32 B2B Marketing Statistics, Trends, and Data Points for 2026

This research asset compiles verified, primary-source B2B marketing statistics for 2024 through 2026: budgets, channel mix, content and demand generation, account-based marketing (ABM) adoption, sales and marketing alignment, AI usage, and return on investment. Most figures below come from self-reported practitioner surveys, so each statistic is attributed to its publisher, year, geography, and sample where available, and methodological limits are flagged throughout. Where industry sources conflict, the disagreement is stated rather than smoothed over.

Executive Summary

• Marketing budgets sat at 7.7% of company revenue in both 2024 and 2025 across surveyed CMOs in North America, the UK, and Europe, down from an 11% pre-pandemic average. Source: Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey.
• 46% of B2B marketers expected their content marketing budget to rise in 2025, while 41% expected it to hold flat; survey fielded June to August 2024, mostly North America. Source: Content Marketing Institute (CMI) / MarketingProfs, 2025 B2B benchmark.
• 81% of B2B content teams reported using generative AI tools in 2024, but only 19% had integrated AI into daily workflows and 45% had no AI guidelines. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• 64% of marketers reported an account-based or target-account practice in the 2024 benchmark; budgets split roughly evenly across inbound, outbound, and ABM. Source: 6sense 2024 ABM Benchmark.
• 73% of B2B decision-makers said thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing a vendor than its marketing and product materials; survey of nearly 3,500 professionals across seven countries. Source: 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report.
• Forrester reported that customer-aligned organizations achieve 2.4x higher revenue growth than less-aligned peers (announced February 2023). Source: Forrester, 2023.
• 86.4% of marketing teams said they use AI in at least a few areas in HubSpot’s 2026 survey of 1,500-plus global marketers, with content creation the leading use case. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing.
• 56% of B2B marketers said they find it difficult to attribute ROI to content, the single most common measurement challenge reported. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.

Key Findings

• Overall marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of company revenue in 2025, unchanged from 2024, per Gartner’s survey of 402 marketing leaders in North America, the UK, and Europe conducted February to March 2025. Source: Gartner 2025.
• Roughly half of CMOs reported budgets of 6% of revenue or less in 2025, and many reported insufficient funds to deliver their strategy. Source: Gartner 2025.
• 61% of B2B marketers planned to increase investment in video in 2025, the top investment area named in CMI’s 2024 survey of 980 B2B respondents. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• 52% of B2B marketers planned more investment in thought-leadership content for 2025, ahead of paid advertising at 40%. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• LinkedIn was named the social platform delivering the best value by 85% of B2B marketers in 2024, far ahead of any other platform. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• 76% of B2B organizations reported having a dedicated content marketing team or person in 2024, though 54% of those teams had only two to five members. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• Only 29% of B2B marketers rated their content strategy as extremely or very effective, while 58% called it moderately effective in 2024. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025.
• 64% of marketers reported an account-based or target-account practice in the 2024 benchmark, ranging from 57% to 67% across professional, business, financial, manufacturing, and technology services. Source: 6sense 2024 ABM Benchmark.
• 72% of organizations said they prioritize accounts with multiple leads in the 2024 ABM benchmark, up from 61% in 2022. Source: 6sense 2024 ABM Benchmark.
• 90% of decision-makers and C-suite executives said they would be more receptive to outreach from a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership, in a 2024 survey across seven countries. Source: Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024.
• 70% of C-suite leaders said a piece of thought leadership at least occasionally led them to reconsider working with an existing supplier, in 2024. Source: Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024.
• 82% of C-level executives believed their sales and marketing teams were aligned, while 65% of frontline staff reported experiencing a lack of alignment, in Forrester 2024 research as cited by practitioners. Source: Forrester, 2024.
• 54% of B2B buyers said they feel overwhelmed by the volume of content available, in the 2024 Content Preferences survey. Source: Demand Gen Report, 2024.
• 86.4% of marketing teams reported using AI in at least a few areas in HubSpot’s 2026 survey, with only 1.7% saying they neither use nor plan to use AI. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing.
• Measuring ROI was the top marketing challenge in HubSpot’s 2026 survey, cited by 33% of respondents, ahead of keeping up with trends and platforms. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing.

Marketing Budgets

Budget data is dominated by two publishers: Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, which skews toward large enterprises, and CMI’s content-specific benchmark. The two measure different things. Gartner measures total marketing spend as a share of revenue; CMI measures the expected direction of content marketing budgets.

Marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of total company revenue in 2025, flat versus 2024 at the same 7.7%, per Gartner’s survey of 402 CMOs and marketing leaders in North America, the UK, and Europe. Source: Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey. In the four years before the pandemic, marketing budgets averaged about 11% of revenue, per the same Gartner reporting. Roughly half of surveyed CMOs reported budgets of 6% of revenue or less in 2025, per Gartner 2025. A reported B2B-versus-B2C split from Gartner’s 2024 survey put B2B marketing budgets at 8.4% of revenue against 5.7% for B2C, though this split is widely cited secondhand and should be treated as indicative rather than exact.

On the content-budget side, 46% of B2B marketers expected their content marketing budget to increase in 2025, 41% expected it to stay the same, 8% expected a decrease, and 5% were unsure, in CMI’s survey fielded June to August 2024. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. Only 63% of those B2B marketers said they even knew their content marketing budget, a limit on the reliability of the budget-direction figures. HubSpot’s later 2026 survey found 79.2% of marketing teams expecting at least a slight budget increase for 2026, with 73% saying budgets faced more scrutiny than in the past. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing. The contrast between flat top-line budgets (Gartner) and majorities expecting increases (CMI, HubSpot) reflects that direction-of-travel survey questions tend to read optimistic even when aggregate spend is stagnant.

Channel Mix and Content Tactics

Channel data here is B2B-specific from CMI’s 2024 fielding unless noted. These are usage and perceived-effectiveness rates, not spend or attributed revenue.

Organic social media was the most-used distribution channel at 89% of B2B marketers, followed by company website blogs at 84% and email newsletters at 71%, in 2024. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. Short articles and posts were the most-used content type at 92%, followed by videos at 76% and case studies at 75%. Among paid channels, 84% of B2B marketers used paid media, led by social media advertising at 73% and search engine marketing or PPC at 64%; search marketing was also rated most effective at 61%. LinkedIn was named the highest-value social platform by 85% of B2B marketers, with Facebook a distant second at 28% and YouTube at 22%. The reported best-value figure for X/Twitter fell to 7%, and 39% of B2B marketers said they no longer use X, up from 27% the prior year, indicating a measurable retreat from that platform.

HubSpot’s broader 2026 data (mixed B2B and B2C) ranked short-form video as the top-ROI format at 48.6%, ahead of long-form video at 28.6% and blog posts at 22.3%. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing. Because HubSpot’s sample blends B2B and B2C, its platform-ROI rankings should not be read as B2B-specific.

Content and Demand Generation

Demand generation effectiveness hinges on content that buyers will actually consume, and the 2024 buyer-side data shows both heavy reliance on content and growing fatigue.

54% of B2B buyers said they feel overwhelmed by the volume of content available, in the 2024 Content Preferences survey. Source: Demand Gen Report, 2024. A plurality of buyers consume three to five pieces of content before engaging a salesperson, with about three in ten consuming more than five, per the same survey. On the producer side, 74% of B2B marketers said they achieved a goal of generating demand or leads in the prior 12 months, while only 49% said they generated sales or revenue, in 2024. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. 56% of B2B marketers said attributing ROI to content is difficult and 56% said tracking customer journeys is difficult, the joint-top measurement challenges. The gap between lead-generation success (74%) and revenue success (49%) is the central demand-generation tension in the data: marketers can produce pipeline signals more easily than they can prove revenue.

ABM Adoption

ABM adoption figures vary widely across publishers, from roughly 64% to claims above 90%, largely because definitions of having ABM differ and because many high figures come from vendor-aggregated blog posts rather than primary surveys. The most defensible primary number comes from 6sense.

64% of marketers said their teams have an account-based or target-account practice, in the 2024 ABM Benchmark drawn from 1,332 participants across two linked studies. Source: 6sense 2024 ABM Benchmark. Adoption ranged from 57% to 67% across professional services, business services, financial services, manufacturing, and technology, per the same report. Inbound, outbound, and ABM strategies each received roughly 30% of total marketing budget on average, indicating ABM is a co-equal motion rather than a dominant one. 72% of organizations said they prioritize accounts with multiple leads, up from 61% in 2022, showing a shift toward buying-group thinking. Figures circulating at 76% to 94% adoption appear in secondary aggregator articles and should be treated with caution; they are not reproduced here as primary findings. A commonly cited claim that about 26% of B2B organizations have a fully scaled ABM program also originates in secondary sources and is flagged as unverified against a primary publisher.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Alignment is the area most prone to inflated, repeatedly recycled statistics. The widely quoted 208% more revenue figure attributed to LinkedIn and several 2.4x growth claims trace back to older or press-release sources, so they are presented with their provenance and flagged.

Forrester announced that customer-aligned organizations achieve 2.4x higher revenue growth than less-aligned peers, in a February 2023 release on aligning around the customer. Source: Forrester, 2023. Forrester 2024 commentary reported a perception gap in which 82% of C-level executives believed their sales and marketing teams were aligned while 65% of frontline staff reported a lack of alignment. Source: Forrester, 2024. In Pipeline360’s H2 2024 survey of 424 respondents in the US and UK fielded May to July 2024, sales and marketing alignment ranked among the top three challenges at 44%, behind budget constraints at 48% and economic slowdown at 46%. Source: Pipeline360, 2024. The same survey reported that fully aligned teams taking a branded-demand approach reached their goals 80% of the time versus a baseline near 50%, a result Pipeline360 frames as a 60% increase in goal achievement. That 60% figure is a relative improvement on a self-reported baseline, not an absolute revenue uplift, and should be read accordingly.

AI Usage in B2B Marketing

AI adoption headlines are high but uneven, and the most important distinction in the data is between using AI somewhere versus operationalizing it. The two leading publishers, CMI (B2B-specific) and HubSpot (blended), agree on broad adoption and diverge on maturity framing.

81% of B2B content marketing teams reported using generative AI tools in 2024, but only 19% had integrated AI into daily workflows, 54% used it ad hoc or experimentally, and 45% had no AI guidelines in place. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. 88% of those using AI used free tools, while only 32% paid for AI tools, signaling shallow investment. Trust was tempered: 67% reported medium trust in AI outputs and 28% reported low trust, with only 4% reporting high trust. New AI investment areas appeared for 2025, with 40% planning to invest in AI for content optimization and 39% in AI for content creation. In HubSpot’s 2026 survey, 86.4% of marketing teams said they use AI in at least a few areas, content creation led use cases at 42.5% using it extensively, and 68.2% said they understand how to use AI in marketing, up from 47% the prior year. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing. The CMI low-trust and no-guidelines figures are the more sobering counterweight to HubSpot’s adoption optimism.

ROI and Effectiveness

ROI is consistently reported as the hardest thing to measure in B2B marketing, which means most ROI statistics are really challenge-prevalence figures rather than verified financial returns.

Measuring ROI was the single most-cited marketing challenge in HubSpot’s 2026 survey at 33%. Source: HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing. 56% of B2B marketers said attributing ROI to content is difficult, per CMI. Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. On the buyer-trust side that underpins long-run ROI, 73% of B2B decision-makers said thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for evaluating a vendor than marketing materials, and 90% said strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to outreach, in the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn survey of nearly 3,500 professionals. Source: Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024. These trust figures are leading indicators of ROI, not measured returns.

Original Synthesis

The three derived insights below combine the public datasets above. Each states its logic, inputs, and limits. None should be read as a precise measurement; they are directional comparisons across self-reported surveys with different samples.

1. The AI adoption-to-operationalization gap. Logic: subtract the share of B2B teams that have integrated AI into daily workflows (19%) from the share that report using AI tools at all (81%), both from CMI 2024. The 62-point gap quantifies how much AI use is still experimental rather than embedded. Inputs: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. Limitation: both figures are self-reported in one survey, and integrated into daily workflows is a subjective threshold.

2. The demand-to-revenue conversion gap. Logic: compare the share of B2B marketers who said they achieved a demand or lead-generation goal (74%) with the share who said they generated sales or revenue (49%), both from CMI 2024. The 25-point difference frames how far lead success outruns revenue success, consistent with the 56% who say ROI attribution is hard. Inputs: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025. Limitation: goal achievement is self-assessed and the two goals are not held by identical respondent sets.

3. The alignment perception-reality spread. Logic: subtract the share of frontline staff reporting a lack of alignment (65%) from the share of executives who believe teams are aligned (82%) in Forrester 2024 commentary, yielding a 17-point spread between leadership confidence and frontline experience. Read alongside Pipeline360’s finding that 44% rank alignment among their top three challenges, it shows alignment is a persistent execution problem, not a solved one. Inputs: Forrester, 2024; Pipeline360, 2024. Limitation: the two Forrester figures measure different respondent groups (executives versus frontline), so the spread is a perception comparison, not a single-population delta.

Data Tables

Sources, in row order: Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey (rows 1-3); CMI / MarketingProfs 2025 (row 4); HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing (row 5). The Gartner rows reflect a survey skewed toward companies with revenue above 1 billion dollars.

Source for all rows: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025 B2B benchmark, fielded June to August 2024, 980 B2B respondents, mostly North America.

Sources: CMI / MarketingProfs 2025 (rows 1-3); HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing (row 4); 6sense 2024 ABM Benchmark (rows 5-6).

Charts to build

• Marketing budget as a share of revenue, pre-pandemic vs 2024 vs 2025. Data needed: ~11% (2016-2019 average), 7.7% (2024), 7.7% (2025). Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey. Insight: budgets reset roughly a third lower than pre-pandemic and have stalled. Citation-worthy because it is a clean primary-source time comparison from a single publisher.
• AI use vs AI operationalization in B2B teams. Data needed: 81% use any AI, 54% ad hoc, 19% integrated into daily workflows, 45% no guidelines. Source: CMI 2024. Insight: adoption is broad but shallow. Citation-worthy because it reframes the inflated everyone-uses-AI headline.
• Demand-generation success vs revenue success. Data needed: 74% achieved demand or lead goal, 49% achieved sales or revenue goal, 56% find ROI attribution hard. Source: CMI 2024. Insight: the pipeline-to-revenue proof gap. Citation-worthy because it links three figures from one survey into a single narrative.
• B2B channel value concentration on LinkedIn. Data needed: LinkedIn 85%, Facebook 28%, YouTube 22%, X 7%. Source: CMI 2024. Insight: B2B social value is heavily concentrated on one platform. Citation-worthy for its starkness.
• Sales-marketing alignment perception gap. Data needed: 82% of executives believe aligned, 65% of frontline report misalignment; 44% rank alignment a top-three challenge. Sources: Forrester 2024 and Pipeline360 2024. Insight: leadership overrates alignment. Citation-worthy as a cross-source comparison.

Inline bar chart, B2B social platform named best value (CMI 2024):

Source: CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025, B2B respondents.

Methodology

Source-selection criteria prioritized named, dated, primary-publisher surveys over aggregator blog posts. Included publishers are Content Marketing Institute with MarketingProfs (B2B benchmark), Gartner (CMO Spend Survey), 6sense (ABM Benchmark), Edelman with LinkedIn (Thought Leadership Impact Report), Demand Gen Report (Content Preferences Survey), Pipeline360 (State of B2B Pipeline Growth), Forrester (public releases and blogs), and HubSpot (State of Marketing). Each statistic was checked against the publisher’s own page or release rather than a third-party summary wherever the source was reachable.

Inclusion rules: a statistic was included only if it carried an identifiable publisher, a year, and a usable geography or sample. Exclusion rules: aggregator figures with no traceable primary source were excluded or explicitly flagged, including the various 76% to 94% ABM adoption claims and the 208% revenue-from-alignment claim. Conflicting numbers were handled by presenting the primary-source figure and naming the conflict, as with budget direction (Gartner flat versus CMI and HubSpot increases) and ABM adoption (64% primary versus higher secondary claims). Derived estimates in the Original Synthesis section are simple subtractions or comparisons between figures from the same or named surveys, with their limitations stated. All figures are self-reported survey data unless tied to a specific financial release; none are independently audited. Most samples skew toward North America and toward larger companies, especially Gartner. Date of last update: June 30, 2026.

Source Quality

Tier 1 (primary, large-sample industry research): Gartner CMO Spend Survey; Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. These carry disclosed methodologies, large samples, and multi-country scope.

Tier 2 (credible vendor or trade research with disclosed samples): Content Marketing Institute / MarketingProfs B2B benchmark; 6sense ABM Benchmark; Demand Gen Report Content Preferences Survey; Pipeline360 State of B2B Pipeline Growth; HubSpot State of Marketing. These are reputable and methodologically disclosed but are produced by parties with commercial interests in their findings.

Tier 3 (reputable journalism and expert commentary): Forrester public blogs and press releases used here for analyst commentary; trade-press coverage of the above surveys. Forrester’s underlying datasets are paywalled, so the public figures are treated as commentary-grade rather than fully reproducible.

Most Quotable Statistics

• Marketing budgets sat at 7.7% of company revenue in both 2024 and 2025, down from about 11% before the pandemic. Source: Gartner 2025.
• 81% of B2B content teams used generative AI in 2024, but only 19% had built it into daily workflows. Source: CMI 2024.
• 73% of B2B decision-makers trust thought-leadership content over a vendor’s own marketing materials. Source: Edelman-LinkedIn 2024.
• 54% of B2B buyers feel overwhelmed by the volume of content available. Source: Demand Gen Report 2024.
• Only 64% of marketers run an account-based practice, and budgets split roughly evenly across inbound, outbound, and ABM. Source: 6sense 2024.

Data Limitations

Nearly every figure here is self-reported survey data, which is subject to respondent bias, optimistic self-assessment, and non-comparable definitions across publishers. Vendor-published benchmarks (CMI, 6sense, HubSpot, Pipeline360) have a commercial interest in the categories they measure. Geographic skew toward North America (CMI) and toward billion-dollar enterprises (Gartner) limits generalization to smaller or non-US firms. Several widely circulated B2B alignment and ABM statistics originate in secondary aggregators and could not be traced to a primary publisher; those are flagged and not presented as verified. Year-over-year comparisons mix publishers with different samples, so trend lines across sources are indicative, not precise. The Forrester 2.4x growth figure dates to a February 2023 release and predates the other data here.

Recommended Dataset Fields

For a downloadable CSV companion, recommended fields are: statistic_id; metric_name; value; unit (percent, ratio, currency); year; geography; publisher; report_title; sample_size; survey_window; respondent_type (B2B only or blended); source_url; tier (1-3); self_reported (yes/no); limitation_flag; last_verified_date.

Press Summary

B2B marketing data for 2024 through 2026 shows budgets stuck and proof under pressure. Gartner reports marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of revenue in both 2024 and 2025, down from roughly 11% before the pandemic. Adoption of AI is broad but shallow: 81% of B2B content teams used generative AI in 2024, yet only 19% had integrated it into daily workflows and 45% had no AI guidelines, per the Content Marketing Institute. Account-based marketing remains a co-equal motion rather than a dominant one, with 64% of marketers reporting an account-based practice in the 6sense 2024 benchmark and budgets splitting roughly evenly across inbound, outbound, and ABM. Buyers increasingly lean on content, with 73% of decision-makers trusting thought leadership over vendor marketing materials per Edelman and LinkedIn, even as 54% say they are overwhelmed by content volume. The throughline is measurement: ROI attribution is the most-cited challenge, and lead-generation success consistently outpaces provable revenue. For research context, see CO Consulting.

Suggested Headlines

• B2B Marketing Budgets Have Been Frozen at 7.7% of Revenue for Two Years Running
• 81% of B2B Teams Use AI, but Only 19% Have Actually Built It In
• The B2B Trust Shift: 73% of Buyers Believe Thought Leadership Over Marketing Materials
• ABM Is Everywhere and Nowhere: Adoption at 64%, Budgets Split Three Ways
• The Demand-to-Revenue Gap: B2B Marketers Win Leads Faster Than They Can Prove ROI

FAQ

What share of revenue do B2B companies spend on marketing? Overall surveyed marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of company revenue in both 2024 and 2025; a secondary Gartner split put B2B at 8.4% versus 5.7% for B2C in 2024. Source: Gartner 2025.

Are B2B marketing budgets growing? Top-line budgets were flat at 7.7% in 2025, but 46% of B2B content marketers expected content budgets to rise in 2025. Source: CMI 2024.

Which channel do B2B marketers value most? 85% named LinkedIn the highest-value social platform in 2024, far ahead of any other. Source: CMI 2024.

How widely is ABM adopted in B2B? 64% of marketers reported an account-based or target-account practice in 2024. Source: 6sense 2024.

How much of the marketing budget goes to ABM? Inbound, outbound, and ABM each received roughly 30% of total marketing budget on average in 2024. Source: 6sense 2024.

Do B2B teams use AI? 81% of B2B content teams used generative AI in 2024, but only 19% integrated it into daily workflows. Source: CMI 2024.

What is the top use case for AI in marketing? Content creation led, with 42.5% of teams using AI for it extensively in 2026. Source: HubSpot 2026.

How much do B2B buyers trust thought leadership? 73% said thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for evaluating a vendor than its marketing materials, in 2024. Source: Edelman-LinkedIn 2024.

Is content overwhelming B2B buyers? 54% of B2B buyers said they feel overwhelmed by the volume of content available in 2024. Source: Demand Gen Report 2024.

How big is the sales-marketing alignment gap? 82% of executives believed their teams were aligned while 65% of frontline staff reported a lack of alignment, in Forrester 2024 commentary. Source: Forrester 2024.

This asset is published by CO Consulting as neutral research. If you want help turning these benchmarks into a measurement plan, you can book a consultation.

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