B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2024 Research

By publishing tightly scoped, well-structured content that addresses clearly defined problems for a specific audience, AI systems are more likely to surface and reuse that content, even without established brand recognition. New brands can earn AI citations by focusing on relevance and targeting specific buyer questions, use cases, and decision criteria rather than broad category terms. High-impact AEO pages should be reviewed whenever key information changes — pricing, features, positioning, or category definitions — and when a topic area evolves significantly. Visibility tracking helps B2B marketing teams understand the competitive share of voice in generative search. HubSpot AEO includes a Sentiment Analysis feature that measures how positively or negatively a brand is described in AI-generated responses. Attribute pipeline and closed-won deals back to pages and topics that support AI discovery, especially comparison, solution, and pricing content.

Wonder why manufacturers with inferior products and processes regularly outsell your company? Over 2.5 million home services businesses operate in the U.S., from HVAC companies and plumbers to pest control specialists and… Most businesses think they have a traffic problem. If you’re serious about growing in B2B, you need a digital strategy that reflects how modern buyers behave. It drives organic traffic and supports every stage of the funnel. B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing,strategies used to sell products or services to other businesses.

The best setups connect customer data platforms, marketing automation tools, and product analytics into a unified system that tracks behavior across the entire journey. Customer journey mapping for marketers has evolved from drawing linear funnels on whiteboards to building dynamic, omnichannel experiences. The most effective B2B marketing teams have moved beyond grouping contacts by industry or company size and are now orchestrating behavior-based customer journeys that adapt in real time.

Challenges and barriers

Unlike tracking visibility (more on that later), traffic is a tangible, quantitative metric that B2B marketing teams can track and tie to real business impact. Although AI-driven experiences can reduce clicks, there will still be clicks from AI referrals, and traffic numbers remain a baseline indicator of discovery and relevance. AEO requires a new set of tracking and measurement goals focused on AI visibility, citations, and influence — not just clicks or SEO metrics.

Frequently Asked Questions About B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Write up a handful of profiles or bios that represent key stakeholders and decision-makers you encounter during the sales process. Whether you want to start a business-to-business content strategy from the ground up or fine-tune an existing plan, the path to success will follow many of the same steps. We tap into some industry expertise to get a sense of the perks and potential drawbacks of influencer marketing.

Weekly newsletters can increase brand reinforcement and lead generation by providing value and solutions that nurture leads and move them down the sales funnel. Remember that backlinks — or links from one website to another — should play a critical role in your B2B marketing, as backlinks from reputable websites can build credibility and increase website traffic. Focus on high engagement, making sure that the content you’re creating and distributing is original, aesthetically pleasing, useful, and enjoyable to your audience. While it’s important to incorporate hard numbers, high-quality statistics, and original research, it's equally important that your facts and figures resonate with your target audience on a personal level. Here are some other trends to look out for as you build your own B2B content marketing strategy. Weekly newsletters, LinkedIn content, long-form articles, and video content will be the best ways to connect with other businesses.

This includes your data analytics, MRM, DAM, and agile marketing management technologies. If you’re still doing it old-school, these repetitive, mundane tasks are probably costing your business more in the long-run. Make sure to allot resources for mobile app remarketing since research suggests that people tend to stop using apps after 30 days. Now that mobile has become a primary channel for media consumption; businesses need to take advantage of the opportunities for new traffic and data collection. There are over 5 billion mobile users around the world that you can potentially reach with mobile marketing strategies.

• SEO-driven content typically takes 3-6 months to begin ranking for competitive keywords and generating consistent organic traffic.
• I’d strongly consider going after that keyword.
• Guides are useful for educating prospects on your processes, tools or best practices.
• “A lot of small brands try to make a meaningful impact through their customer experience.
• The earned media from “a B2B company at the Super Bowl” was national anyway.
• The audience connected with her humanity first, then trusted her expertise.

With billions of unstructured conversations scanned and analyzed, you can see an overview of the impact your social media, PR, brand outreach, or any public-facing efforts are making. For over a decade, Sprinklr Social has helped the world’s biggest brands reimagine social media as a growth driver with a unified platform, industry-leading AI and enterprise-grade scale. Marketers who track performance in real time and adjust based on insights see higher engagement and better ROI. It covers benchmarking, conversion tracking, and ongoing campaign optimization to help marketers refine their strategies. These resources offer tips for tracking the right metrics and maximizing measurement strategies. Speakers covered how AI can drive content creation, support audience targeting, and help marketers optimize performance through data-driven insights.

Today you’re going to see exactly how to execute a B2B SEO strategy in 2026. Multichannel attribution software solves this issue by tracking the end-to-end customer journey. Cookie-based tracking technologies might have expired between the buyer’s first interaction to their final touchpoint, meaning you might think one channel is poorly performing.

Generative AI isn’t the only issue affecting content marketing these days. Over one-fourth (28%) say they’re not doing any of those things, while 26% say they’re unsure. While a lack of guidelines may deter some B2B marketers from using generative AI tools, other reasons include accuracy concerns (36%), lack of training (27%), and lack of understanding (27%). It's also a people and operational challenge in need of thoughtful and intelligent response.

A Demand Gen Report study found that only 27% of respondents said personas were aligned to their messaging and 30% noted that there will need to be some fine-tuning of their efforts. The ability to measure results and demonstrate that B2B marketing contributes to the company’s bottom line and enables business growth will help change the perception of marketing as a competitive advantage rather than cost center for organizations. For high performing B2B marketing organizations, they develop digital marketing objectives, not sales plans, that inform their company’s business strategy to help differentiate their brand in the marketplace. Compared to higher revenue B2B companies (37%), lower revenue companies (57%) are more likely to view the marketing team as an extension of the sales organization, and not as a strategic asset to the company.

Canto is a leader in digital asset management (DAM), helping global brands maximize the value of their digital content with an intuitive, AI-powered platform. ON24 provides industry-leading companies with a valuable source of first-party data to drive sales and marketing innovation, improve efficiency, and increase business results. ON24 is on a mission to help businesses bring their go-to-market strategy into the AI era and drive the next generation of event marketing. But gravity is not the enemy — it’s a force to design with. However, the people tasked with running them are too often undertrained, overstretched, or outnumbered by the tools. Customers now expect a personalized experience, and to deliver this at scale, marketing organizations need both AI and operational maturity.

When people comment on your posts and you don’t respond, they’re unlikely to comment again. Reveals company tech stacks, identifies decision-makers, and provides contact information for prospects engaging with content. Indicates b2b content marketing strategy keyword optimization effectiveness.