Congratulations! You’re a Thought Leader!
If you’ve worked in SaaS marketing over the past few years, you know that founder brands aren’t nice-to-haves anymore.
Alice Xerri recently wrote about expert-led content becoming the backbone of B2B credibility in 2026. If you’ve worked in SaaS marketing over the past few years, you know that founder brands aren’t nice-to-haves anymore. Showcasing the expertise of your organization and founders has become extremely crucial.
I experienced this firsthand, between 2021–2024, we ran campaigns that alternated between broad topics (think “2022 landscape of AI in product innovation.”) These campaigns were great for lead volume, but terrible for lead quality. We also ran solution-focused pieces featuring actual internal expert perspectives. Although the volume play was tempting, it was the expert-led content that actually got us the leads we wanted.
Nobody Reads Your White Papers
A stat that I came across recently that shocked me was that 40% of B2B marketers cite their top challenge as ‘creating content that prompts any desired action’. Nearly half the industry is publishing content hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone might care?
AI was supposed to solve the content problem. And in a sense, it has: 87% of users report improved productivity with AI (as per CMI’s 2026 B2B Content and Marketing Trends Report) Additionally, 12% of marketers admit that content quality has actually decreased since implementing AI. Brilliant. We can now produce mediocrity at an industrial scale.
Has content evolved into an industry that exists primarily to justify its own existence?
Content is visible work. Unlike the invisible labour of strategy, anyone can see you’re “doing something” when you publish three blog posts a week. Publishing cadence becomes a convenient proxy for productivity. Traffic is a vanity metric disguised as success. And the machine keeps humming along, consuming budgets and generating… what exactly?
Content agencies are judged by volume produced.
SEO consultants by keyword rankings.
Marketing teams by publishing cadence.
The incentives are magnificently misaligned at every level. Everyone’s optimizing for metrics that have zilch to do with whether anyone bought anything. The “thought leader” title has never been easier to claim or less meaningful to hold.
Welcome to 2026, where we’ve mass-produced average content.
Buyers Are Getting Pickier
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that brands are desperately seeking storytellers. Meanwhile, CMI’s 2026 research shows that whilst AI-powered tools lead budget priorities as identified by 45% of marketers, there’s a significant return to events and experiential marketing (33%) and owned media (32%).
Regarding thought leadership, nearly every B2B marketer (96%) says their organization creates it, but only a minority of marketers report broader employee participation (beyond the marketing team.) I do believe that this is crucial to use thought-leadership as a business differentiator.
The most effective channels for B2B thought leadership, as per CMIs report are:
LinkedIn (76%)
Email newsletters (54%)
Speaking events and webinars (52%)
These are all channels that reward genuine expertise and an authentic voice. LinkedIn in particular serves as a means to compound credibility. That is, if you publish consistently and provide intelligent insights, your authority accumulates.
The irony of this situation is that despite “team skills and capabilities” being cited as a top driver of effectiveness by 53% of marketers, human resources (salaries and training) are the lowest budget priority for 2026. Only 9% of marketers cite this as a top priority (in contrast to 45% of marketers who cite AI as the top priority).
Let that sink in.
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Rethinking B2B Content Marketing
Right, enough criticism. When does content marketing deliver genuine business results? Here’s the breakdown based on my own experience:
Condition 1: You Have a Genuine Story to Tell
This entails a genuine, differentiated narrative that your audience cannot get elsewhere.
The checklist:
You’re a strong storyteller who brings novel insights, not recycled industry consensus
You have a point of view strong enough to differentiate (and possibly alienate, yes that is healthy) a section of users
You provide access to information or perspectives your audience can’t find elsewhere
You’re willing to say things that might be controversial within your industry
You possess deep domain expertise
Condition 2: Your Sales Cycle Requires Education
Some products sell themselves in a single conversation. Most B2B solutions don’t.
Content works when you have:
Complex products with long evaluation periods where buyers need to understand capabilities
Multiple stakeholders requiring different information to secure buy-in
Technical buyers who do extensive research before engaging sales
A genuine information gap that your content fills (not just generic category education)
Does your sales team regularly say “I wish I had something to send prospects about X”? That’s real content demand. That’s where your resources should go. Everything else is optional.
Condition 3: High-Intent Keyword Opportunities for High Awareness Solutions
If your solution has high awareness in the market (for example a CRM) and you are not predominantly using commercial intent keywords, you may need to reevaluate your content. This is where SEO stops being a vanity project.
What you need:
Search terms in your category that demonstrate genuine buying intent
“Best [solution] for [specific problem]” queries that exist in meaningful volume
Search intent for queries that matches your actual buyer profile
Example: “CRM for real estate teams under 50 agents” has intent. “What is a CRM” does not. Only one query among these comes from someone evaluating solutions.
Start owning buyer-intent searches.
The Evidence for AI Human-Led Content
Having experienced this firsthand since 2021, I’ve watched how founder expertise and employee thought leadership can drive pipeline and enhance brand value. Now that I’m working on my own company (Spryngbase) and operating as a freelance marketing strategist, I’m seeing it play out even more clearly on platforms like LinkedIn and Upwork.
As AI-generated misinformation proliferates, buyer scepticism intensifies. Buyers today are demanding “hard proof” and human validation before engaging with vendors. They’re not looking for more content rather for more credibility.
This creates an opportunity for B2B companies willing to invest in genuine expertise.
What can you do to enhance credibility?
Identify your genuine differentiators: What insights emerge from your actual client work? How are they different from competitors or substitutes?
Involve broader employee expertise: Your marketing team can’t manufacture thought leadership alone. Your founders, technical leads, and customer success teams hold the insights buyers crave.
Measure business impact, not engagement theatre: Track pipeline contribution, conversation starters, and qualified lead generation — not impressions.
Build compound credibility: Focus on platforms like LinkedIn where credibility compounds over time.
Create content sales actually wants: Work backwards from what closes deals and try to connect it to what grabs attention (i.e. trends etc.)
If you’re ready to build content that actually converts:
Audit your last 10 pieces: How many prompted a sales conversation?
Interview your sales team: What content do they wish existed?
Identify ONE high-intent keyword opportunity you can credibly own
Publish nothing for 2 weeks while you develop an actual POV
Feeding the Publishing Beast
Most B2B content marketing doesn’t work because it’s designed to demonstrate activity, and generate reports with impressive-looking but ultimately meaningless metrics.
The companies that win at content marketing are doing something fundamentally different: they’re treating content as a strategic asset, not a publishing quota. They’re investing in human expertise. They’re building genuine thought leadership whilst others are chasing keyword rankings.
The choice is yours. You can join the content industrial complex, publishing prolifically and achieving very little. Or you can build a strategic content engine focused on the only metric that matters: does anyone care enough to do business with you?
Because here’s what I’ve learned: buyers don’t want more content. They want better answers. They want genuine expertise. They want someone who understands their specific problem and can articulate a credible solution.
Give them that, and content marketing works brilliantly. Give them anything less, and you’re just adding to the noise.
A bit about me: I am Shreya and I help B2B SaaS companies build content engines that drive pipeline. The data in this article is drawn from CMI’s B2B Content Marketing and Trends report for 2026.