Girl You Know It's True

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

This week on the podcast, in an episode we are recording tomorrow that will drop on Wednesday, Jeff and I are planning to chat about some research that MomentumABM has published, suggesting a B2B marketing reset for 2026 and the 5 forces that will influence this.

They shared the research in a report and a webinar, and rather than give spoilers on what Jeff and I will be picking out, I want to dive into something I enjoyed about the webinar with you - they shared a bit of focus on thought leadership, as a strategy to reach into what everyone is recognizing in their research right now as a disrupted buyer’s journey.

“Disrupted” seems to mean that these pesky buyers aren’t following our sales process and refuse to neatly line up in our funnel.

The webinar host defined thought leadership as something like an “original, evidence-based, point of view that helps clients address challenges and opportunities” - which is, or some derivative of it, seems to be (from my brief research) the party line for MomentumABM on this.

What a great test for what we produce in B2B marketing - separating the dull sales crap from genuinely leading thought, especially when we twist the key on our clockwork content robot and let it type away.

Is this:

Of course, the blame for dull B2B content can be laid at our new AI assistants; it‘s the one thing we were already very good at.

But you’d struggle to pass all three of these tests with a simple prompt and then publish, you will need to inject a lot of human into the process, especially to tick box #1 - An original POV.

I’m also a big fan of evidence-based - I had a great writing mentor during my brief tour as an analyst who would redline every opinion I expressed, unless I could back it up, a laborious process that today, if you check its sources, gen AI is splendid at.

And number 3, help clients, hell yeah, that’s what content marketing is for - if it’s about you, it’s not thought leadership, it’s a sales pitch.

That’s what I wanted to share here - hopefully, you’ll listen to the podcast and hear what Jeff and I make of the rest of the research.

Which leads me to the inevitable tune for an email newsletter that has a song title for a subject line and mentions artificially created content - Milli Vanilli, a manufactured band, and “their” hit “Girl You Know It’s True”.

It wasn’t, but your content should be.

Have a great week,

Cheers!

Ian

Giirrrrrl…. you know, it’s not true…