The AEO Playbook Rebuilt: What's ACTUALLY Getting Results

Dan's back from HubSpot's Unbound with a recap full of energy, insight and practical takeaways, starting with Demand Decoded's first ever live show recording on the main stage.He breaks down the panel he ran with HubSpot's Kyle Denhoff and Asja Frost on The Loop, HubSpot's framework for modern B2B marketing, built around expressing, tailoring, amplifying and evolving your message. Dan shares why dropping gated forms from LinkedIn content can multiply your reach, and a sharper way to judge whether your strategy is really paying off.He also unpacks the biggest opportunity that came up in conversation after conversation on the show floor: bringing marketing, sales and finance data together into one source of truth, and what that unlocks for teams who take it on. He wraps up with the standout ideas from the event itself, including the activation that had queues forming at the booth all week.Great listening for any marketer after fresh inspiration and practical ideas for their next event or marketing strategy. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

When private equity buys your business, everything about your go-to-market has to change, and most marketing and sales leaders aren't ready for it. In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh, who brings hands-on experience from both sides of PE deals, to break down what a private equity-backed GTM transformation actually looks like once the deal closes.They explain why recurring revenue suddenly becomes the only metric that matters, how CAC payback period reveals whether your go-to-market model is capital efficient, and why marketing needs to hold the line when finance tries to force attribution into a simple formula. They also cover why disconnected marketing and sales systems put your job at risk during due diligence, and why over-investing in Google Ads because it's "measurable" often leads to bad decisions.If you work in marketing or sales at a PE-backed B2B company, or think you might be acquired soon, this is a practical look at the mandate you'll be operating under, the metrics your board will actually care about, and how to prepare before the pressure hits. Essential listening for anyone navigating go-to-market under private equity ownership. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick 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 marketers are still guessing when it comes to AI search. Some are pouring effort into listicles that never get cited. Others don't realise that promoting bigger competitors in "best of" lists can push their own brand out of the answer entirely.In this episode, Dan and Phil unpack how large language models actually retrieve information, including the "fan out" process that determines what gets cited and what gets ignored. They break down real examples from Blend and its clients, covering listicles, pillar pages, PPC landing pages, and product-led blog content, showing exactly which structures are earning citations right now and why saturation levels change the right approach for different markets. They also cover how to measure AEO properly, and why YouTube is fast becoming a critical citation source.Essential listening for any B2B marketer trying to move beyond guesswork and build an AEO strategy backed by evidence, not assumption. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

Pipeline not moving? Most marketers reach straight for the campaign, blaming channels, budgets, or creative. Dan argues that's almost never where the real problem sits.In this solo episode, Dan runs through a five point diagnostic for working out why demand generation isn't converting into pipeline, checking each stage in the order a buyer actually experiences it rather than jumping to tactics. The five checks cover product market fit, the inseparable trio of positioning, messaging and audience, mental availability and multi channel distribution, website conversion, and the handoff from marketing to sales. Along the way, he shares a real example from Blend's own LinkedIn ads strategy and a case study showing how fixing the sales handoff lifted lead to conversation rates by 50%.Essential listening for any B2B marketer staring at underwhelming pipeline numbers and instinctively blaming the wrong thing. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

We're resharing this episode of Demand Decoded because we think it's worth watching again.Looking to improve demand generation in your business, but not sure where to start? In this episode of Demand Decoded, we strip things back to basics and explore a comprehensive approach to enhancing demand generation across all stages of the buyer journey.From initial demand creation to final conversion, tune in for practical, actionable advice on improving demand gen.   Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

Positioning is the most overlooked fundamental in B2B marketing, and it's the one thing everything else depends on. Get it wrong and no channel, campaign or piece of content can compensate. Get it right and the rest of your marketing engine runs far more efficiently.Dan and Phil sit down with Anthony Pierri, co-founder of Fletch, the positioning and messaging consultancy that's worked with close to 600 B2B companies, to unpack why positioning is so hard to get right and so easy to overlook. Anthony shares the simple test he uses to spot weak messaging (would a competitor claim the same thing?), the three legitimate strategies for category positioning, and why having six "ideal" customer profiles defeats the point of the word ideal. He also explains how large language models now read and rank your messaging, and why clarity matters more than ever in an AI-first search world.Essential listening for any marketing leader who suspects positioning is the thing holding everything else back. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick 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 marketing teams pour their budget into new logo acquisition while ignoring the growth channel already sitting inside their business: their existing customers. Sentiment gets reduced to a single NPS score sent to the wrong person, and by the time an account looks at risk, it's often too late.In this episode, Dan and Josh unpack why customer sentiment needs to be measured continuously, across every stakeholder, not just the day to day contact. They explore how first party signals (usage, tickets, engagement) and third party intent data (hierarchy changes, layoffs, competitor research) combine to reveal churn risk and expansion opportunities long before they surface in a renewal call. They also get into why unnamed case studies do nothing for credibility, and how building authentic, mutually valuable advocacy programmes turns happy customers into your most powerful marketing asset.Essential listening for anyone building a customer marketing or customer success strategy that's about more than ticking a box. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

At the start of the year we made three bold predictions about the channels that would define B2B marketing in 2026. Now it's time to mark our own homework.Dan and Phil react to their 2026 predictions on events, YouTube and AI search, checking what actually played out against what they called back then. They discuss why small, curated dinners are outperforming big exhibitions, why YouTube is driving volume but not always the right buyers, and why AI search looks set to overtake Google for high intent leads within the month. They also share the tactical shift needed as listicle content becomes saturated, plus how they're using HubSpot and Claude together to prove which content is genuinely influencing buyers.Essential listening for any B2B marketer who wants an honest gut check on which predictions are holding up, and which need rethinking. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

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. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.

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. Click here to get your free AEO visibility auditClick here to subscribe to the new Demand Decoded YouTube channel.Click here to see how we can help you drive demand for your business.