Demand Decoded: Marketing, Demand Generation & Business Growth

Traffic is collapsing across B2B. Some brands are down 50 to 60% year on year, yet pipeline and revenue keep climbing regardless. If your dashboard still treats traffic as the leading indicator of success, you're tracking the wrong thing, and you're far from the only one getting this wrong.

In part one of this mini-series, Dan and Josh tear through the chaos list: why answer engine optimisation has gone from nice-to-have to non-negotiable, why the old lead waterfall no longer holds up, and why long-form video and podcasts are now doing the discovery work blogs used to. They also tackle the conversation most CMOs are avoiding: disconnected systems between marketing, sales and customer success that leave leadership flying blind on revenue, and why net new logos can't be the only number that matters anymore.

Essential listening for anyone in B2B marketing leadership trying to work out what's actually broken in their go-to-market, and what to fix first.

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Every B2B marketer is being told ChatGPT ads are the next big channel, but almost nobody's actually run them. There are no keywords, no search volume data, and no way to see what buyers are typing into the chat that triggers your ad. So how do you target, and how do you know it's working?

In this solo episode, Dan shares Blend's real testing data from months of running ChatGPT ads, covering the campaign structure, the shift from keywords to context hints, and why the simplest, most literal ad copy is consistently outperforming anything clever. He breaks down real cost-per-click figures against Google Ads, the platform's biggest current weakness, and why conversions are still lagging behind other channels despite promising click-through rates.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer with test budget to spend and a reason to get ahead of a channel that's about to become unavoidable.

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Your sales team could be pitching your competitor's narrative right now, and they wouldn't even know it. That's the risk hiding inside AI adoption. As more of your business relies on ChatGPT and Claude to write proposals, RFPs and content, without any shared context or governance, the gap between what's true about your brand and what's actually being published grows wider every day.

In this episode, recorded live on LinkedIn, Dan and Josh break down exactly how to fix this. They unpack the data behind the problem (63% of B2B marketers say AI is increasing noise, not differentiation) and explain why cloud projects and custom GPTs only patch the issue rather than solve it. Then they demo Blend Core, a governed knowledge base that plugs your ICPs, tone of voice, case studies and convictions straight into any AI tool, so every output stays consistent, on-brand and actually sounds like you.

Essential listening for any marketing or sales leader scaling AI usage without a governance plan in place.

Want to see how BlendCore keeps your brand's voice consistent everywhere your team uses AI? Find out more: blendb2b.com/blendcore

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Most B2B marketers think persuasion is instinct. It isn't. It's psychology, and most brands are getting it wrong without realising why their messaging falls flat while competitors' sticks.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Phill Agnew, host of Nudge, to unpack the behavioural science principles hiding behind some of the biggest marketing wins in history. They cover why Zoom beat GoToMeeting by saying less, not more (the goal dilution effect), why Apple never mentioned megabytes and instead sold "1,000 songs in your pocket" (concrete phrases), and why anchoring a scary price before the real one makes buyers say yes. They also dig into the human-to-human connection principle: why Banksy hides behind anonymity, why Lush sticks employee names on products, and what that means for faceless B2B brands trying to build trust.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer who wants their messaging to actually stick, not just sound clever.

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Most B2B businesses are unknowingly marketing for their competitors. They invest in content that educates the market, builds awareness of a problem, and creates real demand, then watch the majority of that demand flow straight to the category leaders already occupying the most mindshare. This is the duplication of purchase law in action, and it's costing businesses far more budget than they realise. 

In this episode, Dan and Amanda break down why this happens and what to do about it. They explore the trap of leading with the problem rather than your answer to it, how to define a value proposition that is genuinely yours rather than the sum of your parts, and why partner marketing amplifies this risk more than almost any other channel. They also dig into category-aware versus category-unaware audiences, the role of authentic personal brand in cutting through, and why clarity of positioning is the single biggest unlock for most B2B teams. 

Essential listening for any marketer or business leader who suspects their campaigns are doing more for the competition than for their own pipeline. 

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Click here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.

Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

Most B2B teams buying intent data are either over-trusting it or barely using it at all. They're treating weak signals as buying intent, spamming entire lists off the back of a topic search, and wondering why response rates look like cold outbound. The tool isn't the problem, the way it's being operationalised is. 

In this episode, Dan and Phil cut through the vendor hype and get into what intent data can and can't actually tell you. They cover first party versus third party intent, the right way to build LinkedIn audiences from intent signals, using company news triggers that map to real buying moments, intent-triggered account reactivation, and how AI prospecting agents are changing the outbound motion, without removing the need for a decent offer. 

Essential listening for any B2B marketer or revenue team trying to get real return from their intent data investment, not just a more expensive cold list. 

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Most B2B businesses are still hiring and structuring their teams the way they did a decade ago, more headcount to hit more targets, more layers between marketing, sales, and customer success. That model is already breaking. 

In this episode, Dan and Josh map out what the GTM organisation actually looks like in the AI era: fewer people, more senior, with entirely new roles emerging, the Growth Architect, the Brand Knowledge Steward, the Agentic Operations Lead. They get into how every function changes, from content and demand gen through to BDRs, AEs, and customer success, why human-to-AI ratios are shifting fast, and what governance has to do with whether any of it works. 

Essential listening for revenue leaders, heads of marketing, and anyone trying to figure out whether their current team structure will still make sense in two years' time. 

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Most B2B content operations don't fail because of a lack of effort, they fail because they were never built on the right foundations. Jumping straight to "let's start a podcast" or "we should post more on LinkedIn" before answering the harder questions about point of view, ICP, and channel strategy is where most teams go wrong. 

In this episode, Dan and Phil break down what it actually takes to build a content engine that scales. They cover how to extract genuine insight from subject matter experts (without asking them to write newsletters), why video has become the non-negotiable starting point for a modern content strategy, how to repurpose long-form content into a connected multi-channel system, and why consistency at scale now depends on having a single source of truth for your AI outputs. 

Essential listening for B2B marketers who know content should be driving pipeline, but are stuck figuring out how to make the engine run. 

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Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

89% of B2B buyers are using generative AI to research vendors. 60% of searches now end without a click. And most shortlists are formed before anyone picks up the phone. If your marketing still treats every buyer the same way, you're not just losing deals. You're being cut from the list before the race has even started. 

In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh Bouk to break down why procurement-led and economic buyer-led journeys demand completely different playbooks. They cover how to engineer your presence into the day-one shortlist, why marketing and sales teams need to stop lobbing leads over the wall and start building a genuinely connected buyer experience, and the specific tactics that make you easier to buy from at every stage. 

Essential listening for B2B marketing and sales leaders who want to build a revenue process that maps to how buyers actually buy today. 

89% of B2B buyers now use generative AI in research: https://www.forrester.com/report/b2b-buyer-adoption-of-generative-ai/RES181769  

60% of searches end without a click: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2026/03/02/the-zero-click-economy-why-60-of-searches-end-without-a-click-and-what-ceos-should-do-about-it/ 

Click here to get your free AEO visibility audit

Click here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.

Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

Website traffic is down, traditional SEO metrics are losing their meaning, and most teams are either not measuring their AEO performance at all or drowning in data they don't know what to do with.

In this solo episode, Dan breaks down how to build an AEO measurement framework that goes beyond vanity metrics. From choosing the right prompts to track, to analysing your citation data for strategic insight, to tying AI visibility to pipeline and revenue, this episode gives you a practical system you can actually use.

Essential listening for B2B marketers trying to make sense of AI search and prove its impact on the business.

HubSpot State of AEO report: https://hubspot-state-of-aeo-report-web-view.lovable.app/ 

How to build an AEO strategy: https://youtu.be/kSM8TvmFAwo

Click here to get your free AEO visibility audit

Click here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.

Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.