This year’s Industrial Marketing Summit covered a lot of ground, but four themes came up over and over again.
This was the third year that our team attended IMS, the second year I attended personally, and the first year where we sponsored the event. As in previous years, attending was the shot of adrenaline our team needed to kick of the year with our marketing brains running at full speed. We loved catching up with familiar faces, and it was awesome to bond as a whole team.
IMS gave us a lot to think about, and we’ve spent the weeks since mulling the topics over. They’ve been the backbone of our internal discussions, and have spurred some new development initiatives which will be the focal point of future articles. For now, let’s dive into our top takeaways from IMS 2026.
1. Traffic Is a Dated KPI.
We’ve long made the case that traffic is a weak indicator of marketing success at best. Sure, in the content marketing heyday, seeing traffic numbers rise as a direct result of white hat SEO tactics felt validating. But the years since have demonstrated that a lot of that traffic was never actually relevant because it was:
- Bots crawling your site
- Your competition
- Traffic to that one unexpectedly viral article you wrote that actually has nothing to do with your business
- Other content marketers reading your articles for research
- People trying to sell you something, especially…
- That one carpet cleaning business that really wants to clean your office
We’ve learned some of these lessons the hard way (see: the unexpectedly viral article), but others have taken a longer time to settle in. However, the past six years of disruption have made revelations unavoidable. Consider:
- In 2020, Covid drove everyone online and traffic exploded. However, a lot of that traffic came from everyone trying to sell to each other, and certainly didn’t translate into a proportionate growth in sales.
- Also in 2020, Google Analytics 4 moved out of beta, marking a shift in analytics tracking that would take a few years to unfold.
- GDPR regulations, private browsing, and cookie blockers have made attribution more opaque. Rises in “direct” traffic are a prime example, as GA4 now marks traffic as direct any time it is missing attribution data.
- The launch of generative search caused traffic volume to crater as Google directed fewer and fewer visitors to websites. Once more, companies have to rethink their content strategies for the new dawn of GEO.
To those of us who have lived and died by our traffic KPIs, this should be alarming. But as it turns out, even with traffic volume down, conversions are up.
It turns out that the very search engines that are tanking traffic volume are also serving as a great filter for the traffic that never mattered. After a year or two of adjustment, we may all go back to caring about traffic again, just with this newer baseline in place. But the chaos surrounding generative search engines combined with the loss of reliable metrics in GA4 should give us all pause. Instead of treating traffic as the end-all-and-be-all, it’s high time we view these numbers critically and hone our strategies accordingly.
Needless to say, Rand Fishkin’s keynote on this topic made the conference for us. We’ve been following Rand since his Whiteboard Fridays, and trusted his SEO insights like they were straight gospel. Watching him get on stage and validate all of the internal conversations we’ve been having over the last few years was like sitting down for coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in a decade and picking up right were you left off.
2. It’s Time to Rethink Gated Content.
The gates are coming down, and it’s about time.
Gating has been a strategy pillar since the earliest days of content marketing. With the constant pressure to grow leads and demonstrate attribution through specific marketing actions, it has always had a lot of appeal. However, the flaws in this strategy which have been noticeable from the beginning are now unavoidable.
For starters, a lot of people haven’t just put up a gate—they’ve built an impregnable fortress surrounded by a crocodile-filled moat, raised the drawbridge, and are demanding a password to enter. Which is to say: the forms are too damn long, especially if you are in the industrial marketing space.
Craig Coffey addressed this most directly in his talk about (un)gating forms, although he wasn’t alone in making the case. I believe his was the graphic that showed the percentage of people who filled form fields with bogus answers (about half—even among marketers), even when the form only asked for name and email. The point is glaringly obvious: Why are we expecting others to follow our neat and orderly marketing pipeline when we barely do it ourselves?
The situation becomes even more absurd when you consider how desperate most of us are for people to read our materials at all. Why would we jeopardize our chances of earning eyes on our work when all we’re getting in return is a partially completed form of info we can’t even trust?
Put simply, would you rather have:
A. 100 people download and read your whitepaper without any attribution data
B. 10 people download and read your whitepaper, of whom 5 gave obviously fake names and emails
The answer is A. Obviously, the answer is A. And if you think the answer is B, talk to your sales team.
All of this is a behavioral argument against gates. But there are two other technical arguments against them.
The first is data privacy. People don’t like giving up their data. And once you, the company, have the data, you are then responsible for it. It’s not a huge deal to slap a GDPR data privacy consent box on a form, but if your business operates in a zone that takes these concerns seriously, it may not be worth the hassle.
Second, putting your content behind a gate makes it invisible to AI. There are ways to get around this (and trust us—GEO will be a huge part of our upcoming content series), but you’re also adding a layer of complication that doesn’t need to be there.
So free your content. You may lose some data, but you’ll gain good will—and you may even see a growth in qualified leads.
3. Video Is Ascendent.
Manufacturing is a visual field. People like seeing machines. They like watching robots. I have yet to encounter a production line that wasn’t mesmerizing.
So it stands to reason that video content performs well. In fact, if you’re blessed to have a savvy marketer with regular access to your production floor, you should have that person filming snippets of your factory in action and sharing them every day.
Not everyone has this person, however, or an operating production floor. We talk to a lot of businesses who work in the software space, or who produce equipment that doesn’t translate so well to a visual medium. What to do then?
First, consider your audience.
What is their job title? Do they have purchasing power, or can they influence those with purchasing power? Where are they spending their time? Are you hoping to catch them during work hours, or when they’re off the clock?
I want to linger on this last question, because sometimes we hear people who are convinced they need to be on TikTok because that’s where people spend their time. And: possibly your audience is there. But if that’s where they’re spending their downtime, they may not be happy to see your product pop up into their feeds.
So when you’re thinking about your audience, think about how you want them to be encountering your videos, and what mindset you hope they will be in for your videos to have the desired impact.
Second, consider the content.
Are you creating videos for brand awareness? Hype reels to launch your latest product? Tutorials or video guides?
Again, we hear people say things like “we need videos that are 30 seconds long.” Why? What do you expect to show your audience in 30 seconds? If your answer is “a quick shot of our robot doing something cool,” then: excellent! You’re building awareness of your brand and your capabilities. No more explanation needed.
But if you’re trying to provide training, a 30 second video is probably useless. This goes back to the old debate about content length when everyone was convinced that 300-word blogs were the way to go, and I’ll say now what I said then: An incomplete answer is worse than no answer at all. Don’t frustrate your viewers with surface-level information. If you need 15 minutes to demo your product, make a 15-minute demo video. You can add chapters and include a transcript for searchability, but don’t pursue “shortness” for its own sake.
Third, consider distribution.
Where will your video content live? On your website? LinkedIn? YouTube?
Building out a customer-facing YouTube channel with detailed product tutorials is a long-term strategy that will require ongoing effort from experienced team members. You’ll want to keep that content up to date, and remove old content as it becomes obsolete. However, this is one of the greatest things you can do for customer success.
Building a following on LinkedIn based on thought leadership content from your executive team can solidify your brand reputation. You may be able to shoot multiple videos at once and space them out over a few months, condensing the time needed from senior team members. These videos may be shorter and better suited for reel-style clips.
Building a following on LinkedIn with 30-second shots of your production line can increase your “cool” factor. It may not lead directly to increased sales, but it will help with recruiting and industry reputation.
Finally, consider production.
If you have someone in your workspace who is naturally video savvy, give them a camera and cut them loose. If you don’t, you can still get there, you may just need some more prep work.
That said, not everyone has someone on hand who feels comfortable doing this, and as an agency, we recognize it’s not feasible for us to be on-site at a client location every week to shoot footage. Instead, our focus recently has been to lower the barrier for filming so that our clients feel more comfortable shooting the footage themselves.
We recently put together a video guide for one of our clients to walk them through the equipment they would need, how to set up a space for shooting video, what kind of shots to take, and how to narrate to camera. They’ll then send us the raw footage, which we’ll edit it into proper videos and post on their channels.
4. Content Is Dead; Long Live Content.
As a writer (could you tell?), last year’s IMS left me with an ache in my heart. The narrative everywhere seemed to be: AI can write your blogs, your emails, your social, your whitepapers, your everything. Automate your content. No one will ever know, or if they do know, they won’t care, because they’ll be doing it, too.
A year later, the flaws in this thinking are already starting to show.
First off, I’d like to acknowledge that some people have indeed automated all their content and seem happy with it. To the extent that that’s actually working with them, they may go with my blessing.
But here’s what I’m seeing:
- People are sick of AI slop. You may get some superficial traction, but to a lot of people, you just look cheap and careless. It’s not a good look for your brand.
- It’s not as good as you think. I’ve been thinking a lot about Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” and how AI content feels purpose-built to trap our brains into accepting work because it looks good and seems right and because we’re tired and in a hurry and want to move on. As soon as you slow down and look critically, however, it starts to fall apart. As marketers, we’re often in fast mode, because we’re on a deadline and juggling a billion elements of a strategy all at once. But our audiences are in slow mode: they’re being considerate, deliberate, and critical. AI material rarely holds up to that scrutiny, which means your productivity high is an illusion that will cost you time down the road.
- Blackhat strategies will catch up to you. We said it in 2010 when everyone was trying to keyword stuff their way to the top of search engine results: Google will find you and punish you. And we’re seeing it again as generative search optimization (GEO) begins to stabilize: AI knows when content is AI generated, and prioritizes material written by people. If you want to be an authority in your field, you have to write with authority using your own expertise. This was already demonstrated in a recent article by Search Engine Land, which showed how sites launched and marketed with purely AI-generated content experienced initial traffic growth before falling off the map.
The upshot of all this is that thoughtful, intentional, human-generated content will continue to be an essential part of marketing strategy for the foreseeable future.
We’ll be back in 2027.
It’s hard to believe the next IMS is only ten months away. We look forward to coming back, seeing our people again, and learning more. And yes, we will be bringing magnets.
In the meantime, we are running an Industrial Marketing Survey to learn more from marketing leaders in our field about their mindsets, priorities, and successes. If you’d like to take part, simply sign up for a 30 minute (virtual) coffee with me.
Bring your spiciest AI hot take. We’ll cover your coffee.