GamePlan Marketing

08/18/2026

Customer engagement gets most of the attention in gamification conversations, but channel partner programs are arguably where it has the clearest use case. Partner teams are already juggling multiple vendors, competing priorities, and training material that's easy to skim past. A gamified onboarding flow or a bit of friendly competition built into product knowledge training gives partners a reason to actually finish the material instead of clicking through it.

Learn more:

Drive engagement, and motivate action with gamified marketing experiences. Explore our gamification solutions for IT industry marketing.

08/11/2026

Buyer journeys are longer than they used to be. Buyers are relying heavily on AI tools during their research, often before a vendor is ever contacted. And a large share of the buying process still happens in places marketing teams have no visibility into.

None of this makes the existing playbook obsolete, but it does suggest that many teams are still planning around a buyer who no longer exists in quite the same form. We broke down the numbers and what they mean for the second half of 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q04nFph10

08/06/2026

Many B2B nurture sequences use the same polished template from the first email to the last, and that consistency may be quietly limiting response rates.

Early in a sequence, when a contact has just downloaded a resource or watched a webinar, a designed email still makes sense. But as the goal shifts toward getting someone on a call, switching to a plain text note from a named person on the team tends to perform better. It reads less like a campaign and more like direct outreach, which is closer to what that stage is actually meant to accomplish. We go deeper in our latest blog: https://hubs.ly/Q04nF7bl0

07/28/2026

Plain text emails generate 42% more clicks than HTML in B2B, and outperform image-heavy formats by an even wider margin. It's a striking enough gap that it should be reshaping how nurture emails get built, yet it rarely does, largely because it runs counter to what most brand and design teams have been trained to prioritize.

Part of the explanation is how people actually read email. A polished, branded template is recognized instantly as marketing, which puts the reader in scanning mode rather than reading mode. A plain note from a recognizable name reads more like something written specifically for them. We dive deeper in our latest blog post: https://hubs.ly/Q04nF35f0

07/23/2026

Direct mail to executives can open doors in a way that a cold email never will, but it can just as easily create a compliance headache if you haven't done the homework on your recipient's industry first.

Before a single dollar goes toward postage, there are a few things worth confirming. Does the recipient's organization have a documented gift policy? Is this landing at a business address or a home address? Does the value and framing of what you're sending read as starting a conversation, or as something closer to an attempt to influence a decision?

None of these questions are complicated, but skipping them is usually where well-intentioned campaigns run into trouble. Learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q04nF4Hl0

07/21/2026

Direct mail is back on the table for B2B tech, with companies now allocating close to a quarter of their marketing budget to it. But the industry you're targeting matters as much as the creative you send. A personalized book or a well-chosen gift lands as thoughtful with a tech buyer. Send the same package to someone in healthcare or financial services, and it can create a compliance issue before the relationship even begins.

Understanding where a package will be welcomed, and where it needs a different approach entirely, is most of the work. Read our latest blog to learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q04nD-rm0

07/14/2026

Direct mail is back on the table for B2B tech, with companies now allocating close to a quarter of their marketing budget to it. But the industry you're targeting matters as much as the creative you send. A personalized book or a well-chosen gift lands as thoughtful with a tech buyer. Send the same package to someone in healthcare or financial services, and it can create a compliance issue before the relationship even begins.

Understanding where a package will be welcomed, and where it needs a different approach entirely, is most of the work. Read our latest blog to learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q04nFmHW0

07/07/2026

Most executive gifting programs are well-intentioned but poorly executed. The gift feels generic, the timing is off, the recipient wasn't quite right; and, instead of opening a door, the whole thing quietly reflects badly on your brand.

Physical gifting works when it's treated as a considered tactic rather than a checkbox. A well-chosen gift sent to the right person at the right moment in the buying cycle does something a follow-up email sequence rarely does: it gets noticed, and it stays on the desk long after the message would have been deleted.

The blog covers what a thoughtful executive door opener program actually looks like in practice, including the questions worth asking before your next send: https://hubs.ly/Q04jBD7d0

06/15/2026

Your CTO posting on LinkedIn about something they genuinely believe will do more for pipeline than most paid campaigns.

75% of decision-makers say thought leadership directly led them to research a product they hadn't considered before. (Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study)

We broke down what this actually looks like: why executive content reaches buyers that a company page never will, how to tell the difference between real perspective and content that just looks like perspective, and how to build a process your leadership team won't quietly abandon after two weeks. https://hubs.ly/Q04jzjf90

06/09/2026

Most LinkedIn ad budgets are wasted before the campaign even launches. Not because of poor creative or the wrong offer, but because of the list.

In B2B tech, where deals are large and buying cycles are long, reaching the wrong companies doesn't just burn budget. It slows down your entire pipeline.

We put together a full breakdown of how to build a LinkedIn ABM target account list that actually reaches the right accounts, the right people, and spreads your budget across the full buying committee, not just the three people who click on everything. https://hubs.ly/Q04jz2Yt0