free to revisit that peaceful water image now.)
〜 Ripple effects:
AI joins the team: Repetitive tasks move to AI, (in theory) freeing people up for creative, strategic, and high-impact work.
Blurring roles across GTM: With all these shifts, marketing, sales, and success must align more tightly around accounts, shared tools, and efficiency.
Part 2: The new tenets of the B2B startup marketing playbook
By now, the pattern is clear: AI didn’t just give us faster tools—it upended the foundations of B2B marketing. The old playbook, built on leads, channels, and siloed functions of specialists, simply can’t keep up.
So where does that leave us? We need a new B2B startup marketing playbook: one designed for differentiation, account alignment, hybrid human + AI teams, and campaigns that actually move the needle.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of each of these 4 suggestions:
Authenticity & differentiation:
With audiences increasingly tuning out, you must identify your strengths and lean hard into your unique story. When making marketing “fuel” (aka brand & content), make work only your company could make. And if you can’t create differentiated content and/or don’t know how you’ll distribute it—what channels and processes (your marketing “engine”) will push it out—don’t create it at all. This is your best defense against the sea of sameness.
One other secret for both authenticity and differentiation: Co-create with people and brands in your ecosystem who already have credibility with your audience.
✅What to do now:
With Krameworks™ (frameworks made by me) to help!
Step 1: Find your Marketing Advantages™
To find your differentiators, identify the marketing advantages your company uniquely holds—whether product-driven, ecosystem-driven, fuel-driven, or engine-driven.
Choose the one or two with the most leverage, then design campaigns that amplify them (more on this below). An advantage only matters if it’s truly differentiating, and competitors can’t easily match it.
Step 2: Make a Story Stack™
Your marketing content is another “product” you’re building for the same audience as your software product; it too needs to focus on problems your audience faces and be differentiated.
Use the Story Stack (brand → company story → product story → positioning) and write Perceptions™ (3-4 narratives) to create a consistent narrative.
Step 3: Amplify via ecosystem marketing
Since every channel is flooded with AI-generated noise, trusted voices matter more than ever. Ecosystem marketing means tapping into the people and organizations your audience already trusts: partners, creators, communities, customers, etc.
Start by making an ecosystem map to identify these players. Then find ways for them to amplify your message and credibility, whether through co-created content, partnerships, or community engagement. The goal: leverage relationships your audience already has to reach them where traditional channels can’t.
For paid MKT1 subscribers:
Here are exercises for identifying Marketing Advantages and ecosystem mapping.
🕳️ Pitfalls:
Focusing on quantity over quality: Pumping out AI-written content without a clear POV that just adds to the noise. While it might be tempting to do this for AEO (answer engine optimization, aka search + LLM optimization), it’s not going to help you win.
Speaking like AI, and not like a human: Audiences want to feel like you have an authentic voice and POV, and many are becoming allergic to AI—I’ve even thought about toning down my em-dash use because people think that means AI wrote it. But I’ve decided against doing that—clearly.
Account-driven foundation:
An account-driven setup needs to be the foundation of your growth engine. This isn’t old-school ABM; it’s the basis for how you approach all of GTM, not just your top 50 accounts.
With tighter budgets and leaner teams, aligning on shared account targets is the only sustainable path forward for most B2B startups. Inbound is still useful, but being reactive isn’t enough to keep pace now. You need a proactive strategy: know exactly who you’re going after, then figure out the best ways to reach them with the right content.
The good news: What used to be a manual, expensive nightmare—getting account, contact, and intent data into your CRM—is now realistic even for companies going after large audiences.
✅ What to do now:
Step 1: Understand your ICPs & TAM
Before you do anything else in marketing, you must define and deeply understand your audience. This means identifying both your total addressable market (TAM) and your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), or the best-fit companies and people for your product today.
You need to figure out what companies—and who within those companies—you are targeting and prioritize them. Equally important is developing a qualitative understanding of your audience: their motivations, pain points, and behaviors.
Step 2: Shift to an account-driven GTM process
Identify target accounts, segment them into priority tiers, and give each tier its own playbook—high-touch for Tier 1, scalable for the rest.
Map lifecycle stages for both accounts and contacts/leads in your CRM to get full visibility and trigger the right actions (not just leads like we used to do!). Accounts show where a company is in its journey (e.g. Identified → Engaged → Opportunity), while contacts or lead stages track individual readiness and can trigger accounts forward.
Treat inbound as one of many signals (albeit an important one) that guides when, how, and with what message to engage.
For paid MKT1 subscribers:
Here are exercises for TAM & ICP mapping and setting up account-driven GTM.
🕳️ Pitfalls:
No cross-team buy-in: An account-driven strategy won’t work if it’s just marketing. Sales, success, and ops need to be aligned on the same targets.
New data, same old playbooks: Don’t just dump accounts and signals into your CRM and keep doing cold outbound + waiting for inbound. The point is more proactive, more precise marketing to cut through the noise!
Chasing perfection: You’ll never have all the data. Start with Tier 1 accounts and operate from there—progress beats waiting.
High-impact campaign focus
To win in the AI era, a pile of Random Acts of Marketing (R.A.M.™) won’t cut it. The antidote to RAM is running high-impact campaigns: initiatives that deliberately combine fuel + engine, align to your strategy, and are built around unique audience insights.
🐏🐺The other antidote to RAM is a wolf, but this isn’t an animal kingdom-focused Substack (dad jokes!)
This means planning your marketing efforts around big-bet campaigns, not individual channels or content pieces. Run fewer, bigger, cross-channel initiatives that reinforce your story and tie directly to your marketing advantages. Put Gen Marketers in charge of orchestrating these campaigns (more on this in a second). Use AI to speed up production and scale, but human judgment to nail the creative.
✅ What to do now:
Step 1: Plan big-bet campaigns
I define campaigns as marketing initiatives that combine both fuel and engine. Campaigns are typically focused on a specific audience segment (or set of segments), anchored around a theme, for a set amount of time.
Big-bet or high-impact campaigns are the ones that you think can cause a step-change in your growth trajectory.
Success requires cross-functional planning, a single DRI, and a GACCS Brief™ to align goals, audience, creative, channels, and stakeholders.
Create internal playbooks for each campaign. Define Tier 1 Campaigns (full-team efforts), Tier 2 Campaigns (medium-sized), and Tier 3 Campaigns (tests that you can scale if successful). Include tier designations in your GACCS Briefs for alignment.
Step 2: Build an impact-focused annual marketing plan
Create one shared doc that captures your annual strategy, goals (and non-goals), forecasts, and big-bet campaigns. Share broadly and use it to drive quarterly planning, prioritization and get buy-in on your big ideas.
Within this plan, include K.P.O. goals™. This includes KPI goals (metrics that capture your core work), Project goals (big bet campaigns), and Ops goals (behind-the-scenes work: hiring, tools, and process to enable scale).
To set yourself up for step-change growth, you need to focus on high-potential-reward campaigns (Project goals) and make investments behind-the-scenes to help you scale, like bringing in a new AI tool or building account-driven foundation (Ops Goals). Just focusing on KPI goals with no plan of how to get there doesn’t work.
For paid MKT1 subscribers:
Here are templates for building GACCS Briefs, setting K.P.O. Goals, and building an annual plan (just in time for Q4).
🕳️ Pitfalls:
Traffic light trap: If you literally or figuratively rate work as red, yellow, green; most teams will obsess over fixing the reds (what’s not working), but the real leverage comes from doubling down on the greens (what is working) and letting the reds go.
Confusing campaigns with a calendar of activities: Without clear goals, audiences, and storylines, you’ll just recreate channel chaos under a new name. Also confusing campaigns with the Salesforce or HubSpot definition or just a campaign on ad platform, those are all campaigns too, but not exactly how I’m using the term here.
Human + AI teams, built around “Gen Marketers”
GTM teams are smaller now, and they aren’t getting bigger anytime soon. Unless you count AI agents as team members, which actually you probably should start doing.
For your marketing team to fit into the GTM org now and keep up with all these changes, the foundation of your marketing org now needs to be Gen Marketers. And you yourself should consider upgrading your skillset.
And it’s not just marketing that will need to change. To support everything mentioned in this newsletter from the ripple effects to the other 3 tenets of the playbook (authenticity and differentiation, account-driven foundation, and a high-impact campaign focus) you’ll need to adjust how all of GTM works together.
✅ What to do now:
Step 1: Build your team around Gen Marketers™
Here’s what it means to be a Gen (a marketing generalist, who is an expert in generative AI, ready for this generational shift in marketing) Marketer:
Tasks that once required deep specialists are now within reach of anyone using AI tools. So, generalists will become the center of gravity for marketing teams. Specialists will still exist, but there will be fewer in-house and you’ll lean more on agency and contractors for specialty needs (e.g. SEO, video, design).
Refresher on the skillset of a Gen Marketer: See the diagram below!
For paid MKT1 subscribers:
Here’s a job description & scorecard template for a Gen Marketer (plus other modern marketing roles).
Step 2: Balance Fuel & Engine™
This is a foundational framework to MKT1: Your marketing fuel is everything you say and create for your audience (out loud, in writing, or visually); your engine is the channels and processes that get that fuel in front of them. When your mix isn’t balanced—or doesn’t align with audience behaviors and needs—your marketing becomes inefficient fast.
Being able to combine fuel and engine has always been essential, but in the AI era it’s more critical. Don’t make fuel without knowing the engine that will distribute it, and vice versa. Without this tight orchestration, you won’t be able to stand out.
For a breakdown on all the things you can and should do with AI, check out my post on AI Hackathons here or the AI prompt library for paid subscribers.
And I’ll be writing about what to keep in-house, what to outsource, and what to delegate to AI in a newsletter in the next couple months!
🕳️ Pitfalls:
Relying on a T-shaped skillset: Having breadth and depth isn’t enough in the AI era. You also need to learn AI orchestration, how to “work with” not just human teammates but AI agents, and know how to run differentiated, high-impact campaigns.
Using AI as a crutch: The sea of sameness comes from leaning too hard on automation without knowing when human creativity, judgment, or nuance is required.
Looking forward & riding the waves
More ripple effects of AI—and ripple effects of those ripple effects—are on the way. A few predictions:
Websites will matter less ➜ Answers and even purchases (which, hot off the press, is now possible with Stripe in ChatGPT) will increasingly happen inside LLMs and AI agents. Marketers will need new ways to get discovered and distributed inside these environments.
Inbound will keep losing steam as our current social channels decline too ➜ With AI-generated noise saturating LinkedIn and other B2B social channels (and those platforms discouraging linking out), marketers definitely need to adopt that account-driven foundation and diversify their channel efforts!
Events and ecosystems will surge… then plateau ➜ Marketers will lean harder on influencers, but even those partners may see reach plateau or credibility erode. Stay nimble, and remember your ecosystem extends well beyond these creators!
GTM teams will keep shrinking, for now ➜ Leadership will keep testing how lean GTM teams can get, sometimes leaving too few (or the wrong) people to actually do the work. Leaders: Marketing can be your moat in the AI era. Invest in Gen Marketers who know how to run big campaigns, and your odds of winning go up.
The ripples will keep coming, but the four strategies outlined here will help you rise above the noise and stay nimble enough to handle whatever comes next. Focus on authenticity and differentiation across all content and creative, plan your distribution efforts with an account-driven foundation, run high-impact campaigns to bring together fuel and engine for your audience, and update your team structure and role definitions to fit this new playbook.
I think my friend Kasey, Head of Content & Brand at Retool, said it best:
Godspeed, marketers.
More from MKT1
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What’s next
📰 Next newsletter: The LinkedIn Flywheel
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Templates and resources for paid MKT1 subscribers:
Gen Marketer job description & scorecard
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