Go-to-market articles and insights

Every B2B marketing leader has heard the warnings by now. Google traffic is declining. ChatGPT is replacing search for research. Your buyers are asking LLMs for vendor recommendations, and you have no idea if your brand even shows up.

The SEO tool vendors see this shift too. SEMrush, Ahrefs, and newcomers like Mentions are rolling out "AI visibility" features that promise to track how often your brand appears in LLM responses. The pitch is compelling: if your buyers are using AI to research solutions, shouldn't you know whether ChatGPT recommends your competitors instead of you?

We decided to test these tools across our own properties and several client sites. Not to write an official vendor comparison (yet), but to answer a practical question: is there any real benefit to investing in AI visibility tracking today?

The short answer: not yet.

The tools show promise, but the data infrastructure isn't there. More importantly, anyone claiming they've cracked the code on how to manipulate LLM visibility is lying. These systems are still largely a black box, and the theories about how to game them are just that: theories.

What we found, and what you should focus on instead.

The Current State of AI Visibility Tools

The concept makes sense in theory. Just like you track keyword rankings in Google, you should track "prompt rankings" in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. You want to know how often your brand appears, what prompts trigger mentions, and how you stack up against competitors.

The tools we tested claim to deliver these insights. In practice, they provide dashboard scores without the substance you need to act on them.

Zero Visibility Doesn't Mean Zero Impact

If you're not a household brand with massive search volume, expect to see mostly zeros in your dashboard. The tools assign you an "AI visibility score," but provide almost no context for what drives that number.

One client site we tested scored a 0. Their direct competitor scored a 35/100. Sounds concerning, right? Except there's no breakdown of which prompts drove that 35, how many actual appearances that represents, or what content made them visible. You can't reverse engineer success when the underlying data isn't exposed.

This isn't like traditional SEO, where you can identify long-tail keywords, see monthly search volume, and build an optimization plan. The LLM vendors aren't sharing prompt data at scale. OpenAI doesn't provide a "Search Console for ChatGPT." Neither does Anthropic for Claude, or Google for Gemini.

The AI visibility tools are trying to fill a gap that's mostly still empty.

The Data Problem Is Foundational

These tools are building on quicksand.

Google Search Console exists because Google wants site owners to improve their content. Better content creates better search results. The incentive structure works for everyone.

LLM providers haven't opened up that same transparency yet. You can't see which prompts mentioned your brand, how often you appeared in responses, what context surrounded those mentions, or whether users took action afterward.

Some tools are scraping what they can or running test prompts at scale to simulate visibility. But it's a thin dataset compared to the depth available for traditional search. Until the LLM vendors provide real transparency, these tracking dashboards are measuring shadows.

One Thing Works: The ICP Exercise

Mentions does something valuable that has nothing to do with tracking. Their onboarding takes a crack at creating your ideal customer profile after some general questions. It identifies competitors, articulates differentiators, and maps the questions buyers naturally ask based on services and does a decent job of it so you can quickly edit or replace what it creates. 

This exercise matters. It pushes you to think about brand positioning in the context of conversational queries, not just keyword strings. If someone asks an LLM, "What tools help B2B companies improve pipeline visibility without adding headcount?" how should your brand be described in that response?

That's a strategic question worth answering, regardless of whether you can track the results.

But after building that foundation, the tool primarily tracks prompts that explicitly mention your company name. Of course you appear in those results. The more valuable question is whether you surface in category-level or problem-level queries where your name isn't mentioned at all.

Those are the prompts that drive net-new awareness. And the tools can't reliably track them yet.

Traditional SEO Vendors Are Adding Bolt-On Features

SEMrush and Ahrefs are layering AI visibility modules into their existing platforms. On the surface, this seems efficient. You already pay for these tools, so why not get AI metrics in the same dashboard?

The risk is they're applying an SEO framework to a fundamentally different problem. AI visibility isn't just about keywords and backlinks. It's about how your brand narrative gets synthesized into conversational responses. It's about authenticity, context, and the authority signals that LLMs use to decide what's worth citing.

If you optimize for trigger words without understanding how LLMs construct answers, you might improve a score that doesn't correlate with actual buyer influence.

What You Should Do Instead

If the tracking tools aren't ready, what's the alternative? Focus on the fundamentals that drive AI visibility, whether you can measure it precisely or not.

Build Content That LLMs Want to Reference

LLMs are trained on public content and retrieve from indexed sources during inference. If your content is thin, generic, or keyword-stuffed, it won't surface in AI responses no matter what your dashboard says.

Write content that demonstrates real expertise. Address specific buyer problems with depth. Provide clear points of view backed by experience. This is what gets cited when an LLM synthesizes an answer.

Forget the tricks. There are no tricks yet. Anyone who tells you they've reverse-engineered the ranking algorithm for ChatGPT is selling you something they don't have. These systems are black boxes, and the theories floating around are mostly speculation dressed up as strategy.

What works is the same thing that's always worked: create content valuable enough that it becomes a source of truth in your space.

Make Your Content Crawlable and Structured

LLMs need to access your content to reference it. That means basic technical hygiene matters more than ever.

Ensure your site is crawlable. Use clear URL structures. Format your pages with proper headings, lists, and semantic HTML. Make it easy for both traditional search engines and AI systems to parse what you're saying.

If you have key service pages, product explainers, or methodology documentation, structure them clearly. Use headings to break up sections. Include definitions for important terms. Link to authoritative sources that support your claims.

This isn't new advice. It's just more important now.

More kudos to Mentions in this feature area, they provided the most depth on suggestions of structured content that might improve your “score.” Most were obvious: write about the topics that involve your services or customer problems identified in their ICP analysis.  However, Mentions also attempted to diagnose general some visibility problems with your brand and suggested content pieces unrelated to services (e.g. write a blog post specifically focused on who is Trelliswork so that the LLMs can fill in the gaps on what they glean from pages, FAQs, and services pages).

Link to Authoritative Sources (And Earn Backlinks)

LLMs weight authority when deciding what to include in responses. That authority comes partly from who links to you and who you link to.

Build relationships with credible sources in your industry. Contribute to publications that matter. Get cited in research reports, analyst briefs, and case studies from recognized firms.

When you publish your own content, link out to authoritative sources that support your points. This isn't just good practice for readers. It signals to AI systems that your content exists in a network of credible information.

Define How You Want to Be Described

Think about how you want an LLM to describe your company when someone asks about your category. What's your core differentiation? What problems do you solve that competitors don't? How would you explain your value in two clear sentences?

Document this. Make it public. Repeat it consistently across your site, case studies, thought leadership, and any content you control.

LLMs synthesize from available sources. If your positioning is clear and consistent everywhere, that's what gets reflected in AI responses. If it's muddled or contradictory, the LLM will struggle to represent you accurately.

Test Your Own Visibility Manually

You don't need a paid tool to understand your AI presence. Open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini. Ask the questions your buyers would ask. See what shows up.

Try variations:

• "What are the best tools for [your category]?"
• "How do B2B companies solve [problem you address]?"
• "What should I look for when evaluating [your solution type]?"

Does your brand appear? If yes, how is it described? If no, look at what does appear. What made that content authoritative enough to reference? What sources get cited?

Reverse engineer those patterns. Look at the structure, depth, linking behavior, and positioning of the content that wins. Then build your own content strategy around those observations.

This is manual and time-consuming. But it's more actionable than a dashboard score you can't interpret.

Promote Your Content in Traditional Ways

AI visibility doesn't replace traditional distribution. It complements it.

Keep promoting your content through email, social, partner channels, and any other distribution you've built. The more your content gets read, shared, and linked to, the stronger the authority signals become. Those signals matter for both traditional search and AI discoverability.

Don't abandon what works in pursuit of a new metric you can't control yet.

The Vanity Metrics Problem

You could add these AI visibility tools to your stack today, get a score, and have no idea what it means or what to do about it.

If your score is high, great. But why? If it's low, what's the actual fix? The tools don't provide enough depth to connect visibility to action.

This is dangerous for marketing leaders who need to justify spend and show progress. A static or declining AI visibility score without context creates pressure to "do something" without clarity on what that something should be.

You risk adding another dashboard that looks important but doesn't drive real decisions. That's the definition of a vanity metric.

Our score has ranged from 30-80%, but when you dig deeper – you start to see why. It is giving us credit for questions and response that really aren’t real. No one would ask these questions about Trelliswork:

What to Watch For as These Tools Mature

These tools will  no doubt get a lot better as LLM providers open up more transparency. When that happens, AI visibility tracking will become essential infrastructure, just like SEO tools are today.

What needs to happen for these tools to cross the threshold from "interesting" to "must-have":

Real prompt-level data. You need to see which specific prompts triggered your brand, how often, and in what context. Not aggregated scores, not when your brand was in the question from the start, but granular visibility into what's working to find you in the haystack.

Actionable recommendations. The tools need to analyze why certain content surfaces and provide specific guidance on what to change. "Improve your AI visibility score" isn't helpful. "Add more structured data to your service pages and link to these three authority sources" is.

Competitive context that matters. Knowing your competitor scored higher is useless without understanding what they did to earn that score. The tools need to surface the content, structure, and positioning differences that drive visibility gaps.

Validation that scores correlate with outcomes. Until there's proof that a higher AI visibility score leads to more inbound interest, pipeline, or revenue, these metrics remain theoretical. The tools need to connect their scores to business impact. We all expect this to change quickly so that the LLM providers can monetize beyond a paid chat interface.

Set a calendar reminder to revisit this space in 3-6 months. 

Where We Land

AI visibility tools are trying to solve a real problem. Buyer behavior is shifting toward AI-supported research, and you need to understand your presence in that environment.

But the infrastructure to track and optimize that presence is still too early. The tools from Mentions, SEMrush, and Ahrefs show the right strategic thinking. They understand what needs to be measured. They're building the frameworks and interfaces. The underlying data layer just isn't robust enough yet to deliver actionable value for most B2B brands. Although, as noted above we think Mentions.so is leaping ahead because it appears to have been designed from the start for this task. We are excited to watch this platform continue expanding.

If you're a high-volume, high-recognition brand, you might extract some directional insights. For everyone else, you're better off investing in the fundamentals : deep content, clear positioning, strong technical structure, and authentic authority building.

We'll keep testing these tools as they evolve. When the data catches up to the dashboards, we'll be the first to tell you. Just not today.

While everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs, there's a bigger shift happening that nobody's discussing openly: companies are quietly abandoning expensive agency relationships and in-house marketing teams for outsourced GTM partners.

And the numbers tell you why.

The Math Driving This Shift

A typical marketing leader costs your company between $162,000 and $298,000 annually when you factor in salary, benefits, and overhead. That's for one person. Build out a full marketing team and you're looking at $500,000 to $1 million before you've run a single campaign.

Now compare that to what's happening in professional services. Accenture just cut 11,000 people who couldn't be reskilled on AI fast enough. The firm's workforce dropped from 791,000 to 779,000 in three months while saving over $1 billion. If consulting giants are struggling to justify their traditional staffing and operational models, what chance do mid-market companies have with their bloated marketing departments?

The writing's on the wall. Traditional work models are changing quickly. Work that took 100 hours now takes 10 with AI. Most firms are choosing to partner.

Marketing is hitting the same inflection point with specialized GTM firms offering AI-enhanced services at a fraction of traditional costs. These aren't your grandfather's outsourcing shops. They're AI-first operations that can deliver what used to require a large team with a single specialist and smart automation.

Sam Altman said AI will handle "95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today" — and it'll be "nearly instant and at almost no cost." While that timeline might be aggressive, the direction is clear. Companies are already acting on it.

Why Outsourced GTM Firms Are Winning

Companies are discovering three uncomfortable truths:

Building in-house is expensive and slow. You need AI talent at premium rates, infrastructure from scratch, and 6-12 months before you see results. Most companies get it wrong the first time and have to start over.

Traditional agencies are trapped in the old model. They're built for billable hours, not outcome-based pricing. Their economics don't work when AI collapses delivery time by 50-80%. The Big 4 collectively invested over $4 billion in AI initiatives, but they're struggling to transform without cannibalizing their core business.

Specialized GTM firms have already made the transition. They've spent the last two years figuring out AI-powered workflows. They know which tools work, how to structure teams, and how to deliver outcomes at scale. When you partner with them, you skip the trial-and-error phase entirely.

The best part? You get specialized expertise without the overhead. Need SEO? PPC? Content? Demand gen? Outsourced GTM providers can start next week, no long-term contracts, no benefits packages, no onboarding nightmares. 

There is of course a difference in quality of which firms dig in to understand your business and those who do high quality work. In other words, doing proper buyer diligence isn’t going away. 

The Full-Stack Advantage

Instead of juggling 4-5 partners for different marketing functions, companies in 2025 are opting for full-stack GTM solutions that handle everything under one roof: Website, branding, campaign management, SEO, Google Ads, landing pages, social media management, and more. The reality of today’s marketing world is that connecting the dots between all of these pieces is the hard part, and is necessary if you want to drive higher quality outputs and outcomes. 

This isn't generic outsourcing. The age of "send it to the cheapest vendor" is over. Success belongs to companies that treat outsourced GTM vendors as strategic growth partners. The good ones bring proven frameworks so you don't waste months testing bad messaging and wrong channels.

GTM strategy requires rigorous work. It's time-consuming. Outsourcing it helps you beat competitors while saving costs. With the right partner, you get top-notch results without building the entire capability in-house.

What About Quality?

This is where most objections surface. "Can an outsourced team really understand our business like an in-house team would?"

Agencies are already proficient in the strategies and tools needed to run campaigns. This enables them to find the most cost-effective solution that delivers the highest revenue regardless of industry. An in-house team needs months learning the ropes. Marketing outsourcing companies pinpoint problems and provide solutions immediately.

GTM providers working with multiple clients develop pattern recognition that single companies never achieve. They've seen what works across industries, verticals, and customer segments. That institutional knowledge is worth more than having someone sit in your office.

The Three Options in Front of You

You can build in-house, hire a traditional agency, or partner with a specialized GTM firm.

You can build in-house, hire a traditional marketing agency, or partner with a specialized GTM firm.

01 Building in-house is the most expensive and risky path. You're betting your company can compete with specialized firms that do this all day, every day. You need AI talent at premium rates, infrastructure from scratch, and 6-12 months before you see results. Most companies get it wrong the first time and have to start over.

02 Hiring a traditional marketing agency feels safe but comes with hidden costs. You're paying for billable hours in a world where AI has collapsed delivery time by 50-80%. Their economics are broken, and they're struggling to transform without cannibalizing their core business. You get overhead without the outcomes.

03 Partnering with a specialized GTM firm gives you speed, expertise, and flexibility without the capital commitment. These firms have already made the AI transition. They know which tools work, how to structure teams, and how to deliver outcomes at scale. You skip the trial-and-error phase entirely and focus on what you do best while experts handle the growth engine.

Doing nothing is always the easy fallback option, but it’s a false choice. It just means watching competitors move faster while your costs stay fixed. DThe companies making changes today aren’t just cutting costs — they're restructuring around a new operating model where AI and specialized partners replace generalist teams.

The Choice is Yours

This isn't about AI replacing humans. It's about companies choosing the most effective delivery model for outcomes their customers actually want to pay for.

Traditional marketing departments and agencies are expensive, slow, and struggling to adapt. Specialized GTM firms offering a full outsourced option have already adapted. They're AI-first, outcome-focused, and built for the economics of today.

The question isn't whether to outsource. It's whether you can afford not to.

Smart companies are making the shift now, before their competitors do. The ones waiting to see how this plays out will be the case studies about what happens when you move too late.

Which side of that equation do you want to be on?

Ready to explore an outsourced GTM partnership? The firms winning in 2025 aren't the ones with the biggest teams — they're the ones with the smartest operating models, and can start next week.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is outsourced GTM?

A: Outsourced go-to-market (GTM) refers to specialized firms that provide comprehensive marketing and sales execution services under your brand, handling everything from strategy to execution without requiring you to build internal capabilities or hire full teams.

Q: Can you outsource marketing effectively?

A: Yes. Companies now outsource marketing to specialized partners who deliver faster results at lower costs than in-house teams, with average savings of $10,000-$25,000 monthly for small operations and significantly more for enterprise companies.

Q: What does outsourced content mean?

A: Outsourced content is professionally created marketing material (articles, campaigns, ads, landing pages) produced by external specialists but branded and published as your own work, giving you expert output without building content teams internally.

Q: Is outsourcing GTM strategy worth it?

A: Outsourcing GTM strategy makes sense when specialized partners bring proven frameworks and cross-industry pattern recognition that internal teams take months to develop, letting you beat competitors while reducing operational costs by 40-60%.

Q: How much does it cost to build an in-house marketing team?

A: A marketing leader alone costs $162,000-$298,000 annually with benefits and overhead, while a full marketing team can run $500,000-$1 million before launching a single campaign, not counting the 6-12 month ramp-up time.

Q: What's the difference between traditional agencies and outsourced GTM firms?

A: Traditional agencies bill by the hour and struggle with AI transformation, while outsourced GTM firms are AI-first operations built for outcome-based pricing, delivering what used to require 20-person teams with 3-5 specialists and smart automation.

Q: What marketing functions can be outsourced?

A: Full-stack outsourced GTM Team can handle SEO, Google Ads, Meta campaigns, landing page design, social media management, content creation, demand generation, and complete GTM strategy under one partnership instead of juggling 4-5 separate vendors. Depending on the vendor, some can also work downstream to offer a full revenue operations solution.

Q: How long does it take to see results from and outsourced GTM partnership?

A: Outsourced GTM firms deliver immediate results because they bring proven strategies and tools, eliminating the months of learning curve that in-house teams require, with many companies seeing measurable impact within the first 30-60 days.

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Most B2B executives have a terrible relationship with PR. You've been burned by expensive press releases that went nowhere. You've paid $5,000 to PR Newswire, then another $500 just to fix a typo. You've watched your marketing team chase vanity metrics while your pipeline stayed empty.

So when someone suggests investing in a PR strategy, your first instinct is to say no.

But you're rejecting something much narrower than what PR strategy actually means. You think you're declining press releases and media placements. What you're really turning down is a systematic approach to building credibility, controlling your narrative, and creating the context that makes selling easier.

The problem isn't PR strategy itself. The problem is that most people define it too narrowly, confusing the tactics (press releases, media kits, journalist outreach) with the actual strategic work of establishing authority and trust in your market.

What PR Actually Means Today

Public relations has changed dramatically from its print-media origins, but the core hasn't shifted at all. PR is about connecting with audiences that matter to you in ways that matter to them. That's it.

The channels keep changing. Print became television, which became internet, which became blogs, which became LinkedIn and podcasts. Every few years, someone declares everything is different now. But the fundamentals remain constant: identify who influences your target audience, then build relationships with those influencers.

The problem is that most PR firms haven't helped business leaders understand this distinction. They've let the impression persist that PR means drafting press releases and hoping someone reads them. That's not PR. That's lazy execution masquerading as strategy.

Selling a Hard Concept? Try PR

Back in the day, a quantum computing company was getting terrible press coverage. They couldn't figure out why every article painted them negatively.

The answer turned out to be 12 computer science professors.

These 12 academics were the go-to sources for every major tech reporter covering quantum computing. They didn't like the company's technical approach. So every time a journalist called for background or commentary, these professors undermined the company.

The PR solution wasn't more press releases or better media training. It was building relationships with those 12 professors so they understood the company's approach better. Once those relationships shifted, the media coverage flipped.

That's modern PR. It's targeted, relationship-driven, and focused on the specific people who influence your buyers.

PR strategy isn't a separate function. It's a set of tactics and channels within your larger go-to-market system.

You already have foundational GTM elements: your ideal customer profile, your market focus, your brand promise. PR strategy applies those same foundations to a different set of tactics. Instead of email sequences or paid ads, you're using media relationships, thought leadership, and third-party validation. But the strategic inputs are identical.

This matters because PR can't work in isolation. It relies on the same ICP definition that guides your sales targeting. It reinforces the same brand promise that your marketing team communicates. It reaches the same narrow audience, just through different distribution channels.

Think of PR as a campaign grouping within your GTM system. You might run a content campaign, a demand gen campaign, and a PR campaign, all aimed at the same 500 target accounts. Each uses different tactics. Each measures different leading indicators. But they all ladder up to the same business outcomes.

Good PR gets prospects to the top of your funnel. But it also supports them throughout their buying journey. When a prospect gets cold feet during your sales process, an article or case study that appears at the right moment moves them forward. When they're doing due diligence, external validation from credible sources reinforces that your company is legitimate.

This is why PR should never be measured in isolation. The question isn't "how many press mentions did we get?" The question is "did this move our target audience toward the action we want them to take?"

If you're a mid-market company selling to healthcare CIOs, your PR strategy might involve three different campaigns: one for all healthcare CIOs broadly, one for CIOs in specific geographic markets, and one for CIOs who listen to particular podcasts. Each campaign drives specific outcomes that connect to your pipeline.

The Credibility Hierarchy

Not all channels carry equal weight. A feature in a major industry publication carries more credibility than a post on your company blog. An interview with a tough questioner carries more weight than a conversation with your business partner where you get softball questions.

This matters because credibility is the currency of PR. The more risk involved in a channel, the more credibility it typically carries. Reporters are paid to be objective, to represent their readers, and to question what executives tell them. When you survive that scrutiny and your message comes through intact, people trust it.

The same principle applies to other channels. A detailed customer case study where the client speaks honestly about implementation challenges carries more weight than marketing copy about your solution. A LinkedIn post where you share what went wrong on a project (and what you learned) builds more authority than 50 posts about your company's latest features.

Good PR guides you through these riskier channels. It helps you earn credibility in ways that actually change how your audience perceives you.

When You Actually Need PR Strategy

In simple terms, you need PR strategy when your buyers won't take meetings based on your outbound alone.

If your ideal customers are executives who check industry publications before returning calls, you need PR. If they ask their network about vendors before booking demos, you need PR. If they're influenced by what analysts say or what their competitors are doing, you need PR.

Most mid-market B2B companies face this reality fast. Their buyers don't respond to ads. They don't fill out lead forms. They want proof you're credible before they'll invest time talking to you.

Good PR delivers that proof. It creates the external validation that makes your sales team's job easier. It answers the "who else uses you?" question before prospects even ask it.

Think about your next 10% of revenue growth. Who are those buyers? What convinced the last three deals to say yes? If third-party credibility played any role in closing those deals, you need a PR strategy that creates more of it.

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What AI Changes (And What It Doesn't)

AI tools help with PR strategy in specific ways. They're excellent at surfacing patterns and historical context. If you want to understand how other companies successfully repositioned in their markets, AI can point you in the right direction fast.

But AI-generated content has a problem. Most of what you get on first pass is generic slop. The output is better than what was possible two years ago, but there's no easy button that gets you the results you want.

AI becomes useful when you train it on your specific voice and perspective. This takes work. You can't use generic prompts and expect good results. But if you invest in training an AI tool to understand how you think and communicate, it can help you scale your thought leadership more efficiently.

The catch is that you need a distinctive voice in the first place. You need to know what you uniquely have to offer. You need positions and perspectives that come from real experience, not from regurgitating what everyone else says.

AI can accelerate production. It can't create the authentic perspective that makes your PR strategy work.

The Voice Problem

Most B2B companies struggle to develop a distinctive voice because they're afraid of closing doors. If you take a position, you might alienate potential customers. If you share a contrarian view, someone might disagree.

But generic positioning means no one listens at all.

Authenticity is what matters most. In a market saturated with AI-generated content and corporate-approved messaging, being real is your competitive advantage. Your prospects can smell manufactured authority from a mile away. They trust voices that sound like actual human experience, not committee-approved talking points.

This is what you're actively trying to bring out in your content. Not controversy for its own sake. Not hot takes designed to generate clicks. Just your actual perspective, grounded in what you've seen and done, communicated in a way that sounds like a real person talking.

You don't need to be controversial or pick fights. You need to have a perspective grounded in your real experience. When Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) declared in the late 1990s that technology drives strategy, not the other way around, they took a position that contradicted conventional wisdom. McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group disagreed.

Anderson Consulting turned out to be right. That perspective, consistently communicated across media relations, advertising, and sales conversations, helped fuel their growth into what became a massive global firm.

Your voice should reflect what you actually believe based on what you've seen and done. It should connect to problems your ideal customers face. It should give you something to rally around internally and something that makes prospects pay attention.

If you're a services company that lives and dies by client work, it's tempting to say yes to everything. But trying to solve every problem for everyone means you have nothing distinctive to say. Find the problem you solve better than anyone else. Build your voice around that.

Making PR Strategy Work

Good PR should be project-based, measurable, and finite. You shouldn't feel like you need PR people working for you forever. Start with specific goals tied to specific outcomes.

Maybe you need to flip the perception of 20 key prospects who currently buy from a competitor. Maybe you need to establish credibility with a new industry vertical. Maybe you need to position your CEO as a thought leader on a particular topic that matters to your buyers.

Define the goal clearly. Understand who influences the audience you're trying to reach. Then build a strategy to reach and persuade those influencers. In some cases, that might mean traditional media relations. In other cases, it might mean having coffee with six people who shape how your industry thinks.

The strategy should integrate completely with your broader go-to-market approach. Your PR efforts should reinforce your marketing campaigns and sales conversations. Your marketing content should build on the credibility your PR creates. Everything should point in the same direction.

And you should be able to explain clearly how the investment connects to pipeline and revenue. If you can't draw that line, either the strategy is wrong or you're not measuring the right things.

Are You Asking the Right Question?

The question isn't whether you need a PR strategy. The question is whether you're willing to do the hard work of figuring out what you stand for, who you're trying to reach, and what you want them to do.

If you can answer those questions clearly, PR becomes a practical tool for reaching and influencing the people who matter most to your business. If you can't answer them, no amount of press releases or media training will help you.

Start there. Figure out your voice. Understand your audience. Define the action you want them to take. Then build a strategy that connects those dots.

That's PR. Everything else is just tactics.

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FAQs

What is B2B PR strategy? 

B2B PR strategy identifies who influences your buyers and builds relationships with those influencers. It's not press releases. It's targeted credibility building that moves specific audiences toward specific actions.

How is PR different from marketing?

PR earns credibility through independent validation. Marketing promotes directly. Think of it this way: PR gets prospects to the top of your funnel through trusted third parties like industry analysts, media, or peer recommendations. Marketing guides them through to conversion. PR prepares the field. Marketing plants and harvests. Both need to work together, with your PR creating the external validation that makes your marketing messages believable.

When should a company invest in PR?

When your buyers trust peer recommendations and industry experts more than your marketing. If prospects research extensively before talking to sales, you need PR.

Why do most companies fail at PR?

They spray generic press releases hoping someone notices. They don't know who they're trying to reach or what action they want. They measure press mentions instead of pipeline impact. Good PR requires knowing exactly which 50 people influence your best prospects, then systematically building relationships with those 50 people. Most companies skip that targeting work and wonder why their PR investment goes nowhere.

What does a PR strategy cost?

Expect $3,000-$15,000 monthly for project-based work. Start with 3-6 months targeting specific outcomes. Avoid open-ended retainers.

Should we hire in-house or use a consultant?

Use a consultant. In-house PR only makes sense at scale. Consultants bring cross-industry experience and established relationships. Start project-based, then evaluate.

How long before PR shows results?

Quick wins happen in 30-60 days. Relationship-driven PR takes 3-6 months for measurable impact. Sustainable authority that consistently drives pipeline takes 6-12 months. You're building trust and credibility, not running ads. Expect momentum to build as influencers start associating your company with specific expertise, then recommending you unprompted.

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"What's a good open rate?"

This comes up all the time. It’s the first metric with any data for an outbound email campaign, so naturally we get questions. Sometimes it's phrased as "what open rate should we target?" or "why are our opens so low?" But the more important question to start with is: what does this number actually mean?

Think of open rate as a utility metric. It tells you when something's wrong. It helps identify what's working when you get positive replies. But trying to optimize open rates on their own will send you down rabbit holes that make you no smarter.

Open rates don't correlate with business outcomes. They don't tell you if people read your emails. They don't predict who will reply or book meetings. And with Apple's Mail Privacy Protection now affecting 45% of recipients, the number you see in your dashboard increasingly measures nothing at all.

This article explains how open tracking actually works, why privacy changes broke it, and what you should measure instead.

Estimated read time: 10 minutes

How Email Open Tracking Actually Works

Open tracking relies on a simple trick: your email platform embeds a tiny invisible image (a 1×1 pixel) into every email you send. When someone opens the email and their mail client loads images, it makes an HTTP GET request to fetch that tracking pixel from your server. Your platform sees the request and logs an "open."

That's it. An open just means the tracking pixel loaded.

Here's the technical reality of what counts as an open:

• The recipient's email client requests the tracking pixel
• Their device has images enabled (not blocked)
• The HTTP request completes successfully
• Your email platform receives and logs the request

This system has always been flawed. Plain text emails can't track opens because they contain no images. Preview panes can trigger opens without the recipient actually reading anything. Corporate firewalls and email clients block images by default. And size limits on images can prevent tracking pixels from loading even when images are enabled.

But recent changes made these existing problems catastrophic.

What Broke: Privacy Changes That Killed Open Rate Reliability

Apple Mail Privacy Protection

In September 2021, Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). It changed everything.

MPP works by prefetching all tracking pixels through Apple's proxy servers before you even open an email. Your email platform sees the proxy server request and logs an open. But you haven't opened anything yet. The email might sit unread in your inbox for days, but the "open" is already fired.

Current data shows 90% adoption among Apple Mail users. Apple Mail represents roughly 45% of all email recipients. That means nearly half of your "opens" might be proxy preferences that have nothing to do with human behavior.

The timing patterns reveal the problem. Before MPP, you'd see opens cluster during business hours. Now you see opens fire at 3 AM because Apple's servers prefetch overnight. You can't distinguish proxy opens from real opens in your dashboard. They look identical.

Gmail Proxy Servers and Security Scanning

Gmail runs security scans on incoming emails through California-based proxy servers. These scans trigger tracking pixels to check for malicious links. Research shows a 6.5% false open rate from Gmail's scanning alone.

Corporate email security systems add another layer of noise. Tools like Proofpoint and Mimecast prefetch emails to scan for malware. These security bots generate opens within 60 seconds of email delivery. They're protecting networks, but they're also inflating your open rates with bot activity that looks exactly like human opens.

Microsoft Outlook blocks images by default. Recipients have to manually enable images to load tracking pixels. Many never do.

What about AI Email Agents?

AI agents reading your emails trigger the same tracking pixels as human opens. When tools like Gemini scan your inbox to generate daily summaries, they load email content and request tracking pixels. Your email platform logs these as opens even though no human saw the message. 

This breaks email metrics in a fundamental way: the open rate inflates while actual human attention is zero. As AI agents become standard features in Gmail, Outlook, and third-party inbox tools, they create automated, constant bot activity that makes open rates nearly meaningless. The metric looks identical to human behavior in your dashboard, but it measures machine processing instead of genuine engagement.

September 2024: Gmail's Warning Messages

In September 2024, Gmail started displaying warning messages on tracked emails: "This message contains external images." Recipients now see explicit notice when you're tracking them. Some click through anyway. Some don't. But the friction increased.

Current Benchmarks (And Why They Don't Matter)

Based on what we've seen running campaigns and analyzing industry data, the latest B2B cold email open rates range from 25% to 45%. SaaS and IT businesses tend to fall on the lowest end of that spectrum, hovering around 24-26%. Meanwhile, industries like energy management and oil and gas services consistently see rates on the higher end, closer to 42-43%. The spread is significant and largely driven by how familiar recipients are with cold outreach in their specific industry.

The consensus is that: a 15-25% open rate is now considered "acceptable" for cold B2B campaigns, while anything above 40% is excellent. But here's the uncomfortable truth: these numbers increasingly measure nothing meaningful.

Unfortunately, these benchmarks are becoming meaningless. Based on industry data, our framework shows that a 60% open rate merely indicates that 60% of tracking pixels have loaded. It provides no information about whether 60% of recipients actually read the email, engaged with the message, or are interested in the offer.

You're comparing yourself to industry averages that are equally broken.

Utility vs Vanity: How to Actually Use Open Rates

Chad S. White, author of "Email Marketing Rules" and Head of Research at Zeta Global, makes the distinction clear: open rates are health metrics, not success metrics.

Open rates CAN tell you:

1. Deliverability health signals If your open rate suddenly drops from 35% to 15%, you have a delivery problem. Check your bounce rate, review your sender reputation, and audit your email list quality. Low opens combined with normal click rates suggest deliverability issues.

2. Subject line comparative testing (within your own baseline) Run A/B tests where you change only the subject line. Compare open rates for version A vs version B sent to similar audiences at similar times. The relative difference tells you which subject line performs better for your specific list. Don't compare your open rates to industry benchmarks. Compare them to your own previous campaigns.

3. Re-engagement triggers If someone hasn't opened your last five emails, they probably aren't reading them. Use opens (or lack of opens) to trigger re-engagement sequences or list cleaning. This works because consistent non-opens signal disengagement even if individual opens are unreliable.

Open rates CANNOT tell you:

1. Actual reading behavior An open means the pixel loaded. It says nothing about whether the recipient read your email, scanned it, or immediately deleted it.

2. Conversion intent High opens don't predict replies, clicks, or conversions. People who open emails and never respond are functionally identical to people who never opened at all.

3. Campaign ROI Revenue comes from actions (replies, meetings booked, deals closed), not from tracking pixel loading.

4. Genuine engagement Prefetched opens, security scans, and bot activity all count as opens. Your dashboard can't distinguish human engagement from automated system behavior.

Warning signs your opens are meaningless:

• Sudden spikes in open rates (likely MPP adoption in your list)
• 100% open rates (definitely bots or security scanners)
• Opens at 3 AM or other off-hours (proxy prefetching)
• Opens within 60 seconds of send (security scanning)

What to Measure Instead: Metrics That Predict Business Outcomes

Reply Rates

Average B2B cold email reply rates sit around 5-6%. Anything above 10% is excellent. Reply rates are unaffected by MPP and proxy servers because they measure actual human action.

Track total replies (positive and negative). If someone replies "not interested," that's still engagement. It tells you your email reached a real person who read enough to respond. Low reply rates with high opens suggest your message doesn't resonate.

Click-Through Rates

Average B2B click-through rates range from 2% to 3.2%. Clicks are concrete actions that require human decision making. They're immune to privacy protections because no one is prefetching your links.

High click-through rates with low reply rates might mean your links are compelling but your call to action is unclear. High opens with low clicks suggest your subject line works but your email content doesn't deliver.

Conversion Rates

Average B2B email conversion rate is 2.5%. Conversion means the recipient took your desired action: booked a meeting, downloaded a resource, started a trial, or requested information.

Conversion rates connect directly to pipeline and revenue. A campaign with 50% opens and 0.5% conversion rate is worse than a campaign with 20% opens and 3% conversion rate.

Revenue Per Email

Calculate total revenue divided by total emails delivered. This metric cuts through all the noise. It doesn't matter if opens are inflated or clicks are low if the campaign generates $50,000 in closed deals from 1,000 emails sent.

Revenue per email lets you compare channels. If outbound email generates $25 per email and paid ads generate $15 per click, you know where to allocate budget.

Email Marketing ROI

Industry averages show $36 to $42 return for every $1 spent on email marketing. Track your actual ROI using (revenue from campaign minus campaign costs) divided by campaign costs.

ROI accounts for everything: list acquisition, tool costs, time investment, and creative development. A campaign with terrible open rates but strong ROI should scale. A campaign with amazing open rates but negative ROI should stop.

Three-tier measurement framework table:

Operational Problems Open Rates Create

The obsession with open rates causes real damage to B2B email programs:

List hygiene strategies removing engaged readers Marketing teams build automation that removes "unengaged" contacts based on open rate thresholds. But many of those contacts have images disabled. They're reading every email and planning to reply when the timing is right. You're removing them from your list because your tracking pixel can't load.

A/B tests declaring false winners You test two subject lines. Version A gets 42% opens. Version B gets 35% opens. You declare A the winner and scale it. But version B actually drove more replies and conversions. You optimized for a vanity metric that doesn't correlate with business outcomes.

Automation triggers firing incorrectly You built a workflow that sends a follow-up sequence when someone opens but doesn't click. Except half those "opens" are Apple prefetches that happened before the recipient woke up. Your automation spams people based on bot activity.

Inability to determine actual read time You want to know if recipients read your 500-word email or bounced after the first line. Open tracking can't tell you. MPP prefetches everything immediately. You have no signal about actual engagement depth.

Bifurcated data that makes analysis impossible Your campaign shows 60% opens from Apple Mail users and 15% opens from Outlook users. Is your message resonating better with one group? Or is it just that one blocks images by default? You can't tell. The data is meaningless for comparison.

Executive reporting built on broken metrics Your CEO wants to know campaign performance. You show a dashboard with open rates as the primary metric. The number is up 15% quarter over quarter. Everyone celebrates. But reply rates are flat and pipeline is down. You optimized and reported on the wrong thing.

Tactical Optimizations That Still Work

Not everything is broken. Some optimizations improve actual engagement:

Time Commitment in Subject Lines

Subject lines with explicit time commitments ("2 minute overview" or "Quick question") increase opens by 28%. This works because it sets expectations and reduces perceived effort.

Send Timing

Thursday and Tuesday mornings between 9 AM and 11 AM show 44% open rates compared to 30% on weekends. Business hours in the recipient's timezone matter. Avoid top-of-hour sends when 80%+ of all emails go out.

Job Title Segmentation

Tailoring messages to specific job titles and seniority levels improves reply rates by 38%. This isn't about open rates. It's about relevance. When your message speaks directly to a VP of Sales's pain points, they reply.

Tracking Pixel Removal

Some teams test sending emails without tracking pixels. They report 3% higher response rates. Recipients notice when you're not tracking them. Removing the pixel (and the Gmail warning message) builds trust.

But here's the insight: none of these optimizations require open rates to measure success. You validate them by tracking reply rates, conversions, and pipeline impact.

What to Do Starting Monday

Stop obsessing over open rates. Start tracking metrics that correlate with revenue.

Immediate actions:

1. Add reply rate tracking to your dashboard. Make it the primary metric you review daily. Target 5-6% for cold outreach. Anything above 10% is excellent.
2. Calculate your revenue per email for current campaigns. Divide total revenue by emails delivered. Compare across campaigns and channels.
3. Review your list hygiene rules. If you're removing contacts based on open rates alone, you're probably removing engaged readers who have images disabled. Add reply rate and click rate as qualifying signals.
4. Audit your A/B testing methodology. Declare winners based on reply rates or conversion rates, not opens. Run tests for at least 100 sends per variant to reach statistical significance.
5. Fix deliverability if open rates dropped suddenly. A sharp drop (35% to 15% in one week) signals delivery problems. Check your bounce rate, sender reputation, and email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
6. Segment reporting by email client. View Apple Mail opens separately from Gmail and Outlook. This won't fix the underlying problem, but it helps you understand how much proxy activity affects your data.

Open rates aren't useless. They're just not what you think they are. Treat them as diagnostic signals, not success indicators. Focus on the metrics that predict pipeline, revenue, and business growth.

You can't build a revenue engine on systems alone.

We learned this working with a dozen B2B companies over the past ten months. They had the GTM infrastructure. They understood their ICP. Their sales process worked. But they struggled to capture attention in a market that got 20x noisier overnight.

Systems create reliability. Creative captures attention. You need both.

That's why we partnered with Crown Social.

The Problem Traditional Agencies Can't Solve

Most marketing agencies operate in one of two modes. Either they're creative shops charging enterprise rates and delivering campaigns in a vacuum, or they're execution houses running plays without strategic depth.

Neither model works for mid-market B2B companies generating $10M to $50M in revenue.

These businesses face a specific challenge. They compete against enterprise brands with massive budgets while serving sophisticated buyers who ignore generic content. They need world-class creative to stand out and technical GTM systems to convert attention into revenue.

Traditional agencies can't deliver this combination.

Creative agencies lack the technical expertise to build revenue systems. GTM consultants rarely have access to world-class creative talent. Both charge enterprise rates that don't match mid-market budgets.

The gap creates a real problem. You either invest in creative that looks great but doesn't connect to pipeline, or you build systems that generate activity without capturing attention.

Bridging the Gap

Crown Social brings creative production, social media strategy, and paid media capabilities through their in-house and distributed talent network. Trelliswork brings GTM systems and revenue operations that turn attention into pipeline and revenue.

Together we deliver what mid-market businesses actually need: integrated creative and GTM infrastructure where creative drives distribution, distribution feeds pipeline, and pipeline converts to revenue.

Here's how it works in practice:

You decide to launch a thought leadership campaign. Crown Social develops the creative strategy and produces content that actually captures attention. That content plugs directly into the distribution systems Trelliswork builds as part of your GTM infrastructure. The systems activate channels, track engagement, feed qualified activity to sales, and measure revenue outcomes.

No vendor coordination. No integration headaches. No choosing between creative excellence and revenue systems.

Running a paid social campaign becomes a switch you turn on, not a new vendor relationship to manage.

Mid-Market's Moment

The economics matter here.

Both companies operate without the overhead that drives enterprise agency pricing. Crown Social unites centralized strategy with a global network of influential creatives. Trelliswork provides fractional GTM leadership instead of expensive full-time teams.

This structure lets us deliver modern full-service capabilities at mid-market pricing. You get world-class creative, media strategy, advertising, GTM systems, and revenue operations without paying for enterprise overhead.

The partnership targets founder-led companies in B2B technology, health tech, and robotics. These businesses understand their market but struggle with the same fundamental challenge: how to stand out without building an entire marketing department.

You don't want to manage multiple agencies. You want integrated capabilities that work together to drive revenue growth.

A New Choice for Sales & Marketing Leaders

If you run sales and own marketing, this changes your options.

You no longer need to choose between investing in creative or building systems. You get both, integrated from day one, at a price point that makes sense for mid-market businesses.

If you're a one-person marketing team looking for scale, you gain access to world-class creative talent and technical GTM capabilities without hiring a full team or managing multiple vendor relationships.

The work becomes: define your GTM strategy, develop creative that captures attention, activate distribution channels, and measure what drives revenue. All integrated. All aligned to business outcomes.

This is what modern B2B marketing looks like when you stop forcing companies to choose between creative excellence and revenue systems.

Want to learn more? Reach out directly. Let's talk about what integrated creative and GTM infrastructure could do for your business.

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