Content Marketing Statistics 2026: ROI, AI Trends & Tactics

AEO for B2B is the practice of creating and structuring content so AI-powered answer engines can accurately understand, summarize, and cite expertise when B2B buyers ask questions. This is why an answer engine optimization (AEO) strategy for B2B businesses is essential. Aventi Group was the perfect partner for our hypergrowth plans given their experience with complex technologies and a best practice approach to enablement. Aventi Group has been an invaluable resource, working as an extension of our Creative and Web teams to develop new company branding and lay the groundwork for our site refresh.

This process helps you identify the employees genuinely interested in creating, publishing, and engaging with content relevant to your brand on LinkedIn. If not, you can use a paid tool, such as Sprinklr, Oktopost, EveryoneSocial, or Hootsuite Amplify, that tracks employee shares, engagement, and who’s building an audience on the platform. If your team has time, you can look manually at your analytics and see who shares company content and drives engagement for company-initiated content. That’s not the company page’s purpose anymore.

Another 33% of the B2B marketers said they have a strategy, but it’s not documented. To reach your consumers in the B2B market, you need to publish a substantial amount of content on a regular basis. Meanwhile, 58% of B2B marketers believe content marketing helps increase brand awareness.

The 2X Effect:Agility, stability, scale, and results

Cross-reference your competitors’ SWOTs against your company’s own analysis to uncover the whitespace—areas where the market is severely lacking or strengths that only your company brings to the table. Whether you’re building a new plan or refreshing what you’ve got, 2025 is all about combining proven tactics with fresh thinking. The usage of long-form articles, including videos, blogs, and infographics, increased to 42% from 22% recorded last year. The usage of long-form articles increased from 22% in 2022 to 42% in 2023.

If your B2B content marketing strategy isn’t generating the pipeline results your business needs, schedule a free consultation with Peter Geisheker to explore what a more strategic approach could look like for your company. And transactional intent keywords are typically searched for by those very close to making a purchase. Preferably one that ranks for lots of different keywords. Well, I recently developed a neat little trick for finding these exact keywords.

Creative + Content

So yeah, people that come to your site from top of the funnel terms may not convert right away. Are people searching for “How to save money on shipping” ready to buy right now? But once you’re there, you have a GREAT chance of turning that effort into a positive ROI. This is why they’re shelling out 12 bucks for a single click.

If you are looking for an execution partner, check out our vetted list of top providers to find an experienced B2B SaaS content marketing agency for your brand. By 2024, the B2B digital advertising spending will reach $18.47 billion. This indicates an increase of approximately $2 billion in traditional B2B advertising spending between 2021 and 2023. 91% of B2B marketers now use content marketing, and digital ad spending has reached $19.22 billion in the U.S. alone. He focuses on helping businesses align marketing, sales, content, campaigns, and technology around measurable growth outcomes. By leveraging advanced marketing tools and strategies, Smarketers helps businesses convert leads into loyal customers and drive measurable growth.

Email marketing within content strategy returns $36 for every $1 spent, per Litmus email data cited by SeoProfy. According to CMI’s 2025 benchmarks, 87% of B2B marketers report content helped create brand awareness in the last 12 months, and b2b content marketing strategy 74% say it helped generate demand and leads. Lead generation results from content depend on quality and distribution strategy, but most B2B companies see meaningful pipeline contribution within 6-12 months of a well-executed strategy. How do I create a B2B content marketing strategy from scratch? The buying cycle is longer, involves multiple stakeholders — Gartner research shows more than 11 people on the average buying committee — and requires more educational, data-driven content. Critically, they’re not using AI to replace strategic thinking.

Understand Your Audience and Buyer Journey

Each of these examples is a published, public B2B content marketing example you can study. When buyers are evaluating, they search for "X alternatives" and "X vs Y." If your B2B content marketing plan does not include this format, you miss the moment when buyers are most ready to decide. The same BrightEdge data shows AI Overviews jumped from 36% to 82% of B2B tech query results in 12 months. The B2B content marketing strategy that compounds in this environment combines deep, original research, answer-first formatting, interactive product content, and distribution across the channels where buyers now actually consume.

• Outline key characteristics like industry, company size, annual revenue, and tech stack.
• Specifically, your content needs to target key decision-makers who work at the businesses that you serve.
• It establishes thought leadership, builds trust and credibility, educates potential clients, supports the sales process, and generates qualified leads in the complex B2B buying cycle.
• A lot of corporate marketing materials look the same ­ – a color pallet of blue, white, and grey, with some standard stock photography of people in suits.
• There’s a reason why memes, skits and videos containing trending audio are so popular for B2B brands.

Use keyword research tools to understand what your target audience searches for at each stage of their buying process. Whether you’re starting from scratch or overhauling your existing marketing efforts, the people you’re working with can make all the difference. If you mapped your content strategy to key business goals, you should be able to pinpoint the indicators of content marketing success.

Without the necessary data, you can’t understand who your leads are and how to reach them with personalized communications. Big data algorithms and advanced data analytics make it possible for marketers to deliver consistent omnichannel customer experiences across all platforms and channels. When people hear a piece of information, they tend to only remember 10% of it three days later. Make sure the internet platforms you’re using such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other services that underlie the marketing environment are integrated seamlessly. This may include data management platform, data protection, API services, cloud connectors, tag management, and the like.

Rebrands fail when they invent differentiation. The tagline “Make Smarter Calls” gave the campaign a thread, but the humor gave it reach. Just a story good enough that people chose to spend nine episodes with it. We used geofencing, historical data, and targeted job titles to reach specific accounts, then deployed across digital, CTV, programmatic, and podcasts. By meeting the audience in their physical environment first, we earned the digital attention that cold outreach never would have.