“Random acts of marketing don’t work. They create chaos, inefficiency, and confusion.”

This week, Bill explores what’s truly missing in most marketing plans for manufacturers and B2B companies as planning season for 2026 ramps up. Whether leading a B2B organization or a manufacturing firm, this episode provides a practical roadmap for scalable, predictable marketing success for next year and beyond.

Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Well, it's almost 2026 and it is planning season. Random acts of marketing will not achieve the results that you want. And this is becoming even clearer as we deal with the changes that are occurring in the marketing industry today.

Too many companies are entering the end of the year and entering next year without a clear plan. And that lack of clarity leads to random acts of marketing. Companies try a few things here, a few things there, implement an AI tool here, an AI tool there, and the results they get are scattered, sporadic, and are not repeatable, scalable, or predictable. So today I want to introduce some items that you need to consider as you start your planning for 2026.

So the first item we want to talk about is strategy. Most companies do not have a clear plan around what they are going to do in 2026. And while they have ideas and they have tactics that they're going to employ and they're going to keep their internal team and or agency partners very busy with to do's and tactical implementation, they do not have a clear strategic plan that aligns their goals with the outcomes that they're pursuing. Random acts of marketing don't work. They create chaos, inefficiency, and confusion. In the end, no one's satisfied. The shareholders, the executive team, the marketing team, the sales team, no one is satisfied with the results that occur.

So how do we avoid this problem? How do we create a strategy? Number one, we need to write our strategy down. We need to have a document that is the Rosetta Stone, the control for our marketing strategy for 2026. And developing this strategy can occur in-house. It can be developed with the executive team, with the owners, the founders, the C-suite, as well as the marketing team. But it also may need to be developed with outside resources such as fractional CMOs, agency partners, experts. However we need to get to this written document, this one single source of truth, we need to pull every lever and tap every resource that is available to us to develop the best strategy for our organization for the coming year.

This strategic document can then allow us to really have a waypoint by which we can measure what we're doing in the entire year. And this is the only way we are going to develop a repeatable, scalable, predictable model that can impact growth and value creation.

We have seen so many companies that have struggled with their marketing and we're introduced to them at a very critical point because they have treated their marketing like a side project. It's something we get to whenever and it's the last thing we deal with. It's very common to receive calls from companies at four or five o'clock in the afternoon because that's when they get to it. That's when they feel the priority of marketing should really take hold in their schedule or where they prioritize it. Whereas marketing and growth should move up the ladder and be more top of mind and highly prioritized in the organization schedule. So let's really focus on the end of 2025 and as we approach 2026 on getting clear on our strategy for marketing growth.

Number two, and this is something that has been neglected by everyone in the industry and needs additional focus. This may be the one gold nugget in this call that you've never thought about before or never prioritized in your organization. And that is voice of customer research. Few do it. Most fail at it. But those who listen to the signals and actively acquire voice of customer input around their problems, around their solutions, around their perceived value in the marketplace as a business and a brand. Those are the companies that are going to be able to pivot and move more quickly and develop strategies that will in fact solve real world problems for their clients and be more viable and authoritative in the market.

Voice of customer research is not a nice-to-have anymore. It is a have to have. And there is zero excuse for companies that don't perform this function. We no longer have to have elaborate and expensive scheduling and event type activities that will allow us to achieve voice of customer research. Most of our customers and our clients are willing to jump on a 15 minute Zoom call and answer questions. They're willing to be part of a phone research session that can be short and not inconvenience them significantly. Also, we need to be doing not only the voice of customer research directly, but we also need to be studying and asking what our sales team and customer service team is experienced as they are in the trenches. This information should be on a continuous feedback loop with the marketing department. But if your resources do not allow, and when you can't build a system that allows that continuous feedback loop, we at least need to periodically, once a month, once a quarter, really get together with our sales team and customer service team and dig into what they're experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

One of the keys, and this is kind of a side note, but when you're dealing with your sales team and your customer service team, you have to have a longer session in order to really unpack what occurred recently and what is really a trending topic. One of the things we deal with in trying to extract voice of customer research through the lens of our sales and customer service teams is the primacy recency theory. Most of these folks will respond and answer questions, provide feedback based on the most recent conversation or the more recent conversations that were negative that they've had with these folks. And that isn't always necessarily accurate and doesn't necessarily help us get to the core problems that we can solve. So there needs to be a more in-depth process when we're taking that second step back from actual conversations with the voice of customer, but it's important to study that information as well.

The third thing we want to talk about today is about harvesting the base and selling more to our current customers, increasing our share of wallet with our current client base. And this is often neglected in search of new and more exciting or different markets. Companies get so enamored with that new sale, that new opportunity.

When we think about dialing in those KPIs, when we think about really having the performance metrics that we're looking for, we're often thinking about new customer acquisition. And new customer acquisition is more expensive, takes longer and is more difficult to deal with. The easiest path to predictable profitability and better revenue growth is through your current clients. It is the easiest and is the quickest. It is the most efficient and it is the least costly. And we, time and time again, see customers who only want to talk about how do we have a growth marketing program and they are not interested in talking about selling more and grabbing more share of wallet with their current clients. They only want to focus on pursuing new markets. If you do not have a plan to harvest your existing customer base, to sell more, to upsell, cross-sell, aftermarket sell, or get a larger share of their wallet, this is a huge gap and needs to be addressed in your 2026 planning.

If you're looking for a quick litmus test as to whether or not your organization is focused on selling more to your customer base, look at your marketing mix, look at your marketing budget spend and ask this simple question: What percentage of your marketing budget, what percentage of your internal resources are dedicated to selling additional product services, et cetera, to your existing client? If the answer is less than 10% or in most cases zero, then you need to address this tremendous gap in your planning.

The fourth strategy we want to talk about is content. Content that works. Content is the way your clients find you, recognize your authority, and choose to include you in the buying process. And content is no longer just about keyword optimized landing pages on your website. Content needs to be everywhere. Content needs to be in video, on your YouTube channel, through your social media. There needs to be robust content that actively engages the conversations and questions that your buyers are asking, whether it's through search or through the LLMs. And all content can be delivered through multiple channels that will then interact and send positive signals, however the client or customer is looking for information to buy your product or service. So content is no longer optional. It is mandatory and it needs to be rich. It needs to be developed and distributed across platforms and it needs to be up to date and accurate.

If you're looking at your website and you're saying, oh, our website isn't up to date, this is an absolute litmus test as to whether or not you have a problem and need to address your content strategy. If your content is relatively up to date and you feel very confident in your website, then you need to think about am I ranking for information or am I ranking for pages? SEO focuses on ranking your information and ranking those pages on search. When we look at LLM, AEO, GEO, whatever letters you want to ascribe to dealing with AI and AI search, we're looking at ranking information so that we're earning share in the knowledge graphs and in the responses that the AI tools reference and then generate responses for the folks who are using those tools.

So when we think about content, it needs to be everywhere. It needs to be up to date and it needs to be relevant and meet those buyers wherever they are on their journey. So we're beyond the idea of, well, do we have full-funnel content? We have to have full-funnel content. We have to have content that attracts, that provides more information, authority, and then that converts. And then we have to be available wherever our viewer is searching so that they can make a purchasing decision that includes our organization.

Number five, we need to get serious about data. The promise of AI interacting, automating, optimizing, and just overall improving the marketing function and our go-to-market strategies will be missed by those who do not build strong data foundations in the balance of 2025 and 2026. The tools are moving, AI is advancing rapidly. And while that's amazing and there's going to be so many opportunities to take advantage of AI tools, agents, and different applications that can just absolutely jettison what we're trying to do with the marketing function, if there is not strong data behind it, your organization will lose. You will be way behind.

And this is a tremendous David and Goliath opportunity for challenger brands to catch up. For those who are, who have less resources, who are not as advanced as some companies who've been out there, slugging it away in SEO for 10 years who've been building good content and inbound strategies for a long time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff. This is the opportunity for challenger brands or those to catch up to who want to catch up to really invest in data and make sure that they have the foundation with which they can use the AI tools to rapidly move their organizations forward.

And there's so many different ways we can look at data. The key in this space is to prioritize what makes sense and where you can get the most value from building foundational data that you believe you can leverage in the future. And this is somewhat of a bet because you don't know exactly, but more data will never be bad. So when we think about different data sets, we need to think about our customer lists. And, wow, that seems fundamental. You'd be shocked at how many new potential clients we’ve talked to who have very poor underdeveloped, unoptimized and with no feedback or data quality or hygiene cycles to improve their customer databases. The other thing we need to look at is, so that seems like a stark example of data because you can think of it. It sits in a Excel or a Google Sheets database and a CSV and they're, it’s commonly limited data. So that feels like data.

But other data that needs to be generated and stored for future interaction are recorded customer calls, buyer persona data, pain points, sales presentations. There are so many different things that we're going to be able to analyze and provide better feedback and optimize in the future if we have data.

If we look forward and then all of a sudden it's 2027 and we're looking back and there's some AI tool that will, for instance, analyze all of our sales conversations for the past two years and help us really extract what the customer pain points are and where we lose sales conversations because we're talking through the real customer pain point and we're really talking through their objections as opposed to really identifying those and dealing with them. That's a world I want to live in. That's, I want to live in a world where I can have that data. I can look at it. I can analyze it at scale, develop statistically significant models that will allow us to understand where the real problems are, where the roadblocks are and how we can advise additional tests in the future to improve that sales presentation, that marketing presentation, whatever it is.

So in this example, that all sounds wonderful. But if we don't start recording those conversations, we will not have anything to analyze. And we all know that AI is fast and the amount of data doesn't really matter. So we need to approach this from a more-data-is-better standpoint as we start to accumulate information. In the future, we'll be able to say things like, well, we don't really need to record or track that data set because it was not significant or there was no value to it. But no one knows what that looks like right now. So the more data we accumulate is better.

So when we think about the five strategies we talked about today, while they are not exhaustive, they will improve your outcomes in 2026 and beyond if you focus on them. And those strategies are one, have a strategy. Number two, listen to your customers. Three, harvest the base. Four, focus on content. And five, pay attention to your data. Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast today where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Like, share, subscribe. Have a great day.