Today I want to talk about B2B marketing and solopreneurship. I’m also going to touch on how the big corporations are changing as well, as the key difference is down to size and patience.
One of the things that came across is the State of Solopreneur report, which was put together by Adriana Tica.
You can go to her website (https://www.adrianatica.com/), sign up to her list and she'll send you the report. I also recommend studying the onboarding sequence she sends afterwards - it’s fantastic.
Back to the survey - Adriana’s in-depth data dive from 150 solopreneurs. These are people who either run one-man bands or have a few contractors or a tiny team of 2-3 people.
She wanted to go out to people who were not the big ticket guys. Not the ones with the teams and the fancy YouTube channels. She wanted to know what the rest of us were doing and getting on with day-to-day living.
And she did a really good job.
You've got everything there in terms of what people are spending their time on, what they're doing, how they're competing on social, and also on revenue generators.
Now, this work gets really interesting.
We're constantly told you've got to hit 100 grand, you've got to be scaling wildly, you can aim for a million, just shoot for the stars!
Nope. In real life, it’s much more modest.
The majority of surveyed soloprenuers are not doing that. 24% were making up to 250K and 36% between $25-50k.
So don't think that you're falling behind if you're earning under 100k.
Now I want to put this in context for my British peeps. $100,000 isn't actually that much. It's about £75,000. That's still more than the average salary, but you can make that as a senior manager in a council. Top earners in London firms are likely to take home £90k - £140k ($186,700).
So we're not talking big figures.
We're just talking about people making a steady income.
Now, whether or not you think that is enough to qualify as solopreneurship depends entirely upon how you define your work. Whether you're part-time or full-time. Whether you just want a few clients and you're happy with that, no stress. Whether your business is to serve a purpose.
Maybe you've got a disability, for example. Maybe you just want a few hours a day to work on it. Maybe you want to wrap time around your kids.
There's 101 different reasons why people go into business and a most of the time, it’s not to make megabucks.
So if I have to say anything, if you're a solopreneur going into 2026, define exactly what you want out of your business.
Actually put aside the money goals and decide what you want from your business lifestyle. If the only metric you measure is cashflow, it can end up being a gilded cage.
By defining what you want from your business, you can define your boundaries and then tell your clients. And clients respond well when you give them a predictable structure and workflow.
A few other things are happening in Adriana's report which I'm also seeing with the big boys (and I'll get onto that in a minute).
The first thing is people are moving away from social.
If they're spending time, it tends to be on 1-2 channels. Typically LinkedIn or Instagram, although we've got some outliers using TikTok.
Everyone is doubling down on email lists because they own them. Same with podcasts, blogs, and collaborations. This makes sense because organic reach has been throttled on social and compounded with AI slop. People get burned out at both ends of the content hamster wheel - the business owner desperately posting six times a day to game the algorithm and the reader who sees the same repetitive phrases and cadence across six posts from six companies (because AI wrote all of them).
If you do genuine heartfelt posts and go back to the messy, authentic style, you should actually start to get more engagement. Oddly enough, that’s why LinkedIn is going more lifestyle - it shows the human behind the screen and the conversation happens in the comments and DM's.
So what else are people doing and how are they ramping up the revenue? Well, the key is in asset and content creation. What you do is stack them up.
One of the things Adriana observed was that people that hit the high revenue do so after year three. They're consistently selling offers and reinforcing their core message with every new course, workshop or offer. They usually have evergreen content. They've got their welcome flow set up. They've got a small but mighty email list and they know what they're doing.
So once that happens, it smooths out and it allows you to go, "Right, I can add in referrals. I’ve got something to bring to a partnership. I can add in this affiliate link.
A lot more things become possible once you do that.
So this leads me onto the big firms.
If you're an agency or if you're a larger company, what is happening to you in 2025 and your planning for 2026? This is where I'm drawing on my own experience and what I'm hearing from my contemporaries.
Like solopreneurs, the bigger companies love their data. Typically, they have a newsletter, but it’s going for an overhaul, and they rely on SEO, ads, brand equity and outreach.
The Three Big Channels: SEO, Paid Ads, and Influencers
So when I say bigger assets:
Influencers can be extremely effective. In terms of cash, they're expensive, but in terms of time they're not.
And you have to remember that every time you give another task to your team, you've got that invisible overhead happening in the form of soaking up people's salaries.
So sometimes it makes more sense to say, "Right, let's pay an influencer that we know will work and will generate the assets for them, and that's going to be our campaign for, say, the first half of the year."
And that makes more sense than paying another person on the marketing team. The influencer allows the big brands to reach out to newer audiences and feed their brand presence back into SEDO, AI mentions and audience
Which leads me to something which I see a lot of.
You see a lot of repeatable content in the B2B world, but the soloprenuers that stay tend to shrink their offers down to just one or two. In terms of an eco-system, the typical path of travel is this:
Year One
Scatter-gun approach. Every client gets a bespoke proposal
Year Two
Consolidation. 2-3 packages, often with a testimonial attached.
Year 3
Offer ladder. The smaller ones are hands-off, the larger ones come with a high price point.
Year 4+
Either build a community, branch out into an agency or build a platform.
The more narrow your focus, the more you can pay attention to it, the more you can generate out of it.
CRMs and email lists, as I said before, are the key drivers.
Basically, everyone wants you off the website, off social media, and into their hands where they can control the narrative, the fix-downs, the cadence, and the timing.
Now, for the big boys, what you're looking at here is twofold. Usually it's two business streams.
For the high-ticket offers, where you've got clients that are serious about spending serious money, you need a sales team.
You need someone on hand to answer questions, follow up, do the outreach. That's still really, really important because it saves them time.
Despite how good your copy is, at the end of the day, they just want someone to sit down and honestly say, "Yes, it does this. No, it doesn't do that. Yes, I'm interested in this, and this is where you can get more information."
So high-touch is still very valued.
Unlike the old sales teams, though, one thing coming into play are automated workflows and AI doing the grunt work on the back end.
AI will be sitting there doing some of the research and feeding it back. It can pre-populate audience builds, for example.
They will say, "Do you want me to draft something? Do you want me to summarize the last 10 emails?"
It's speeding up the time-to-phone-call, which is very, very interesting.
So the sales team is still there, but everyone has a little AI minion.
Now, you still need to keep an eye on accuracy - AI hallucinates. So the sales team still needs to get to know the client or customer very well - which is where marketing comes in.
Because what we're looking at these days is what actions people take. Not what they say but what they do.
If we see them, for example, open and click on several pieces of content or download a PDF on the website, we know that they're highly interested in that. And that feeds straight back into the CRM, which then gives the sales team a chance to talk about it.
The other thing to bear in mind as well is advertising.
That's going through a little bit of a renaissance because social media organic reach has really throttled down. Saturation has gone up, which means that the cost per click has gone up.
I've also seen a renaissance happening in outdoor media and to a certain extent in the TV ad space.
And that's interesting because the TV ad space has become very fragmented, especially in the US, compared to what it used to be.
So what's happening is places like Netflix and Disney and Amazon are saying, "What we can do is placements, and we can do it across this broad range, and the broad range will typically correspond to these types of people."
Knowing what your audience is reading, watching, thinking, spending time on has never been more important.
The final thing when it comes to action-based segmentation is to bear in mind that list size really, really matters and this will be the case going into 2026.
Going back to Adriana’s report - a lot of solopreneurs have less than 500 people. So if you're thinking "My list is tiny," you're fine. You're not alone.
And typically the tiniest lists will have much better engagement than bigger lists. That's a fact of life.
With the bigger lists, what we're seeing is the first thing is once you get over a thousand, the compounding effect kicks in (which I mentioned before).
So my clients, once they hit 1,500, we generally see a lot more revenue come in.
(When I say that, I'm not talking about bought lists. I'm talking about ones which are organic. Ones that came in because people wanted to sign up to you. They've heard about you, they like you, they want more).
So you've got the numbers on your side for mass appeal.
The second thing you've got with the bigger lists is the ability to group people,. So you can say; "Right. These people are dormant. Let's set them aside. These people are VIPs - they open every email. These people are not too sure; they're wobbling."
It becomes a lot easier to derive from their actions what people are opening, what they're interested in, in order to send them specific copy.
And you've also at that point had enough people to make it worthwhile to spend the time on that.
So over 1,500, you can directly split your list based upon their actions.
In the global lists, you can do much more micro-targeting.
AI hasn't quite got there yet but it's getting there now. And I predict this is going to be a trend moving forward because this is where AI does excel. Saying, "Right, predictive analytics is in and we can craft emails based on X, Y, Z."
So you'll probably see a lot more personalization.
However, having said that, people don't really like AI copy. And typically the more natural language and the more personal it is, the more people like to open and respond.
So it's always going to be a balancing act based upon that.
My big prediction for 2026 is I think you're going to see a lot more short-form video being folded into marketing.
Now that's not something which can typically happen on email, but it can happen in places like WhatsApp and voice notes, for example, on Voxer. So people will be linked or lead to those channels which are still private and therefore owned by the company.
So I think that is going to take over because it's fast, it's personal, and at the moment, AI can't do a good job.
For the bigger companies, I think you're going to see cohort hubs and smaller communities pop up within their email lists which are dedicated to getting people results in a just-in-time manner. The problem isn’t the sale any more. The problem is getting people to the finish line, so they get the result.
On that note, going back to what I was saying, if you're just starting out your business and you've been overwhelmed by all this information, don't be.
Start small. Define what you want. Build your list. And focus.