Ninety-seven percent of B2B marketers say they have a content strategy, and only 12% say their marketing was highly effective over the last year. Both numbers come from the same survey, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026, and the gap between them is the most useful thing in this year’s research. Almost everyone has a plan. Very few think the plan is working as well as it should.
This page pulls the B2B content marketing statistics from that study, adds context from CMI’s prior-year outlook, and organizes them so you can use them in a planning deck without misquoting anyone. The 2026 study surveyed 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly in North America, between June 24 and August 14, 2025, with sponsorship from Storyblok. Every figure below comes from that sample unless noted.
How B2B marketers rate their own effectiveness
Asked how effective their marketing was over the past 12 months, 12% of B2B marketers said highly effective, meaning they exceeded goals. Another 47% said somewhat effective, meaning they met most goals. Then 31% said neutral, with mixed results, 7% said somewhat ineffective and 3% said highly ineffective.
Add the top two together and you get 59% who think they are at least somewhat effective. CMI’s own read is fair: encouraging, but it means about four in ten are stuck in neutral or struggling. If you are presenting this to leadership, the 12% is the more honest benchmark for “great,” and the 41% who are neutral or worse tell you that an average program is not a winning one.
Content strategy is improving, mostly through better planning
On content strategy specifically, 13% said effectiveness improved significantly, 48% said it improved somewhat, 30% said it stayed stable, 8% said it declined somewhat and 1% said it declined significantly. That is 61% reporting improvement.
The drivers are the interesting part. Among those who improved, 74% credited strategy refinement, 51% credited new technology, 40% credited team restructuring or resource changes and 26% credited better measurement. Budget adjustments came in at 16%, market conditions at 14%, competitive shifts at 13% and audience behavior changes at 10%.
Read in order, those numbers make a quiet argument: refining the plan mattered more than buying tools, and both mattered far more than spending more money. For anyone asking for a bigger budget, that is a challenge. For anyone asking for a planning workshop, it is ammunition.
A practical note on using these numbers. When you cite B2B content marketing statistics in a deck or an article, give the source, the year of the report and the sample size, as in “CMI and MarketingProfs, Insights for 2026, n=1,015.” It takes ten extra words and it turns a number into evidence. B2B content marketing statistics quoted without that context get copied from blog to blog until nobody remembers where they started, and a sharp executive will ask.
Also be careful with percentages from subgroups. When CMI reports that 52% of AI agent experimenters saw efficiency gains, the base is the 28% who experiment, not all 1,015 respondents. Writing “52% of B2B marketers see efficiency gains from AI agents” would overstate the finding by a wide margin. Keep the base in the sentence.
The challenges that will not go away
The top challenge in 2026 was creating content that prompts a desired action, such as a conversion, at 40%. Resource constraints followed at 39%, and measuring content effectiveness at 33%. Further down, 28% struggled to create enough quality content, 24% to differentiate from competitors, 23% to align content with the buyer’s journey and 21% with cross-department collaboration. Understanding audience needs (20%), developing a strategy (16%), aligning with sales (15%), technology integration (8%) and governance (6%) round out the list.
For context, CMI’s prior study, Outlook for 2025, surveyed 980 B2B marketers and found 54% citing a lack of resources as a problem. The two surveys asked the question differently, so do not present the change as a trend line. What you can say is that resources have topped or nearly topped the challenge list in CMI’s research for years, and that the 2026 data puts conversion right alongside it.
What should a content team do with the challenge data? Start with the top item. If conversion is your weak point, audit your ten most-visited pages and check whether each one gives a reader an obvious next step that matches where they are in the buying process. A product comparison page needs a demo or pricing link. An educational guide needs a newsletter or a checklist offer. A missing or mismatched call to action is the cheapest conversion problem to fix, and it is the one most teams overlook while they chase new content.
AI is everywhere, but results are mixed
Ninety-five percent of B2B marketers say their organizations use AI-powered applications. Maturity is lower than that number suggests. Twenty percent describe their implementation as exploratory, 48% as developing, 24% as established, 5% as advanced and 3% as leading. So 68% are still exploring or developing, even though CMI notes that almost nine in ten use AI to produce written content.
Results split along a predictable line. Eighty-seven percent say AI improved productivity and 80% say it improved operational efficiency. But only 39% say it improved content performance, while 34% saw no change, 5% saw a decline, 7% were unsure and 15% said it was too soon to tell. AI is making teams faster. Whether it is making their content better is still an open question for most of them.
Beyond content creation, marketers reported using AI in email tools (36%), market research and insights (35%), conversational tools like chatbots (28%), advertising optimization (16%), personalization (14%) and predictive analytics (12%).
Agentic AI is early
More than a quarter of B2B marketers, 28%, say they experiment with AI agents. Among the more mature AI users, the established, advanced and leading groups CMI calls pacesetters, that rises to 43%. Only 3% of B2B marketers overall, and 6% of pacesetters, say agents are core to their strategy.
Among those experimenting, 52% report improved operational efficiency, 21% better customer engagement and 19% better campaign performance and ROI. On the downside, 19% flag data quality or compliance issues and 14% point to cost, integration or team adaptation. If your board is asking about agents, the honest benchmark is that most peers are testing, very few are relying on them, and the reported gains are mostly about speed.
Thought leadership, and the Pacesetter Gap
B2B marketers rated LinkedIn (76%), email newsletters (54%) and speaking events or webinars (52%) as the most effective channels for thought leadership. Two of the top three are channels a brand controls or semi-controls, which is a reason to treat earned media coverage as raw material for owned distribution rather than an end point.
The more useful finding sits in the comparison between pacesetters and everyone else. Among pacesetters, 75% track business impact from thought leadership versus 63% overall, and 51% track brand authority versus 38% overall. Twenty-four percent of pacesetters report substantial or widespread participation of their organization’s experts, compared with 18% overall.
We call the distance between those two groups the Pacesetter Gap, and it is the frame we use when Instant Press clients ask where to invest next. Calculate it for any metric by subtracting the overall figure from the pacesetter figure. For business-impact tracking the gap is 12 points, for brand-authority tracking it is 13 points and for expert participation it is 6 points. The biggest gaps point to the habits that separate leaders from the pack, and in this data they are all about measurement. Pacesetters are not publishing on different channels. They are measuring different things.
First-party data and personalization
Ninety-one percent of B2B marketers collect first-party data, but half describe their strategy as exploratory (19%) or developing (31%). The other half say established (37%), advanced (10%) or leading (3%). On data governance, 52% put themselves in the pacesetter range: established at 29%, advanced at 17% and leading at 6%. The most common data headaches were quality or compliance issues (24%), management complexity (21%) and resource constraints (13%).
Personalization is basic for most teams. Fifty-nine percent describe it as simple personalization in one or two channels, 35% as moderate, 5% as extensive and 1% as comprehensive. If a vendor tells you that every competitor is running AI-driven, real-time personalization, this data says otherwise.
For a team deciding whether to start, the personalization numbers are reassuring. You are not behind if you personalize only by industry or role in email. Most of your peers are doing the same thing. The better question is whether your first-party data is clean enough to support the next step, and the governance numbers suggest that for half the market, it is not yet.
Experiential marketing and ABM
Seventy-eight percent of B2B marketers allocated budget to experiential marketing, but only 30% rate their efforts as established, advanced or leading. On budget share, 40% put 1% to 10% of spend into experiential, 26% put in 11% to 30%, 13% put in 31% to 50%, 4% put in more than half and 17% were not sure. They measure it through engagement (70%), customer feedback (46%), revenue (46%), content performance (39%) and brand impact (34%). Fifty-one percent overall say experiential touchpoints shorten the sales process.
On account-based approaches, 19% use both ABM and ABX, 30% use ABM only and 51% use neither. Among ABM users, 18% say it significantly outperforms traditional marketing and 47% say it somewhat outperforms, while 6% say it underperforms.
Where the 2026 budget is going
Asked where they plan to invest in 2026, B2B marketers named AI-powered marketing tools first at 45%, followed by events and experiential at 33%, owned media at 32%, paid media at 25%, content personalization at 24%, tech infrastructure at 21%, social and earned media at 20%, agencies and outsourcing at 19%, research and insights at 15% and first-party data at 12%. Notice what is missing from the top of that list. CMI’s own commentary on the findings warns that organizations “hesitate to invest in the people who make the strategy real,” and calls that a mistake.
Compare that with the prior year. In CMI’s Outlook for 2025, 46% of B2B marketers expected their content marketing budget to rise, 41% expected it to stay the same, 8% expected a decrease and 5% were unsure. The questions are not identical, so treat the two years as separate snapshots, but together they describe a field that is still spending and increasingly pointing that spending at tools.
Set that hesitation next to the earlier finding that 74% of improving teams credited strategy refinement. The work that moved results was human. The money for 2026 is mostly going to software. The teams that close the Pacesetter Gap next year will likely be the ones that fund the people who decide what the software should do.