The Mindshare 2025 Virtual Summit opened with clarity.

Kelly Cheng, CMO at Goldcast, made the essential point: modern B2B marketing isn’t really about chasing demand. It’s about earning trust before demand exists.

She called it mindshare. In other words, attention with alignment.

Not selling, but signaling.

Not shouting, but showing up consistently in a way that makes you inevitable.

Mindshare marketing is about earning a place in your buyer’s mind before the buying cycle begins. It’s proactive brand positioning—not reactive lead chasing.

Kelly reframed marketing as a form of long-term leverage: an upfront investment in trust and relevance. A positioning strategy so when the buyer’s need finally emerges, you're already the default.

Then came Devin Reed.

Devin explained how “Mindshare-first marketing” works when applied on the ground.

His message was simple: if you're waiting for intent signals, you’re already too late.

Together, they shared poll results from attendees and to no surprise, video was king. It makes sense.

Video is scalable, personal, and persistent. And if you're not using video to earn mindshare, you're handing that edge to someone else.

This was a summit rooted in reality. Not “how to go viral,” but how to become trusted.

In the long run, the market rewards authenticity and consistency. Mindshare is just the precursor to market share.

And those playing long-term games with long-term people? They’ve already started.

Eventually, the conversation turned, as it always does, to video and social media. Not as trends, but as truths.

Rather than pitching tactics, Kelly and Devin spoke from experience. From the scars and successes of building trust in public.

They emphasized consistency over virality. Repetition over reinvention.

The game isn’t to chase likes or clicks. The end game is to earn loyalty. And that requires showing up, again and again, in the places your audience already lives.

Devin spoke about crossing the chasm of sales into content at Gong, and shared a simple but powerful insight: trust doesn’t start with product as much as it starts with relevance.

Lead with ideas, education, resonance and you earn mindshare before the sales cycle begins.

Kelly echoed this. At Goldcast, the strategy is community-first. Create space. Build trust. Let engagement emerge. You don't need to manufacture demand—you just need to stop repelling it with self-interest.

Devin also introduced a model: the content assembly line.

Start with something hard to fake—original research. Then atomize it. Turn it into tweets, videos, blog posts, conversations. This is leverage. The kind that compounds.

AI helps, sure. But the spark, the original thought, that's human. As Devin pointed out, AI may extend your voice, but it won’t find your voice. You still have to know what you stand for.

In the end, it's not about being everywhere. It's about being trusted somewhere, consistently. That’s where mindshare begins. And eventually, that’s where the market follows.

As the conversation deepened, it turned toward metrics, but not the ones marketers typically obsess over.

Devin made then made the case for inbound. Especially in SaaS, where the product often sells itself—if people already trust the brand. That trust isn’t built when someone’s ready to buy. It’s built before they know they need you. That’s what mindshare really is: pre-earned trust.

Kelly explored the line between brand marketing and mindshare marketing.

Devin cut through the noise: “Everything is both brand and performance.”

In the end, it's all one game. What matters is whether your audience is growing. If no one’s paying attention, nothing else follows.

They both circled back to video. High consumption. High signal. High potential.

If you're not using video to seed trust, you're relying on friction-heavy channels to do the work later. Video is asymmetric leverage.

Devin pointed to a strategy that hit home: edutainment. Teach, but don’t preach. Make it useful, but make it light. The right mix depends on where the buyer is.

Early? Keep it playful. Later? Get sharper.

Take long-form ideas, break them down into micro-content. Spread it wide. Let the content work while you sleep. If you’ve done the thinking once, don’t waste it.

Repurpose. Reuse. Redistribute.

That’s how you compound attention. That’s how you build mindshare.

When it came to webinars, Devin offered a sharp approach: don’t just post the whole thing.

Tease it. Lead with the insight. Show the value upfront, and let curiosity do the rest.

In a world drowning in content, attention is earned in fragments. You earn the full view only after you've earned the click.

The discussion moved into tougher terrain like distribution priorities, maintaining consistency, tying marketing to revenue. Everyone wants ROI. But Devin brought it back to first principles: audience growth precedes revenue growth.

In other words, you don’t measure early efforts by pipeline. You measure them by presence. If no one’s listening, nothing else matters. Engagement is the early signal. Revenue is the lagging one.

Play long-term games. Build trust in public. The numbers will follow.

As the session wound down, Devin left a final note: trust is built with quality, and lost with mediocrity. You need better content, not more. The kind of content people remember. The kind that earns a return not just in clicks, but in credibility.