The Future Marketing Mix: Beyond Clicks and Into Smarter Discovery

In todays piece, I am collaborating with Noa Eshed, and her Substack No BS B2B Tech Marketing tactics. Me and Noa exist in the same world of B2B advertising but we address it from slightly different angles. My background is programmatic advertising and the world of ‘adtech’ via my business Funnelfuel.io whereas Noa builds trust, shaping perception and AI signal engineering via her agency Bold Digital. We’re addressing the convergences between our worlds and the future marketing mix, moving beyond clicks into signals and smarter discovery

Across the board, our clients are feeling the same pressure: the old playbook isn’t working the way it used to. Top-of-funnel clicks are expensive and fleeting. Organic visibility is increasingly hard to win, especially if the strategy relies only on Google. And yet, expectations for measurable growth are sharper than ever.

In this environment, we’re noticing two parallel forces:

A trust gap: Buyers are skeptical. Authority and credibility are the deciding factors in attention.

A metrics gap: Too often, marketing teams chase “vanity metrics” that don’t translate into meaningful pipeline or revenue.

From a paid media perspective, clients are pressing harder than ever on ROI clarity. Spend efficiency is being challenged because the traditional signals no longer hold up. A high click-through rate does not mean quality engagement, and optimising to the cheapest impression often works against the goal of building pipeline.

What we are seeing instead is a move towards measuring the right signals. Attention, context, and trust are becoming more valuable than surface-level engagement. Buyers are not short of content; they are short of reasons to believe. That means marketing investment has to do more than buy reach, and it has to output more then just trivia metrics. It has to place credible narratives in front of the right accounts and then prove that those interactions are tied to business outcomes.

This shift mirrors the wider gaps we see in the market. The trust gap: buyers only act when the source is credible. The metrics gap: marketing teams can no longer afford to chase numbers that look good in a report but fail to move revenue. The answer lies in building a measurement layer that captures real signals

How the direction is changing

The big shift is philosophical. Marketing is no longer about dominating the SERP or winning the auction. It’s about creating smarter discovery paths. 71% of B2B buyers are now millennial or younger - this cohort aren’t clicking adds, they are leveraging technology and ripping up the old B2B playbook overnight

From Google-first to ecosystem-first: Buyers discover through LLMs, social proof, communities, and trusted peers before they turn to Google (or an LLM) for a deeper dive.

From impressions to intent: A single meaningful interaction can outweigh thousands of untargeted impressions.

From separate silos to convergence: Paid, organic, content, and AI tools no longer sit apart - they feed each other in loops.

From a paid media perspective, the role of ads is changing. They are no longer isolated campaigns, designed to win auctions and generate volume. Instead, ads act as accelerators inside the discovery loop.

The most effective programmes start with credible content – for example, a practitioner post or influencer creative on LinkedIn – and then use paid media to amplify that content across the full account list. This is doable now - a LinkedIn post URL can make a vast array of programmatic creatives instantly, and be ran outside of the LinkedIn walled garden to reach net-new people or the same audiences in a different context

The below image shows a repurposed LinkedIn post, being used in programmatic advertising, bringing familiarity to the user. This opens up using influencers to see trust and credibility, and then using paid advertising to pipe those impressions to the right accounts

This changes the value of paid investment. It is not about reach at any cost, it is about taking signals that buyers already trust and making sure those signals are seen consistently across channels. In practice that means repurposing influencer or authority creative through omnichannel ABM. The outcome is that paid spend reinforces credibility and drives intent, rather than chasing impressions for their own sake.

The convergence: where the flywheel spins

This is where our worlds meet.

Paid ads + LLM-powered discovery: Search isn’t going away, but it’s being reframed. LLMs are increasingly the “front door” to brand discovery. That means the content and ads buyers encounter must be credible enough to be surfaced by AI systems.

Trust as currency: If ads buy visibility, trust earns the click. Without authority-building, even the smartest targeting falls flat.

Metrics that matter: In content, the trap is reach without resonance. In paid, it’s impressions and clicks without conversion. Together, the north star must be contribution to pipeline and long-term brand equity.

From a paid media perspective, this is where the shift becomes tangible. Traditional metrics such as impressions and clicks are proving weak signals. They show activity, but not impact. What matters is whether ads influence high-value actions, contribute to pipeline, and do so with efficiency.

That means reframing measurement. Instead of chasing CTR, teams should track whether campaigns lower customer acquisition cost, improve conversion through the funnel, or increase the lifetime value of the accounts they reach. Attention metrics and HVA tracking can help bridge the gap, by showing when buyers are not only exposed to an ad but meaningfully engaged.

The result is that paid media moves from a cost centre to a growth lever. Ads are no longer about generating volume at the top of the funnel, they are about strengthening trust and nudging accounts towards commercial outcomes. This is the alignment point: marketing spend justified by pipeline influence and long-term brand equity, not vanity reporting.

Building the marketing mix of the future

The marketers who will thrive are the ones willing to ditch siloed thinking. Instead of asking, “Should we invest in content or paid?” the question becomes: “How do we create a discovery ecosystem that compounds?”

That ecosystem looks like:

• Content as the trust engine

• Paid as the amplifier

• LLMs as the curator

• Metrics as the guardrails

Closing thought

The clicks may be going, but discovery isn’t. It’s shifting into a smarter, more interconnected system - one where trust, creativity, and data alignment matter more than brute force.