The Best B2B Marketing Resources of 2026: Our Year in Review

Every year we write this list, and every year it gets harder to keep short.

2026 was the year AI stopped being an experiment in most marketing teams and became part of the daily work. It was also the year a lot of teams discovered that producing more did not mean getting further. The resources that earned a place on this list are the ones that helped us think more clearly.

Below is what we actually read, listened to and used this year, plus the handful of lessons from our own marketing that we are carrying into next year.

What changed in B2B marketing this year

Before the list, a short honest look at the year.

AI moved from the side of the desk to the center of it. Drafting, research, reporting and list building now take minutes. As a result, the bottleneck moved. It is no longer production. It is judgment: deciding what to say, to whom, and what to stop doing.

Buyers also changed how they research. More of them now ask AI tools for recommendations before they ever visit a website. Meanwhile, much of the real persuasion still happens in private, in team chats and forwarded emails that no analytics tool can see. We wrote about that in our guide to dark social.

Finally, cold outreach got harder. Inboxes filled with AI-written sequences that all sound alike. So the teams that did well were the ones buyers already recognized before the first message arrived.

What we learned running our own marketing

We use our own methods on ourselves first. Here is what this year taught us.

Write the thinking down before you automate anything

We rebuilt our website in four days with AI. The speed was not the interesting part. The interesting part was that it only worked because our positioning, audience and voice were already written down in detail. We wrote up the whole process in how we built our website in 4 days with AI.

The pages Google already shows are the fastest win

This year we looked at which of our pages appear in Google’s results but rarely get clicked. Rewriting how those pages read in search results, the title and the short description underneath, is some of the fastest work available to any B2B site. It needs no new content, just a clearer promise.

Old content is an asset, not a liability

We refreshed about twenty older blog posts this year. Several had solid rankings but outdated advice. As a result, updating them was faster than writing new ones, and it protected traffic we had already earned.

Every AI tool needs a human owner

We run much of our marketing on Claude. The lesson that stuck: when an output is wrong, fix the written rule that produced it, not just the output. We explain how in Claude for marketing.

The best B2B marketing books we read

Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford

The clearest practical book on positioning we know. It walks through how to decide what market you compete in and why a buyer should care. If your sales team and your website describe the company differently, start here.

Measure What Matters, by John Doerr

The book that made OKRs mainstream. We plan all of our marketing, and our clients’ marketing, in quarterly objectives and measurable key results. This book explains why that structure works and where teams usually misuse it.

Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick

A grounded, readable take on working alongside AI. In particular, Mollick avoids both hype and panic. For marketing leaders trying to decide what AI should and should not do in their team, it is a sensible place to begin.

Play Bigger, by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney

The case for category design: defining the problem you solve so clearly that the market starts to use your language. Useful for any company that feels it is being compared on the wrong terms.

The best marketing newsletters in our inbox

These are the ones we still open, week after week.

• Why We Buy by Katelyn Bourgoin. A free weekly newsletter on buyer psychology. Each issue takes one quirk of how people decide and shows what it means for your marketing. Because it is short, you can read it before your first meeting, and it is often funny.
• Lenny’s Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky. Product and growth, but much of it applies directly to B2B marketing. The pieces on how AI-native companies work were among the most useful we read all year.
• Marketing Dive. A fast daily summary of what is happening across the industry. Good for context, even when the examples are consumer brands.

The best marketing podcasts we listened to

• Women in B2B Marketing, hosted by Jane Serra. Conversations with women who lead B2B marketing, from their first manager job to the CMO seat. It is honest about the career and also specific about the work: account-based marketing, data and building a team.
• Marketing Trends, hosted by Stephanie Postles. Interviews with CMOs and founders. This year many episodes dealt with AI directly, for example planning cycles that shrank from years to weeks, and what changes when software does part of the buying.
• On with Kara Swisher. Not a marketing podcast. Still, it earned its place: Kara Swisher interviews the people running tech, media and business, and she asks the questions their PR teams hoped she would skip. It is good context on the companies behind the AI tools marketers now use every day.
• Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan. Two marketing leaders testing new ideas, with a lot of attention on AI in practice.
• Lenny’s Podcast. Long-form interviews with operators. In particular, the episodes on growth and positioning are worth a marketer’s time.

The marketing tools we actually used

We keep our stack small. These are the tools that did real work this year.

• Claude. Our main AI tool for research, drafting, auditing and building. Projects hold our brand files, and Claude Code runs our website and publishing work.
• HubSpot. CRM, email and the connection between marketing activity and sales conversations.
• Google Search Console. Free, and still the most honest view of how Google sees your site.
• SEMrush. Keyword research and competitor visibility.
• Canva. Fast, on-brand visuals for social and the blog.

For a wider comparison of AI tools specifically, see our guide to the best AI marketing tools for B2B.

Our most useful guides from this year

If you only read a few of our pieces from 2026, make it these.

• The One-Page Marketing Plan. The simplest structure we know for a plan people actually use.
• How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile. The foundation everything else depends on.
• AI Marketing Strategy. Why most B2B teams get AI backwards, and how to write the strategy on one page.
• Will Marketing Be Replaced by AI? What the marketing team looks like now.
• B2B Marketing Budget. A step-by-step way to plan next year’s spend.

What we are taking into next year

1. Narrative first. Every tool works better when the message is written down and agreed.
2. Plans measured by execution, not activity. Three to five quarterly goals, each with a number.
3. Fix what already exists. Refresh strong old pages before writing new ones.
4. Write for the forward. Content good enough that someone shares it privately with their boss.
5. An owner for every AI agent. Someone who reads the output and updates the rules.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best B2B marketing resources?

The most useful mix is a small set of books for lasting thinking, a few newsletters for current practice, a podcast or two for perspective, and tools you actually use every week. Our 2026 picks include Obviously Awesome, Measure What Matters, Why We Buy, Lenny’s Newsletter, Women in B2B Marketing and Google Search Console.

What are the best marketing podcasts for B2B?

For B2B marketers specifically, Women in B2B Marketing and Marketing Against the Grain are both strong. Marketing Trends is good for hearing how CMOs plan around AI. Lenny’s Podcast is broader, focused on product and growth, but many episodes apply directly to B2B marketing.

What are the best marketing books to read this year?

For positioning, start with Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. Measure What Matters by John Doerr is the one for planning and measurement. On working with AI, read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. And for category thinking, Play Bigger.

Which marketing newsletters are worth subscribing to?

We open Why We Buy, Lenny’s Newsletter and Marketing Dive. Pick two or three that match your role and read them properly, rather than subscribing to twenty and skimming them all.

What free marketing tools should every B2B company use?

Google Search Console is the most valuable free tool for most B2B websites. It shows which searches bring people to your site, which pages Google shows, and where people see you but do not click.

We promised ourselves a shorter list this year.

We will promise it again next year.