At Simon/Myers, we elevate home and building product brands and build inroads with their crucial pro audiences. As Director of Digital Marketing, I’m always on the lookout for new ways these brands can reach and compel architects, interior designers and general contractors, especially in the midst of tariff upheaval and AI uncertainty. 

So I hopped on a (very long) flight to Inbound 2025 to soak up some fresh thinking.

Unsurprisingly, 75% of this year’s sessions were about AI. Topics included: 

• Rethinking Lead Gen: Your Blueprint for AI Growth
• The Creative’s Guide to AI: Thriving in the Age of Agents
• Democratizing Data in the AI Era

The list goes on. I attended a lot of these sessions, but they generally focused on how to think about AI-based marketing, rather than how to actually do it. 

A few of my favorite sessions included:

• The Marketing Millennial’s 5 Tactical Ways to Grow Organically on LinkedIn 
• Jay Schwedelson’s Email Marketing: Test This, Not That-What’s Working Now

Both offered discrete tactics to gain a competitive edge in a landscape that will look different tomorrow than it did today. They even offered examples of some of their favorite AI prompts. 

As a B2B marketer suffering from AI-induced brain fog, I found comfort in a concrete list of things to try – and if you didn’t make it to Inbound yourself, I figured you may, too.

Tactic 1: Ditch the Email Preheader.

Emojis ‼️, ALL CAPS, [brackets] and (parentheses) can all play a part in the quest to stand out in the crowded email inbox, but higher-end home and building brands don’t often want to compromise their elevated tone of voice with internet comms add-ons.

During his session, Jay Schwedelson shared an example of an email inbox where all but one email had a preheader following the subject line. By doing less instead of more, that one email immediately grabbed your attention, no silly emojis needed. 

The less is more rule applies to email content, too. Many of our clients rely on email to keep in touch with their Pro audiences, but these emails can become lengthy with different communication priorities. The kicker is that shorter emails see higher engagement.

Keep each block of copy to under three lines. Consider breaking out emails with multiple subjects into multiple emails.

Tactic 2: Retire the Word “Webinar.”

Continuing education is a key pillar of many of our clients’ programming for their architect, design and general contractor audiences. Education is offered through podcasts, certifications, in-person training and webinars — and Schwedelson had a bone to pick with that last one. His argument? Everyone has too many webinars in their inbox, so much so that starting an email subject line with “webinar” reduces open rates by 16%. We’re willing to bet that home improvement pros can relate to webinar fatigue.

But what else can you call a webinar? A video class, perhaps. A speaker panel. An expert forum. A digital workshop. Something that feels a little less stodgy is ideal, but A/B test a few different options. 

A lot of time and effort goes into planning, promoting and producing these events, and any tactic that ups audience engagement is a win.

Tactic 3: Add External Links to LinkedIn Posts Later… or Not at All.

I’m guilty of treating organic social as an afterthought, especially when dealing with hypertargeted B2B audiences. The Marketing Millennials’ session was a good reminder that to make the most out of your organic presence, you need to play by the platform’s rules, or find creative ways to skirt around them. Many clients treat LinkedIn as an extension of their newsroom or blog, but all those external links tank their reach and engagement.

We marketers have so many links we want to share. How else will we promote the events FKA webinars? The recommendation for this was simple. Publish your post without a link (and make sure the content works without it). Twenty minutes later, once you’ve made it past the initial engagement hurdle, edit your post and add your link at the bottom. Or, better yet, scrap the link entirely and design content purely for LinkedIn. Take your blog and turn it into a series of standalone posts. Share video clips from past webinars. Feed the algorithm the LinkedIn-first content that it craves.

Tactic 4: Up Your AI Competitive Research Game.

While neither of these sessions focused specifically on AI, they offered some examples of prompts to try. At S/M, we already leverage AI as a competitive research tool and are always looking for new ways to get smarter and faster on behalf of our clients. So here are just a few of the ways these presenters are using AI in their day-to-day:

• Uploading screenshots of an email inbox and asking for a heatmap of which subject lines are most likely to be opened and why, based on email marketing performance trends
• Creating a table to catalog competitor organic LinkedIn content, noting content type, topics, frequency and engagement metrics
• Finding the latest viral memes and cultural moments for the past week across Reddit, Instagram and TikTok to inspire organic content creation

Conclusion

Though it feels like everything in the marketing landscape is in flux, email and social are still the backbone of B2B marketing. According to another Inbound presenter, Neil Patel, email still boasts the highest B2B conversion rates by a mile. Rather than letting these channels run on autopilot, we’re always on the hunt for ways to stop someone’s scroll – and you should be, too. And while we’re at it, we can build AI into our marketing workflows one step at a time.