Emerging marketing channels: Reddit, Substack and GEO

Let’s start with an apology for the mild hypocrisy. This piece will have been posted through various channels, which means there’s a good chance that’s where you’ve discovered and clicked on it.

Obviously, your presence here proves that LinkedIn, email and other avenues can still be effective at driving traffic.

But the harsh reality is that our audiences are often much smaller than we think they are. We fall into the trap of expecting our followers and potentially interested parties to see what we’re putting out.

In most cases, this simply doesn’t happen.

The social media algorithms marketers rely on only showcase our content to a fraction of our followers, and that reach has only been getting worse.

All of this may be fine if you’re publishing without much of an overarching strategy. But this approach becomes a lot less viable if you’ve invested serious time, money and effort into a properly researched piece of thought leadership.

In that case, treating activation as an afterthought is a very expensive habit.

So how do marketers make sure the right people actually encounter their content in the first place, and build a process that improves with every campaign that follows?

Set up for success

Getting the resource behind any campaign is harder than ever. In a world of measurable metrics for unmeasurable outcomes, it can be especially tough. 

And because thought leadership programmes can be a sizable investment, the temptation is to spend heavily on the core asset at the expense of everything else. The research, the report, the film – it’s the thing everyone’s excited by because it’s a bit different from the day-to-day.

But if you don’t leave budget, time or internal capability for activation, you’ve basically bought a BMW and decided fuel is optional.
That may sound counterintuitive coming from an agency that specialises in thought leadership. But cross-channel activation is not a nice extra. It is the campaign.

Budget for it upfront, add contingency, and start planning before everyone disappears into production mode and re-emerges six weeks later clutching a PDF.

Test new marketing channels

If resources allow, we recommend testing your thought leadership campaign across multiple channels.

Not because ‘multi-channel’ sounds good in a deck, we’re not interested in buzzword bingo. This is about protecting the value of the content you’ve already invested in, and getting clarity on where to spend in the future.

By testing multiple channels – some trusted, some new – you can reduce your dependence on any one platform’s algorithm, priorities, or sudden identity crisis.

Admittedly, getting it right takes a bit of thought. It’s not just a matter of resizing the same asset into an increasingly complex matrix of formats and platforms.

Instead, it means understanding where your audience is, why they’re there, and what kind of message that environment will reward. Creating specific content concepts for each channel that are true to the proposition and findings of the campaign.

Study where attention is already being won. Ad libraries are useful. Even more useful if you can pair them with AI and spot patterns quickly. Mix short and long-term tests. Test in-flight, back winners. There’s nothing more ineffective than boring content.

Emerging marketing channels for 2026

Before diving into the emerging channels marketers should consider testing on, it’s important to note that for any B2B business LinkedIn is still the obvious place to begin.

It has the audience and it has the intent. People go there for ideas, opinions and professional signalling dressed up as thought leadership. And, thanks in part to the ongoing ‘reinvention’ of X, it’s become an even more important route to senior audiences.

So it is important to get it right.

Empower your people, regions and vertical leads. Let humans speak, not logos. Say something interesting. Have a point of view. Speak directly to the audience you want, rather than vaguely at the algorithm and hoping for the best.

But starting there is not the same as stopping there.

And once that foundation is in place, then it’s worth looking at the other channels beginning to matter more in 2026.

Substack

Our analysis shows a notable increase in publishing activity on Substack towards the end of 2025.

The platform user base is growing too.

Enough that even UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and former US Vice President Kamala Harris have turned up there, though we wouldn’t go looking to those accounts for communications best practice.

More importantly, Substack suits thought leadership unusually well. People go to Substack for a point of view. They arrive with a higher tolerance for depth, more appetite for detail, and a clearer willingness to hear from people they trust.

Actual people with actual perspectives.

That matters, because peer-to-peer marketing is changing the shape of thought leadership. The individual voice is becoming central, not decorative. 

The catch is that Substack is not a content recycling bin. Like a podcast, it needs a clear proposition, a consistent cadence, and a reason to subscribe. And, like a podcast, growth rarely happens by magic. You need a distribution strategy around the distribution platform.

Reddit

Recent Semrush analysis shows that Reddit accounts for a similar proportion of  citations in AI-generated responses to Wikipedia and LinkedIn.

That makes it strategically interesting, even if it is a little bit scary – particularly for B2B brands. But being visible on Reddit is one thing. Being visible there when you actually have something worth saying is another.

Reddit rewards discussion, not messaging.

The targeting matters, the tone matters, and your ability to handle disagreement matters most of all.

If your brand wants to show up here, it needs to be ready for scrutiny, scepticism, and the occasional public dragging from someone who remembers what your company did in 2019.

To do this well, forget the sale. Any thinly disguised sales pitch will be spotted immediately and dealt with in the traditional Reddit manner.

Tactically, that means choosing the right subreddit, contributing to existing conversations rather than only starting your own, and being transparent about who you are. “Full disclosure, I work for…” is often a better opening than stealth.

Approach it like a self-aware participant, not a corporate infiltrator.

If you can do that, Reddit becomes a live, highly opinionated – occasionally uncontrollable – focus group, and a place where credibility can travel further than you might expect, including into large language models.

GEO

Speaking of LLMs, you’ve probably noticed the explosion of acronyms for improving discoverability in AI search. I’m using GEO, partly for convenience and partly because we do not need another paragraph debating marketing terminology.

That conversation sits somewhere alongside ‘AI can never write like a human’ and ‘I built an agent to automate my business’ in my internal rankings of things I least want to hear at length.

But, whatever you call it, it matters.

It’s one of the biggest shifts happening in marketing right now. ‘Zero-click’ may still be slightly overdramatised, but a lower-click environment is already here.

60% of people get enough of an answer from an overview, summary or generated response to avoid clicking through at all. That means presence matters more than traffic alone. Specifically, presence in trusted contexts.

Forums, news sites, expert commentary, original data, cited perspectives. All of these help shape whether your brand appears in the conversation.

Which is why your underlying strategy matters more than ever. For most brands, rather than tackling broad megatrends, you should be building a small number of interlocking thought leadership pillars.

Where’s your angle?

Where do you have something distinctive to say, where your audience genuinely cares, and where the argument has some chance of being picked up, referenced, discussed or reported on?

Getting there isn’t about guessing, it’s about listening. 

Use discovery sessions with leadership and customers, social listening and media monitoring.

Work out where your organisation has permission to speak, where it already has evidence to contribute, or can credibly generate it, and where the surrounding conversation is already moving.

Build your hypotheses, methodology or lines of questioning on where the existing story ends. Then make sure the content can actually be found and interpreted. 

Don’t bury everything in a static PDF.

Bring a coherent, descriptive story – with the top-line findings – to your site. Support it with expert voices, original data, video, third-party validation and strong PR. Make content machine-readable by using Schema markup to give LLMs the structured context they need to cite you.  

From what we know so far, GEO is not really about gaming AI systems.

It is about building enough contextual credibility across the web that your brand becomes associated with the ideas you want to own.

Done properly, thought leadership is one of the best tools you have for that.