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One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing.
Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’
Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us.
Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range.
Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate.
I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion.
John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why.
1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent
The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper.
Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent.
2. They were dogged about creating original content
The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists.
Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory.
3. If you do steal, make it count
When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs.
Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy.
4. They worked to be that good
The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week.
Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it.
5. They overcame obstacles
Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage.
George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them.
‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’
Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road, Ticket to Ride from Help, A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever, would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer.
Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage.
6. They knew their competitors
When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath, which included Under My Thumb, Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper. The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds. The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era – released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents.
Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on.
7. They understood ‘multi-channel’
The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now.
And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography.
They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City.
Learning: B2B marketing needn’t be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time?
8. They were storytellers
For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life.
Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Lovely Rita, Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture.
Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch.
9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant
The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move.
But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet.
The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon.
Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy.
10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans
The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Help, In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks.
Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience.
11. The Beatles were brave
The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules.
At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent.
They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans.
Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss.
Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting.
12. They continued to invent; even after failing
As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life.
Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film.
Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered.
13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas
The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life:
“We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”
“I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...”
Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader.
14. They got results
The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product.
Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘results’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you.
One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing.
Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’
Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us.
Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range.
Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate.
I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion.
John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why.
1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent
The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper.
Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent.
2. They were dogged about creating original content
The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists.
Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory.
3. If you do steal, make it count
When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs.
Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy.
4. They worked to be that good
The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week.
Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it.
5. They overcame obstacles
Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage.
George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them.
‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’
Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road, Ticket to Ride from Help, A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever, would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer.
Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage.
6. They knew their competitors
When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath, which included Under My Thumb, Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper. The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds. The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era – released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents.
Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on.
7. They understood ‘multi-channel’
The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now.
And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography.
They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City.
Learning: B2B marketing needn’t be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time?
8. They were storytellers
For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life.
Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Lovely Rita, Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture.
Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch.
9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant
The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move.
But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet.
The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon.
Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy.
10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans
The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Help, In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks.
Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience.
11. The Beatles were brave
The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules.
At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent.
They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans.
Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss.
Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting.
12. They continued to invent; even after failing
As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life.
Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film.
Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered.
13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas
The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life:
“We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”
“I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...”
Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader.
14. They got results
The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product.
Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘results’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you.
One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing.
Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’
Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us.
Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range.
Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate.
I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion.
John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why.
1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent
The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper.
Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent.
2. They were dogged about creating original content
The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists.
Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory.
3. If you do steal, make it count
When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs.
Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy.
4. They worked to be that good
The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week.
Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it.
5. They overcame obstacles
Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage.
George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them.
‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’
Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road, Ticket to Ride from Help, A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever, would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer.
Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage.
6. They knew their competitors
When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath, which included Under My Thumb, Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper. The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds. The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era – released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents.
Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on.
7. They understood ‘multi-channel’
The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now.
And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography.
They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City.
Learning: B2B marketing needn’t be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time?
8. They were storytellers
For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life.
Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Lovely Rita, Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture.
Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch.
9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant
The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move.
But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet.
The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon.
Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy.
10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans
The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Help, In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks.
Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience.
11. The Beatles were brave
The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules.
At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent.
They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans.
Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss.
Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting.
12. They continued to invent; even after failing
As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life.
Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film.
Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered.
13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas
The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life:
“We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”
“I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...”
Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader.
14. They got results
The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product.
Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘results’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you.
London
Mar 31, 2026
Rich Fitzmaurice
Letters
Dear Rich,
I am under pressure from my CEO and CCO because they are increasingly obsessed with AI chatbots. Apparently the chatbots don't know much about our firm but can answer questions about our competitors. I am interim head of marketing and I'm feeling like I don't have long to address this before it harms my prospects for the gig full time.
I understand organic content is still valuable but how exactly do I get our firm and our products into ChatGPT or Claude?
Rebecca, Manchester
Dear Rebecca,
Your CEO and CCO have stumbled onto something increasingly real. To be fair to them, I think they are right, you need to treat this as a priority.
Prospective buyers are using AI tools to shortlist vendors before they ever land on your website. A CFO types "which platforms offer AI-powered forecasting" into Copilot. A procurement director asks ChatGPT "who are the main providers of X in the UK." None of them went to Google first (who would have said that just a year ago?!). And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. If yours wasn't one of them, you lost ground in a conversation you didn't know was happening.
The discipline you need is called AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation. It's what SEO was in 2008, which means the window to get ahead of your competitors is open right now, but it won't stay open forever. You can’t open LinkedIn or Instagram or any social media without someone talking about it or pitching a solution.
Here's what you actually do.
First, understand how AI decides what to say. Tools like ChatGPT were trained on web data up to a certain point. What they know about your company comes from that training: your content, your press mentions, your directory listings, third-party coverage. Retrieval-based tools like Perplexity pull live web data. Google's AI Overviews blend both. No single fix works across all of them. But the underlying principle is consistent. AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
Start with an audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note where your competitors appear instead. Run fifteen to twenty prompts. The gaps become your priority list. This also gives you something concrete to take back to your CEO this week, which, given your situation, is not a small thing. It shows you are on it.
(Important Note: We see the need, so B2B Marketing United have decided to build our own ‘AI Search Scout Report’ tool to conduct this audit for free and get you started. We’ll release it soon so sign up to the newsletter on our website for updates.)
Then look at your own website. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, and specific factual statements all increase the chance of being cited. A page that says "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." Specific beats vague. Every time. Go through your most important pages and make them legible to a machine. This means leading each section with a direct answer, adding FAQ sections that mirror the actual questions buyers ask, and replacing any claim that a journalist couldn't quote with one that they could.
Build your authority footprint outside your own site. Here's the thing most marketers miss. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. AI models weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, bylines on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your brand as worth citing. One well-placed article in a credible trade publication does more for your AI visibility than ten posts on your own blog. I said it in our AEO how-to and I'll say it again here: PR is making a comeback, and this is the big reason why.
Fix your entity consistency. This is the unglamorous work that nobody wants to do and that most companies haven't done. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. If your founding year, product description, or company category varies between sources, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Content and Comms teams must be loving that all their hard work insisting on ‘core scripts’ and ‘factbooks’ are now more than justified and back in vogue.
Use the language your buyers use. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. If your website speaks in internal jargon and your buyers are searching in plain English, the connection AI needs to make between your brand and their queries simply won't be there. Write for their vocabulary, not yours.
The pressure you're under is real. But the good news is that fixing this is visible work. You can show your CEO a before and after. The audit alone demonstrates that you understand the problem and are taking action. The content and authority work demonstrates that you're addressing it. Most of your competitors haven't even started. That's your advantage, and your argument for the full-time role.
Move fast. Document what you do. Show the change. Get that job permanently!
Onwards!
Rich
For a fast read on the full AEO playbook, our how-to is here: How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers. And if you want to know exactly where you stand right now, the B2BMU AI Scout Report will audit your AI visibility for free just get in touch with the team via the website at www.b2bmarketing.com
Dear Rich,
I am under pressure from my CEO and CCO because they are increasingly obsessed with AI chatbots. Apparently the chatbots don't know much about our firm but can answer questions about our competitors. I am interim head of marketing and I'm feeling like I don't have long to address this before it harms my prospects for the gig full time.
I understand organic content is still valuable but how exactly do I get our firm and our products into ChatGPT or Claude?
Rebecca, Manchester
Dear Rebecca,
Your CEO and CCO have stumbled onto something increasingly real. To be fair to them, I think they are right, you need to treat this as a priority.
Prospective buyers are using AI tools to shortlist vendors before they ever land on your website. A CFO types "which platforms offer AI-powered forecasting" into Copilot. A procurement director asks ChatGPT "who are the main providers of X in the UK." None of them went to Google first (who would have said that just a year ago?!). And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. If yours wasn't one of them, you lost ground in a conversation you didn't know was happening.
The discipline you need is called AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation. It's what SEO was in 2008, which means the window to get ahead of your competitors is open right now, but it won't stay open forever. You can’t open LinkedIn or Instagram or any social media without someone talking about it or pitching a solution.
Here's what you actually do.
First, understand how AI decides what to say. Tools like ChatGPT were trained on web data up to a certain point. What they know about your company comes from that training: your content, your press mentions, your directory listings, third-party coverage. Retrieval-based tools like Perplexity pull live web data. Google's AI Overviews blend both. No single fix works across all of them. But the underlying principle is consistent. AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
Start with an audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note where your competitors appear instead. Run fifteen to twenty prompts. The gaps become your priority list. This also gives you something concrete to take back to your CEO this week, which, given your situation, is not a small thing. It shows you are on it.
(Important Note: We see the need, so B2B Marketing United have decided to build our own ‘AI Search Scout Report’ tool to conduct this audit for free and get you started. We’ll release it soon so sign up to the newsletter on our website for updates.)
Then look at your own website. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, and specific factual statements all increase the chance of being cited. A page that says "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." Specific beats vague. Every time. Go through your most important pages and make them legible to a machine. This means leading each section with a direct answer, adding FAQ sections that mirror the actual questions buyers ask, and replacing any claim that a journalist couldn't quote with one that they could.
Build your authority footprint outside your own site. Here's the thing most marketers miss. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. AI models weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, bylines on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your brand as worth citing. One well-placed article in a credible trade publication does more for your AI visibility than ten posts on your own blog. I said it in our AEO how-to and I'll say it again here: PR is making a comeback, and this is the big reason why.
Fix your entity consistency. This is the unglamorous work that nobody wants to do and that most companies haven't done. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. If your founding year, product description, or company category varies between sources, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Content and Comms teams must be loving that all their hard work insisting on ‘core scripts’ and ‘factbooks’ are now more than justified and back in vogue.
Use the language your buyers use. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. If your website speaks in internal jargon and your buyers are searching in plain English, the connection AI needs to make between your brand and their queries simply won't be there. Write for their vocabulary, not yours.
The pressure you're under is real. But the good news is that fixing this is visible work. You can show your CEO a before and after. The audit alone demonstrates that you understand the problem and are taking action. The content and authority work demonstrates that you're addressing it. Most of your competitors haven't even started. That's your advantage, and your argument for the full-time role.
Move fast. Document what you do. Show the change. Get that job permanently!
Onwards!
Rich
For a fast read on the full AEO playbook, our how-to is here: How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers. And if you want to know exactly where you stand right now, the B2BMU AI Scout Report will audit your AI visibility for free just get in touch with the team via the website at www.b2bmarketing.com
Dear Rich,
I am under pressure from my CEO and CCO because they are increasingly obsessed with AI chatbots. Apparently the chatbots don't know much about our firm but can answer questions about our competitors. I am interim head of marketing and I'm feeling like I don't have long to address this before it harms my prospects for the gig full time.
I understand organic content is still valuable but how exactly do I get our firm and our products into ChatGPT or Claude?
Rebecca, Manchester
Dear Rebecca,
Your CEO and CCO have stumbled onto something increasingly real. To be fair to them, I think they are right, you need to treat this as a priority.
Prospective buyers are using AI tools to shortlist vendors before they ever land on your website. A CFO types "which platforms offer AI-powered forecasting" into Copilot. A procurement director asks ChatGPT "who are the main providers of X in the UK." None of them went to Google first (who would have said that just a year ago?!). And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. If yours wasn't one of them, you lost ground in a conversation you didn't know was happening.
The discipline you need is called AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation. It's what SEO was in 2008, which means the window to get ahead of your competitors is open right now, but it won't stay open forever. You can’t open LinkedIn or Instagram or any social media without someone talking about it or pitching a solution.
Here's what you actually do.
First, understand how AI decides what to say. Tools like ChatGPT were trained on web data up to a certain point. What they know about your company comes from that training: your content, your press mentions, your directory listings, third-party coverage. Retrieval-based tools like Perplexity pull live web data. Google's AI Overviews blend both. No single fix works across all of them. But the underlying principle is consistent. AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
Start with an audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note where your competitors appear instead. Run fifteen to twenty prompts. The gaps become your priority list. This also gives you something concrete to take back to your CEO this week, which, given your situation, is not a small thing. It shows you are on it.
(Important Note: We see the need, so B2B Marketing United have decided to build our own ‘AI Search Scout Report’ tool to conduct this audit for free and get you started. We’ll release it soon so sign up to the newsletter on our website for updates.)
Then look at your own website. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, and specific factual statements all increase the chance of being cited. A page that says "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." Specific beats vague. Every time. Go through your most important pages and make them legible to a machine. This means leading each section with a direct answer, adding FAQ sections that mirror the actual questions buyers ask, and replacing any claim that a journalist couldn't quote with one that they could.
Build your authority footprint outside your own site. Here's the thing most marketers miss. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. AI models weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, bylines on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your brand as worth citing. One well-placed article in a credible trade publication does more for your AI visibility than ten posts on your own blog. I said it in our AEO how-to and I'll say it again here: PR is making a comeback, and this is the big reason why.
Fix your entity consistency. This is the unglamorous work that nobody wants to do and that most companies haven't done. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. If your founding year, product description, or company category varies between sources, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Content and Comms teams must be loving that all their hard work insisting on ‘core scripts’ and ‘factbooks’ are now more than justified and back in vogue.
Use the language your buyers use. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. If your website speaks in internal jargon and your buyers are searching in plain English, the connection AI needs to make between your brand and their queries simply won't be there. Write for their vocabulary, not yours.
The pressure you're under is real. But the good news is that fixing this is visible work. You can show your CEO a before and after. The audit alone demonstrates that you understand the problem and are taking action. The content and authority work demonstrates that you're addressing it. Most of your competitors haven't even started. That's your advantage, and your argument for the full-time role.
Move fast. Document what you do. Show the change. Get that job permanently!
Onwards!
Rich
For a fast read on the full AEO playbook, our how-to is here: How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers. And if you want to know exactly where you stand right now, the B2BMU AI Scout Report will audit your AI visibility for free just get in touch with the team via the website at www.b2bmarketing.com
Content
Mar 23, 2026
Content
How to's
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
Content
Mar 13, 2026
Content
