So you’re trying to sell something that’s never existed before.
Not easy.
But in this era of rapid-fire AI growth, also not uncommon.
A lot of marketers right now are trying to figure out how to talk about solutions that are brand new to the industry, not just better versions of what exists right now. And they’re falling short. Not because the need doesn’t exist, but because buyers and marketers alike don’t know how to articulate it.
Ads aren’t designed to do the heavy lift of education. Jargony product pages don’t convert. And no amount of budget fixes a fuzzy narrative.
At the same time, buyers are being pushed to understand AI-driven changes faster than their teams can research them. That means they’re turning to people who can actually explain what’s happening—practitioners, original research, and voices they already trust—long before the formal buying cycle begins.
Nick Lafferty has lived this problem from the inside. As Head of Growth Marketing at Profound, an enterprise platform that helps B2B companies show up in AI search, Nick saw the mismatch clearly. Buyers needed education.
In this context, winning teams are the ones deepening reader trust, not increasing content volume. Here’s Nick’s approach to doing just that.
Key takeaways:
- In emerging categories, building trust comes before buyer demand.
- The most trustworthy voice for buyers is usually not the marketer. By bringing in subject matter experts who have a direct connection to your audience, you can build greater trust.
- Original research creates differentiation and inbound demand without paid ads, and speed of buyer learning is key.
Selling into a category that doesn’t exist
Breaking into an emerging category means marketing without a map.
There are no competitive benchmarks. No established best practices. And no shared language among buyers. (Yet.)
At Profound, Nick saw this play out daily.
Nick’s target buyers—SEO leaders, growth marketers, and CMOs—were being told ad nauseum to “figure out AI visibility.” In some cases, it showed up in their OKRs. But when those buyers showed up to sales calls, the message was consistent: “Please educate us first.”
“Their boss is telling them to go figure this out,” says Nick. “They’re getting pressure from the CEO, the board, the investors.”
This creates a familiar paradox for anyone selling something new:
- Buyers feel urgency but lack understanding
- They don’t yet know a solution like yours exists
- They assume your category is just a rebrand of old tools
- They’re skeptical after being burned by over-promised AI products
Traditional demand gen assumes buyers already understand the problem. In emerging categories, they don’t, and it’s the marketer’s job to close that gap.
To build trust, let the experts be the experts
Nick’s insight was simple, selfless, and maybe a little uncomfortable for most marketers: Prospects didn’t need to hear from him. Even if he was the one holding the megaphone.
Despite 15 years in growth marketing and a large LinkedIn following, Nick’s audience was broad. It included marketers across many disciplines. Profound’s ideal buyers, however, were technical SEOs who wanted depth and specificity.
But one of Profound’s team members, Josh Blyskal—who leads AI strategy and research—already had the trust, and the audience, Profound needed to reach.
“I would post and get crickets, and then Josh would post the same thing, and it would blow up,” says Nick. “The metrics made it obvious.”
Nick chose to move away from marketer-led thought leadership, redesigning Profound’s marketing to amplify SME voices. Marketing would build the system. The SME would lead the story. That shift became the foundation for everything that followed.
Building a research-powered trust flywheel
Step 1: Amplify the right SME voices
Don’t assume the founder or head of marketing should be the public face of your company. Look at the data.
Nick analyzed engagement across the team:
- Who gets traction when posting about the work?
- Whose audience matches Profound’s ICP?
- Who’s already earned buyer trust?
While Josh had the right audience of technical SEOs, he didn’t have a high follower count early on. But when evaluating the potential of his page as a platform, Nick prioritized the quality of the audience (“in-ICP”) over the quantity.
Profound decided to activate Josh’s LinkedIn to share more of their original research—and landed him a slew of speaker invites and over 10K new followers in a year.
If you’re trying to apply this in your own organization, start by thinking about the audience you need to reach and who already has credibility with them. That person may be internal or external.
If it’s not obvious, ask around, review engagement data, and make this part of onboarding or early team conversations rather than a one-off exercise.
Step 2: Publish original research on a consistent cadence
In a category with no playbook, research becomes the playbook.
Any findings you publish can become the go-to resource to help your ICP excel at work and lead internal strategy conversations, keeping your product top of mind for when the time is right.
To set up your own research arm, start by identifying the questions your buyers are being asked internally, and which ones don’t have a clear, trusted answer yet. Your research doesn’t need to be exhaustive, but it does need to be original, specific, and useful enough that buyers can reference it in real decisions.
Profound committed to publishing original research roughly once a week, sharing analysis no one else could replicate. Using insights from 1.5B user conversations, ~5B AI citations, and ~500M AI responses, they uncovered how AI platforms cite sources, which domains show up most often, and where brands were invisible.
This research did three things at once:
- Educated buyers who didn’t know where to start
- Positioned Profound as the expert explaining the space
- Offered SMEs a steady stream of material to react to and build on
When it came time to share their findings, Josh didn’t just repost company content. He riffed, added context, and mixed in his unique perspective. The research was the backbone, but the voice stayed human.
Step 3: In early innings, distribution beats attribution
In emerging categories, buyer journeys are messy, multi-touch, and difficult to track end to end. And so, at this early stage of trust building, Nick abandoned traditional attribution models to go all-in on distribution.
Once research was published on Profound’s blog, every piece was repurposed across other channels, including:
- LinkedIn posts
- Conference talks
- Newsletter sponsorships
- Sales enablement materials
- Webinars, both Profound-run and external
- Blog posts
- Earned media distribution
- Special distribution to Profound customers (often as early access)
Nick put it simply:
Does pipeline go up? Does ARR go up? Cool—then it’s working.
Profound tested aggressively. They found ultra-niche newsletters outperformed massive lists. Sales conversations improved because buyers arrived educated. Failed experiments were killed quickly, while winners scaled fast.
Speed mattered more than certainty.
When your prospects memorize your talk track
LinkedIn became Profound’s largest inbound source. Sales reps routinely heard prospects say they found the company through Josh’s research. “Josh’s name is mentioned in 90–95% of sales calls,” Nick confirms.
Even CMOs outside of Profound’s immediate network were citing insights from Profound’s research from memory. One growth leader publicly shared that they bought Profound specifically because of Josh’s analysis. That kind of organic validation is hard to manufacture.
The real outcome was becoming the source teams pointed to when making sense of the category, long before anyone was ready to buy. Profound didn’t just sell into the category. They defined how people talked about it.
FAQ
What do we do if subject matter experts don’t want to post publicly about our product?
Provide research they can respond to and offer to help draft or edit posts. Consistency and credibility matter more than volume, and both tend to increase as participation becomes easier.
How long does it take for educational and research content to translate to sales?
In new categories than AI, pipeline results tend to appear earlier than traditional demand programs—but not immediately. Early success indicators usually include stronger engagement, inbound references, and more informed sales conversations, with revenue impact following later.
How can our company publish original research if we don’t have proprietary data?
Start by organizing your unique insights from customer conversations, implementation patterns, or recurring questions raised by sales. Large datasets are not required to build authority. Clear, relevant observations are often more valuable to buyers than scale alone.
