2026 Growth Marketing Priorities
Our Perspective: GTM Priorities that will Accelerate SaaS & Technology Growth in 2026
2025 marked a decisive turning point for B2B revenue teams. Over the years, marketers have become accustomed to siloed campaigns, reactive projects, and disconnected sales and marketing teams. Now, after months (actually, years) of being told we need to ‘do more with less’, the last twelve months have forced the industry into a reset, fundamentally changing, and setting a new precedent for how we approach growth, performance and impact.
The rise of AI has completely changed how people search for and consume their information. By mid-2025, ChatGPT was adding over 100 million users in just two months, and now the platform commands nearly 74% of the AI search market, serving 850+ million users and driving billions of monthly visits. And, whilst ChatGPT’s market share has remained relatively stagnant throughout 2025, unsurprisingly a rise in competition from alternate generative AI models has increased. Last week, Google announced several updates to Gemini which users are remarking as ‘game changing’, and Microsoft’s Copilot Usage Report 2025 demonstrates the move of AI from experimentation into everyday work at scale. Data revealed not how organisations expect AI to be used, but more importantly, how millions of people are actually integrating it into daily decision-making (for work and personal use) - highlighting a shift from theoretical AI strategy to real, human-led behaviour that is reshaping how everyday tasks get done.
2025 also marked a pivotal point where social media fully became the central infrastructure of the consumer journey. In simple terms, social media stopped being “a channel” and became the place where people discover, evaluate and make a purchasing decision. Social is no longer one step in the buyer journey, it is the journey itself.
Before 2025, the model looked like this: Advert → Website → Research → Comparison → Purchase
By 2025, it looked more like this: Scroll → Discover → Validate → Decide (often without leaving the platform)
Social platforms have now evolved into primary engines for discovery, entertainment and research, and audiences have shifted from passive scrolling to high intent decision-making behaviour. Communities have replaced traditional advertising as sources of truth, and for the first time, social search overtook traditional search for younger audiences. A survey of 1,000 US Gen Z adults (ages 21–27) shows media habits shaped by speed, short-form video, interactivity and a rising demand for authenticity. Their approach to media consumption is unique, marked by preferences for interactivity, personalization, and authenticity - coincidentally (or not) something we consistently emphasize the importance of at Arlo Marketing Solutions.
Insights from We Are Social show that social media is now where trust is formed. Visibility alone is no longer enough for brands heading into 2026. Relevance now depends on earning attention, credibility and connection in community-led spaces where reviews, feedback and brand accountability matter.
We’ve outlined the marketing and sales priorities we believe will define competitive advantage for SaaS and technology companies in 2026 - and what CMOs, CROs and revenue leaders need to put in place to stay ahead of competition.
1. A Unified Go-To-Market Team
In 2026, the most successful B2B companies will operate under one single GTM sales and marketing function. Revenue growth won’t come from isolated activity or the efforts of an individual sales hero, but instead, from tightly aligned teams, operating under unified leadership, and working against a set of common commercial goals. It is imperative. This begins with fully aligned definitions of ideal customer profiles, agreement on buying committees, and a genuine definition of what constitutes a qualified pipeline, to ensure everyone is targeting the same accounts, the same decision-makers, and the same revenue opportunities.
Crucially, this alignment extends to joint ownership of targets, where marketing is accountable not just for awareness or demand creation, but for measurable contribution to pipeline progression and ARR. Marketing owns a seat at the table. Lead volume alone is not enough of a success metric. Instead, high-performing marketers will be measured on their ability to influence outcomes, implementing clear and measurable strategies that actually show account engagement, opportunity creation, expansion and retention.
This is a fundamental shift in how marketing operates inside SaaS organisations. The era of marketing as a downstream support function is over. In 2026, marketing must function as a revenue partner. Where this level of alignment doesn’t exist (particularly in organisations without a mature RevOps layer), the disconnect between marketing activity and sales outcomes will be extremely visible - and it will be the single biggest blocker to sustainable growth.
2. Account-Based Marketing Becomes the Default Enterprise Motion
We talk a lot about ABM at Arlo Marketing. We believe for most B2B businesses, ABM is a non-negotiable and essential part of a GTM strategy, which includes new business and customer acquisition. However, we also know from speaking with multiple clients, ABM causes confusion - it appears expensive, time consuming, unrealistic, and for that reason it takes a back seat. The reality is ABM is expensive, it does take time, it takes dedication to research and it cannot be done without meticulous planning and detail. But, when all of this is done properly, and with proper buy-in from leadership and sales, it will likely be the single most beneficial marketing tactic to drive sales.
In 2026, Account-Based Marketing is no longer a “nice to have” or a side experiment. It is the default GTM approach for mid-market and enterprise SaaS organisations. As sales cycles lengthen, broad-based demand generation alone is no longer sufficient to drive revenue. High-performing teams are concentrating effort where it matters most: a defined set of high-value accounts with defined commercial potential.
However, mature ABM looks different from the early pilot programmes we may have experimented with in previous years. The emphasis has shifted away from scale and activity, but instead towards hyper-focused commercial impact. This requires research and persona mapping into complex buying groups, and delivering highly personalised engagement across multiple stakeholders, not just a single champion.
In advanced ABM programmes, sales leads the account strategy, owning account selection, deal strategy and relationship mapping, while marketing supports execution with tailored content, events and campaigns designed to progress accounts through the pipeline. They seamlessly work together. Success is no longer measured by impressions or clicks, but by tangible outcomes: deal velocity, higher win rates, larger contract values and stronger account acceleration.
The strongest ABM programmes are fully integrated into the wider GTM ecosystem. They combine targeted digital activity with in-person events, executive-level engagement, partner-led introductions and account-specific content, creating consistent, high-impact touchpoints across the entire buying journey. Crucially, ABM is no longer treated as a marketing tactic - it is a revenue strategy, tightly aligned with sales priorities and designed to accelerate growth.
3. Events Re-Emerge as High-Impact Revenue Channels
4 days ago, the event tech giant Cvent announced its acquisition of ON24 webinar platform, a major turning point for the events industry.
The Cvent-ON24 merger signals a shift from fragmented event execution to integrated, revenue-driving infrastructure - particularly for B2B and enterprise marketing. By unifying in-person logistics with digital experience and engagement analytics, the merger reflects how buyers actually want to engage with events today: as a continuous journey, not separate physical or virtual moments. It elevates events from a marketing activity with soft metrics into a measurable GTM channel, linking engagement directly to pipeline impact. This aligns with the reality of modern enterprise selling, where trust and account-level insight are critical. The message is clear: events are back, and the bar has been raised. They must now be integrated, accountable and measurable.
Over the next 12 months, we’re expecting to support our clients delivery highly polished event experiences including;
Executive dinners and private roundtables
Curated leadership forums
Invite-only customer and prospect events
Partner-led events aligned to key accounts
The teams who will see the strongest results are those who treat events as strategic levers of growth, integrating these experiences directly into sales and account planning.
4. Customer Marketing Drives Sustainable Growth
According to Forbes, 84% of companies that improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue - and it's kind of a no brainer. Whilst new business will always be a priority, longer sales cycles, leaner teams and budgets, more conscious consumers, and more competition in the market means the cheapest and fastest revenue is no longer “net new”… it’s protecting and expanding what you already have.
That’s why we predict customer marketing and retention strategy will become a firm priority for tech businesses in 2026.
As new-logo growth slows, expansion revenue through upsell, cross-sell, additional users and product add-ons will account for a greater share of growth. But this only happens when customers clearly understand, adopt and continuously realise value from the product, which is where retention marketing plays a critical role.
Tangible deliverables as part of this strategy should include;
Structured customer advocacy programmes, including advisory boards
Scalable case study and reference frameworks
Expansion and cross-sell marketing
Community-led engagements
Regular customer feedback surveys and communication loops
At the same time, the increasing rise of smarter AI-enabled SaaS is raising expectations more than ever. We see it on LinkedIn everyday. Another new AI tool launches. Every week another “game-changing” update arrives. And amongst all the noise, AI has become confusing instead of empowering. As talked about above, customers quickly disengage if promised efficiencies and insights are not translated into real outcomes that directly benefit the end user. In an increasingly crowded market where many platforms claim to “do everything,” trust, relevance and long-term partnership have become the differentiator, and retention marketing - through onboarding, education, customer storytelling, leadership engagement and community - is how that trust is built and reinforced at scale.
Crucially, retention marketing also helps determine some really smart GTM decisions by generating insight into customer usage patterns - for example customers that are the most likely to expand or churn, product roadmap signals, pricing feedback etc. The result is a shift towards customer-led growth, where marketing is responsible not just for acquisition but for lifetime value.
In short, in 2026 SaaS companies that fail to actively market to their existing customers will see slower growth and an increase in customer loss - because if they don’t nurture, educate and re-sell value to the loyal customers they already have, competitors absolutely will.
5. AI Becomes an Efficiency Layer - Not a Strategy
There are literally thousands of stand out use cases which demonstrate the rapid adoption of AI in the last two years, and how it’s making a genuine difference across pretty much all sectors today. Scanning Google’s list of 1,001 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations, it’s clear from even the first few examples that the most impressive AI use cases are deeply integrated, well governed, and tied directly to customer experience. This is AI moving from novelty to infrastructure, and it’s what brands should prioritise in 2026.
AI focus has shifted from experimentation to practical, governed use of AI that genuinely improves productivity without compromising a brand’s integrity. The most effective teams are deploying AI to accelerate content production with human oversight.This improves targeting and segmentation, supports sales enablement and research, and surface insights from large and complex datasets. Crucially, AI is not replacing strategy. Organisations attempting to “automate growth” without a clear GTM foundation are already seeing diminishing returns, reinforcing that AI delivers impact only when applied in service of a coherent GTM and revenue strategy.
6. Lean Teams Demand Smarter Execution Models
On reflection, 2025 felt somewhat like a year of adjustment. After a prolonged period of economic uncertainty budgets were scrutinised, headcount reduced significantly (in tech alone, last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi), and decision-making slowed as leaders focused on efficiency, cash flow and proving ROI. Revenue teams were asked to deliver more impact with fewer resources, and many organisations spent the year simplifying strategies, cutting experimentation, and re-establishing discipline after years of rapid expansion.
2026 looks positive and purposeful. The environment is still lean, but it’s more stable. Companies have a clearer understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Growth is on the agenda but it’s being approached with tighter alignment between sales and marketing, and there already feels like there’s greater accountability across GTM. Teams remain smaller, budgets remain controlled, but there is a renewed confidence in investing where outcomes are measurable. Rather than rebuilding for scale alone, organisations are designing GTM models that are resilient and flexible.
The result is a leaner operating model with fewer specialists, less execution bandwidth, and far less tolerance for activity that doesn’t translate directly into pipeline and revenue.
Your Plug-In Growth Partner
And this is driving a decisive move toward flexible, plug-in growth partners who can operate as an extension of the revenue team, providing senior-level strategy and hands-on execution without the overhead or risk of permanent hires. Arlo Marketing Solutions is built for exactly this reality. We embed seamlessly into existing sales and leadership teams, align tightly to GTM priorities and revenue targets, and flex up or down as needs change. By acting as a growth engine rather than a traditional agency, we help SaaS organisations rebuild momentum, scale what works, and drive measurable revenue impact where efficiency, accountability and speed are non-negotiable.
We consult with leading SaaS and technology brands on high-performing revenue marketing strategies that work. Get in touch with us to discuss your growth priorities in 2026.
