B2B Product Marketing: 7 Tips That Still Work in 2026

Key Takeaways

Most B2B buyers now make up their minds before a salesperson ever gets involved. In a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, 61% said they prefer an overall rep-free buying experience, and 73% said they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach (Gartner). That single shift (from “sales-led” to “content-led”) is why some of the standard product marketing advice from a few years ago has aged badly, while a handful of the fundamentals matter more than ever.

That shift changes what actually works in product marketing. Some tactics that used to be optional are now table stakes. Others that got a lot of attention a few years ago matter less than they used to. (If you want a deeper operational picture of what centralizing a catalog actually involves, our guide to catalog management software covers that separately.) Here are seven tips that hold up in 2026, with the reasoning and numbers behind each one.

Why B2B Buying Looks Different Than It Did a Few Years Ago

B2B marketing advice has long leaned on a familiar assumption: that buyers eventually talk to a sales rep, and marketing’s job is to get them there faster. That assumption has largely broken down. Buyers increasingly research and shortlist independently, and a majority say they’d rather avoid direct supplier contact altogether if they can. It isn’t just a preference issue, either: in the same Gartner survey, 69% of B2B buyers reported inconsistencies between what a supplier’s own website says and what its sales reps tell them (Gartner).

Two forces are accelerating this:

For product marketers, the practical implication is the same one that has always mattered, just with higher stakes: if your product information is incomplete, inconsistent, or hard to find (on your site, in a marketplace listing, or in an AI-generated answer), you lose the sale before anyone ever picks up the phone.

Tip 1: Centralize Your Product Data and Digital Assets Before You Do Anything Else

This is the foundation everything else on this list depends on, and if anything, it matters more today than it used to.

The problem it solves hasn’t changed: once a catalog grows past a few hundred SKUs across more than one sales channel, spreadsheets and shared drives stop scaling. Descriptions drift out of sync, images get duplicated or lost, and every new channel or marketplace becomes a manual export project. Product information management (PIM) software solves the data side (names, specs, pricing, attributes) by giving every channel one accurate source to pull from. Digital asset management (DAM) does the same for images, videos, spec sheets, and 3D files, so assets are tagged, versioned, and findable instead of buried in someone’s downloads folder.

What’s genuinely new is why this matters beyond internal efficiency. AI shopping agents and answer engines don’t read your homepage copy or admire your photography. They query structured product data directly, and if a field is missing or vague, they either guess wrong or skip your product entirely in favor of a competitor whose data is complete (see Tip 2). A centralized PIM+DAM foundation is what makes it possible to keep that data accurate at scale, rather than re-entering it by hand every time a channel or an AI platform changes its requirements.

The other piece worth revisiting: integrating your ERP system with PIM and DAM. A connected foundation like this typically lets teams:

Together, these are what let a product content operation grow without growing headcount at the same rate.

Tip 2: Make Product Content Findable, By People and by AI

Prioritizing faceted search is still some of the best advice out there. Faceted search, which lets buyers filter by price, size, material, certification, or any other attribute, remains one of the highest-leverage things you can do for on-site findability, because B2B buyers are usually looking for a specific spec, not browsing for inspiration. Faceted search depends entirely on clean, consistent attribute data; a PIM with unlimited metadata tagging and a proper taxonomy is what makes it work at scale rather than breaking down after a few hundred SKUs.

What’s new is that “findable” now extends well past your own search bar. AI shopping agents and answer engines have become a standard research tool in B2B buying, and they don’t browse a site the way a human does. They query structured, machine-readable product data and score how completely it answers the buyer’s question. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, announced in January 2026 alongside Shopify, Target, Walmart, and other major retailers, standardizes exactly this: a shared format that lets AI agents read catalogs and product attributes across platforms without a custom integration for every one (Search Engine Land). OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe, is moving in the same direction for conversational and procurement-driven commerce, giving AI agents a standard way to request structured quotes and pricing directly from a supplier’s data rather than a webpage (Anglera).

Findability now effectively has two audiences, and both are demanding the same thing (complete, structured data), just for slightly different reasons:

None of this requires product marketers to become data engineers. It requires the same discipline faceted search always demanded (complete, specific, attribute-level product data), applied a layer deeper. If a buyer or an AI agent asks “does this fastener meet ASTM A193 spec?” or “is this coating rated for outdoor use?” and your product data doesn’t explicitly answer it, you’re invisible in that moment, regardless of how good your product actually is. This is also where SEO and product content start to overlap directly with what some vendors now call product experience management, or PXM, the practice of treating product content as a full experience layer, not just a data field.

Tip 3: Treat Visual Content as Infrastructure, Not a Nice-to-Have

It’s a simple, durable insight: buyers respond to visual content more than text alone, and it’s a large part of what makes product page optimization work in the first place. What’s changed is the bar:

This isn’t just about producing more video, it’s about producing the right formats consistently across a catalog: short product demonstrations, 360-degree or multi-angle imagery for products buyers can’t physically inspect before ordering, and customer-created content that functions as social proof.

The practical bottleneck is almost never creative talent: it’s distribution. A single new product video or image set is only useful if it’s easy to attach to the right SKUs, resize and reformat for every channel’s requirements, and keep in sync when a product gets updated. That’s the job of a DAM with built-in asset transformation: one master asset, automatically rendered into the aspect ratios, resolutions, and formats each channel needs, tagged so the sales and marketing teams can actually find it again. Without that layer, visual content programs tend to produce a burst of great assets that quietly go stale within a year, which is a large part of why generic “add more 360-degree images” advice often doesn’t stick.

Tip 4: Expand Beyond Your Own Site: Marketplaces Are Core Infrastructure Now

Treating Amazon and Walmart as an optional expansion move (something to consider only once your own channels are “nailed down”) is outdated thinking. Amazon Business alone surpassed $60 billion in annualized gross sales in mid-2026, up from roughly $35 billion at the end of 2022, and now serves more than 11 million business accounts, including 97 of the Fortune 100 (Modern Distribution Management). For a manufacturer or distributor with a catalog of any real size, marketplaces aren’t a side bet anymore: they’re a primary discovery channel buyers already expect to find you on.

The operational challenge that made marketplace expansion painful in the past hasn’t gone away: every marketplace has its own attribute requirements, image specs, and category taxonomy, and manually reformatting a catalog for each one doesn’t scale. This is where a centralized PIM earns its keep. With Amazon-ready and Walmart Marketplace-ready export templates, teams can:

Tip 5: Design for Mobile and Self-Service, Not Just “Mobile-Friendly”

Page speed and avoiding pop-ups still matter operationally, but that’s a narrow way to think about it now: mobile and self-service aren’t a secondary experience for B2B buyers anymore, they’re close to the default. Mobile now accounts for roughly 59% of global retail ecommerce sales (Demandsage), and B2B sites are seeing the same shift directly: a 2026 analysis of 21 B2B ecommerce storefronts found mobile driving 70–76% of total site traffic (Elogic Commerce).

Layered on top of that is the self-service shift discussed earlier: buyers expect to configure, compare, and often complete a purchase without waiting for a rep to call back: McKinsey’s B2B Pulse research found 39% of B2B buyers are willing to place a self-service order above $500,000, and 20% would place $1 million or more digitally (McKinsey B2B Pulse data, via Elogic Commerce), so this isn’t limited to small reorders. What this means practically for product marketers is that your product pages (on desktop and mobile alike) need to carry the full weight of the sale: complete specs, clear pricing logic, and enough detail that a buyer doesn’t need a phone call to say yes. A platform-appropriate PIM integration, whether for Shopify, BigCommerce, or another storefront, matters here because inconsistent or incomplete content is what forces buyers back into a sales conversation they were trying to avoid. And a buying committee that can’t self-serve on one channel will often just move to a competitor who lets them.

Tip 6: Make It Effortless for Distributors and Retailers to Sell Your Products

Relationships with e-retailers and distributors (the Graingers, Fastenals, and Fergusons of a given industry) remain some of the highest-leverage relationships a B2B brand has, because a single distributor relationship can unlock access to buyers you’d never reach directly.

The mechanics haven’t changed much: every distributor and retailer wants product information and assets in their own specific format, on their own timeline, and manually assembling that per-partner (a spreadsheet here, a Dropbox folder there) doesn’t scale past a handful of relationships. What a channel-ready export template does is let you apply a partner’s specific format to your existing, centralized product data and export exactly what that partner needs in minutes rather than days. That speed advantage compounds: a distributor who can publish your new product line to their own site within hours of receiving it is going to prioritize your brand over one whose content arrives late or needs cleanup before it’s usable. The same logic applies to retailer relationships and any partner who resells or lists your catalog on your behalf.

Tip 7: Give Partners and Sales Teams Self-Serve Access to Your Digital Assets

Securing digital assets for easy, controlled sharing is still sound advice, and arguably underused relative to how much friction it removes. Sales teams, dealers, and marketing partners routinely need product images, spec sheets, and videos on short notice, and if the only way to get them is asking someone on your team to dig through folders, that becomes a bottleneck that scales badly as your partner network grows.

A branded, self-serve portal solves this directly:

For brands with a wide network of dealers, distributors, or sales reps representing the product, this is often the difference between a partner network that markets your products consistently and one where every partner is working from whatever assets they happened to save locally months ago.

The Common Thread

Every tip on this list (marketplace expansion, mobile-ready content, findability, visual content, distributor relationships, partner self-service) depends on the same underlying thing: product data and digital assets that are accurate, complete, and centralized enough to keep up. The rise of AI-driven product discovery has only raised the cost of getting it wrong. Incomplete or inconsistent product content used to mean a slower sale. Increasingly, it means being invisible in a channel, or to an AI agent, before a human buyer ever sees your product at all.

If your team is still managing product content in spreadsheets and shared drives, that’s the place to start, not the marketplace expansion or the video strategy. The tips that still work all assume you have a single, reliable source of product truth to build on, and if you’re still weighing which type of system fits your catalog, our comparison of PIM platform types is a reasonable next stop.

How Catsy Helps

Catsy’s integrated PIM and DAM platform is built around the exact problem underneath every tip in this article: getting accurate, complete product content out of scattered files and into a system that can feed your website, marketplaces, distributors, and AI-facing channels from one place. Built-in completeness and readiness scoring flags gaps in your product data before it goes live, channel-ready export templates handle the reformatting work for Amazon, Walmart, and individual retailer requirements, and a self-serve portal gives partners and sales teams direct access to approved assets without a bottleneck on your team.

If your product marketing strategy depends on being found (on your own site, in a marketplace, or by an AI shopping agent), it depends on the product data behind it. Request a demo to see how Catsy’s PIM and DAM can support that foundation.