What does marketing look like when your customers take months or even years to make a buying decision? And what happens when Google is no longer the only place where people discover your brand?
In this episode, Austin Willman is joined by Louise Boyd, Head of Marketing, and Jenny Adams, Marketing Director at Aspect, a UK-based marketing and communications consultancy working across the energy sector. Together, they explore what it takes to market complex B2B businesses in a world where AI is changing how brands get discovered, evaluated, and trusted.
They dig into the challenges of proving marketing’s impact when the path from first touch to closed deal can be incredibly long. They also discuss why marketers need to be involved in growth decisions earlier, how account-based marketing can work when your total addressable market is relatively small, and what in-person events and brand activations can actually contribute to the bigger picture.
The conversation then shifts to AI search and LLM visibility. Louise shares how her SEO experience translates to platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, from getting the technical foundations right to using proprietary data and building a consistent presence across trusted third-party sources.
Jenny also makes the case for putting brand back at the center of the conversation. When you’re working with multi-year sales cycles, short-term campaigns alone aren’t enough. Building recognition and trust over time can be just as important as generating immediate leads.
They finish with a practical discussion around budgets, measurement, experimentation, and the importance of having enough internal trust to try new things.
If you’re working in B2B, energy, or any industry where deals don’t happen overnight, this episode offers plenty of practical ideas for navigating longer sales cycles and a search landscape that’s rapidly being reshaped by AI.
Takeaways:
- Marketing should join growth planning early, not just execute finished decisions
- Long sales cycles make attribution harder to trace across years, not months
- Account-based marketing fits industries with a small pool of possible buyers
- In-person brand activations need a clear digital next step to measure impact
- Sharing sales insights with marketing closes the loop, not just monthly updates
- AI search rewards proprietary data and consistent brand messaging across the web
- Press releases are widely cited by LLMs, even without traditional pickup
- Set aside roughly 20% of budget for testing new channels and approaches