Most people think thought leadership is just putting out content.

A blog here, a whitepaper there – maybe even a webinar.

But, insight-led thought leadership doesn’t just add to the noise. 

It shapes the conversation. 

↳ It influences how people think, make decisions & the action they take.

That’s why I started iResearch Services in 2008, and TechInformed in 2021.

Today, we’ve helped companies like KPMG, Accenture, and Visa create bold B2B Thought Leadership content that blends deep research, data science, and human imagination – turning insights into influence. 

At iResearch Services, our thought leadership follows the 4Rs framework:

✔️ Revenue: Does it drive measurable results?
✔️ Relationships: Are your peers quoting it?
✔️ Reputation: Does it elevate your brand?
✔️ Real-world impact: Does it spark change or action?

Because if your content isn’t doing this, it’s not thought leadership. 

It’s just more noise.

We help our clients generate demand, build influence & enhance credibility. 

Our process simplifies the heavy lifting for B2B leaders & top-tier companies with our five pillars of reporting:

Ideation. Advisory. Insights. Storytelling. And Activation.

—

I’m also the CEO of TechInformed.

↳ TechInformed was born out of a simple idea:

✔️ Tech buyers don’t just need news – they need insights that drive decisions.
✔️ Engagement & lead generation – connecting tech decision-makers with the right solutions.
✔️ Research-driven content – uncovering the latest industry trends.
✔️ Strategic insights – helping brands position themselves with authority.

—

As well as a Founding member of Giving for Good Foundation.

↳ A not-for-profit on a mission to ‘Empower through giving’ by providing equal opportunities to children and women from low-income communities since 2018.

—

📩 Drop me a message if you’re interested in how we can transform your business or want to learn more.

Yogesh Shah

Lee Odden

VP Online Marketing

Owner & CEO at TopRank B2B Marketing Agency | Content, Search, Social, Influencer Marketing

As CEO of TopRank Marketing, I’m on a mission to elevate the B2B marketing industry by helping brands create more strategic, creative, and results-driven content marketing. 

I believe in empowering B2B brands to become the best answer wherever their customers are searching - through content, search, social, and influencer marketing that connects across the entire customer journey.

At TopRank Marketing, we bring that vision to life with a talented team of B2B marketing specialists and our full-funnel approach to modern B2B marketing: Brand, Demand, Revenue.

My current focus is on shaping the way we and our clients move B2B marketing forward with bold ideas, human creativity, and strategic use of AI technology. With over two decades of experience at the intersection of content, SEO, social, and influence, I’ve been fortunate to partner with leading global brands and contribute to the industry as a speaker, author, and advisor.

I’m the author of Optimize (Wiley), have written over 1.4 million words on the TopRank Marketing Blog, and have delivered keynotes and workshops on 5 continents. I’ve also served as an influencer for brands like Adobe, Oracle, IBM, and others who share the goal of advancing B2B marketing excellence.

After co-founding TopRank and leading its growth for 20 years, I returned as full owner and CEO in 2025 with renewed commitment and purpose. I’m excited to help shape what’s next for B2B marketing — and to help our clients do the same.

If you’re a B2B brand ready to lead instead of follow — let’s connect.

CEO & Co-Founder

CEO of TopRank Marketing where we help B2B brands create more authentic content experiences that inspire trust, drive engagement and influence action. 

Lee Odden is a digital marketing strategist, author, international speaker and bearded CEO of TopRank Marketing. He also leads agency strategy, industry evangelism and serves as coach and cheerleader for an amazing team of marketers.

His work integrating search, social, content, and influencer marketing has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Forbes as well as CMO.com and MarketingProfs. By combining a "best answer marketing strategy" together with "do well by doing good" values, he's attracted top industry talent and clients including 3M, GE Digital, Dell, LinkedIn, McKesson, Oracle, SAP, Content Marketing Institute and Slack. 

TopRank Marketing is a specialized digital marketing agency serving enterprise organizations with integrated content and influencer marketing solutions. As a pioneer in search, social, content and influencer marketing, TopRank Marketing advocates and implements holistic marketing programs that strengthen relationships, improve customer engagement and increase brand revenue. 

As an active participant in the marketing industry, TopRank Marketing publishes the only blog named the #1 content marketing blog three times by Content Marketing Institute.

One of the great pleasures of my role as CEO of TopRank Marketing is engaging with top B2B marketing leaders on our new podcast, #BeyondB2BMarketing. 

Many of the guests this season are people I've known for over 10 years with impressive careers ranging from senior marketing roles to CMO and CEO.  

We kicked off this first season with the amazing Ty Heath from B2B Institute at LinkedIn and wrapped up with the brilliant Stephanie Losee from Salesforce. 

In between, I had the opportunity to talk with an incredibly talented group of B2B marketing thought leaders and professionals on everything from martech to adtech, content, community, AI (of course), thought leadership, integration, influence, SEO/AEO, creativity and storytelling and the need for humanity in it all. 

Out of those conversations, there are 5 themes that stood out:

💡 Reclaiming the humanity of B2B Marketing with insights from Ann, Brian, Jon and Kathleen.
💡 Rethinking the power of brand to drive demand with insights from Jon, Ty and Rishi.
💡 Thought Leadership as an engine of B2B Marketing performance with insights from Cindy, Stephanie and Brian.
💡 We are entering the age of B2B influence with insights from Amber and Ty.
💡 Orchestrating the integrated B2B Marketing experience with insights from Heike, Christiana and Steve.

HUGE thanks to Tyrona Heath, Christiana Marouchos, Amber Naslund, Kathleen Booth, Steve Kearns, Ann Handley, Jon Miller, Cindy Anderson, Heike Young, Brian Solis, Rishi Dave and Stephanie Losee for contributing their expertise, experience and insights to help our community elevate B2B strategies. 

Be sure to check out my post on our B2B Marketing Blog this week where I wrap-up the season and share details on these 5 themes. And remember, there's no better time than now, to break free of boring B2B! 
https://lnkd.in/g_kaxPbV

Owner & CEO at TopRank B2B Marketing Agency | Building Best Answer Brands with Integrated Search, Content, Influence, & Thought Leadership Marketing

Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast season one wrap-up.

I'm happy to share we've launched a new B2B Marketing playbook based on the 6 pillars of Best Answer Marketing!

Research consistently shows that relevance, alignment, trust, and credibility are central to how modern B2B buying groups make decisions. 

Buyers are not just looking for information. They are looking for confidence that they can use to defend a decision internally. 

Best Answer Brands earn that confidence by working to address the questions of the entire buying committee. This is the strategy the current moment of B2B marketing demands. 

94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs during their buying process (6sense) and Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop 25% this year, due to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.

With AI-driven discovery and fragmented attention, becoming the best answer goes beyond volume or tactics. It's about tapping in to a system that delivers credibility and confidence to people and to the AI powered platforms that increasingly guide them.

The Best Answer Marketing Playbook was created to help B2B organizations do exactly that.

Download the BAM Playbook here: 
https://lnkd.in/g9qU6ZVD

In the face of disruption and transformation, confidence in marketing's ability to drive impact is more important than ever. 

So what is a confident marketer?

To help answer that question, the Association of National Advertisers conducted a study and found that only 39% of B2B marketers are "extremely" or "very confident" in their ability to measure marketing's effect on financial performance. 

Their research found several consistent characteristics of confident marketers including sales/marketing alignment, data and analytics competency, AI sophistication and original / unique content such as thought leadership centered in original research. 

Huge thanks to Patricia Riedman Yeager for including TopRank Marketing in the article and for citing our marketing work for LinkedIn and Sprinklr as an example of making best answer, human-generated content (research, influence, experiential content, multi-channel).

There's a lot to navigate in the marketing world right now and B2B brands are looking internally and some externally for sources of confidence. That's exactly what our Best Answer Marketing framework is set up to do. 

"A confident marketer is about being grounded in intelligence and insight about not only what your brand stands for and the value prop that you bring to your customers, but especially the pain points and the objectives of what's turning out to be a much larger group of decision-makers — explicit and hidden."

Check out the full ANA Magazine article here:

Open article: What are the Attributes of a Confident Marketer? by ana.net

What are the Attributes of a Confident Marketer?

Love the in/out list idea for B2B marketing in 2026 from Davang Shah at LinkedIn.

Here’s mine:

IN 
• Buyer questions driving content, SEO, AEO
• Integrated storytelling across brand and demand
• Trust as a system with original research, creators & earned media
• Content experiences designed for memory
• Optimization for multi-channel discovery 
• Unified analytics for full journey insight

 OUT 
• All brand and no buyer insight for content planning
• Siloed brand and demand execution
• Content promotion without proof
• Boring B2B content
• Guessing channel distribution 
• Fragmented metrics

I think 2026 is definitely going to be the year of Best Answer Brands!

VP, Marketing at LinkedIn / Google, Ford, P&G Alum / Yale MBA, Michigan BBA

What’s IN and OUT for B2B marketers in 2026 👇
 
IN ✅
• Precision over scale — reaching real decision-makers, not just more people
• Trust as the core KPI — being relevant and credible with buyers
• Being buyable from day one — partnering with trusted creators to earn buyer confidence
• AI-ready content — clear and credible content designed to be discoverable by AI
 
OUT ❌
• Ad waste — misplaced impressions erode performance and trust
• Vanity metrics — likes and clicks over pipeline impact and growth
• Polish without substance — looking good without driving outcomes
• Noise over signal — reach without relevance
 
2026 will reward credibility, not noise. The next era of B2B belongs to brands that buyers trust.
 
What’s on your 2026 IN or OUT list?

How can B2B marketers optimize their thought leadership content to be more impactful?

Make that content an experience that engages and creates both mental availability and contributes to buyability. 

From interactive experiences to events to video or podcasts - going beyond the PDF to make thought leadership content an experience goes a long way towards differentiating B2B leaders from the rest. 

It's great to see reporting on our new B2B Thought Leadership Research with Ascend2 from EMARKETER: Interactive, event-based, and video content top the list for impactful B2B thought leadership. 
https://lnkd.in/g_8TSpjK

Chart on how to make thought leadership content more effective

AI fatigue is real and so is the growing hunger for "what's real" in all aspects of what we do in business and marketing. 

As technology plays an increasingly important role in what we do to advance, there's always been friction between "mechanical" and "meaningful", operational efficiency and quality of experience. 

I think we'll see that friction play out even more in marketing this year as an opportunity to: 
- differentiate amongst infinite content and finite attention
- elevate brand as a full customer lifecycle revenue driver 
- improve the credible and memorable experiences we create for customers, and our own teams

I love how Lulu Cheng Meservey puts it:
https://lnkd.in/gKD4m4cz

"In 2026, narrative alpha will come from doing real things.

That means:
- Putting in real effort to create beautiful durable things that exhibit taste and craftsmanship, with zero tolerance for slop. As Thomas Paine wrote during the American Revolution: “What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”
- Showing real evidence for real outcomes, not flashy claims or vagueposts
- Designing real world events and artifacts, leaving people with memories that far outlast the cheap “impressions” generated by brainrot content troughs
- Showing up as real humans, with real flaws and foibles, instead of ultra-polished personas following AI scripts
- Forming real relationships that will weather time and tide"
 
h/t Frank Strong

Open article: Standing Out by getflack.com

What's the connection between B2B influence, research and thought leadership? 74% of B2B marketers who frequently collaborate with influencers say their research-based content is very effective, versus only 29% of everyone else. 

That's a finding from our newest research report, The State of B2B Thought Leadership in 2026 and it's just one of the topics we covered to kick off Season 2 of the #BeyondB2BMarketing podcast. 

In this episode I sat down with, Todd Lebo, CEO at Ascend2, on the findings of our joint survey of 797 senior B2B marketers on the intersection of original research, influence and AI visibility. 

In this clip, Todd talks about how original research can be validated and contextualized by industry influencers to help provide the "so what" factor. And this collaboration with influencers and brand is mutually beneficial. 

I know from our own experience at TopRank Marketing with producing and marketing research reports for B2B brands like Adobe, HubSpot and LinkedIn, adding industry influencers to thought leadership content adds credibility and distribution in ways that can really have an impact on reach, engagement and building brand trust. 

You can listen, watch or read the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gX9PXnDr

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Yogesh Shah

Lee Odden

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The Battle

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Lee Odden

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Lee Odden's LinkedIn Performance

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