What the 2025 B2B Content Marketing Report Tells You

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B Content Marketing Research Report is one of the most widely cited documents in the industry, and for good reason. It surveys hundreds of B2B marketers across company sizes, industries, and budget levels, and it gives you a reasonably honest picture of where the profession sits right now. If you want to understand what your peers are doing, where budgets are going, and which content formats are gaining ground, this report is a solid starting point.

But a starting point is all it is. The report tells you what B2B marketers are doing. It does not tell you what is working, what is worth copying, or what the gap is between the marketers getting results and the ones just producing content. That distinction matters more than most people acknowledge when they share the findings on LinkedIn.

I have spent most of my career in agency leadership, and one thing I learned early is that industry reports get read very selectively. People pull out the numbers that validate what they already planned to do. The stat about video content growth gets pasted into a deck. The finding about thought leadership gets used to justify a podcast. The uncomfortable findings, the ones about measurement gaps and strategic drift, get quietly skipped. This article is an attempt to read the 2025 CMI report more honestly.

What the 2025 CMI Report Actually Covers

The Content Marketing Institute has been running this annual survey for well over a decade. The 2025 edition covers B2B marketers across North America, with additional international representation, and spans companies from small businesses to enterprise organisations. It covers content strategy maturity, budget trends, channel and format usage, AI adoption, team structure, and measurement practices.

The methodology is survey-based, which means it reflects self-reported behaviour and perception rather than tracked outcomes. That is not a criticism of CMI. It is a structural limitation of any large-scale industry survey, and it is worth keeping in mind as you read the findings. When a marketer says their content marketing is “very successful,” that is a subjective assessment. It may or may not correlate with pipeline generated, revenue influenced, or any other commercial metric.

The report is well-constructed and the CMI team are rigorous researchers. But the gap between “we do this” and “this works” is where most of the interesting questions live, and the report cannot fully close that gap by design.

If you want to go deeper on content strategy frameworks and how to build a programme that actually connects to business outcomes, the Content Strategy and Editorial hub at The Marketing Juice covers the planning, measurement, and execution side in more detail.

The Strategy Maturity Gap Is Wider Than It Looks

One of the most consistent findings across CMI’s annual reports is the correlation between documented strategy and content marketing success. The 2025 report continues that pattern. Marketers who have a documented content strategy consistently rate their programmes as more effective than those who are working from an undocumented or informal approach.

This sounds obvious, but the numbers behind it are worth sitting with. A substantial proportion of B2B marketers still describe their strategy as undocumented or say they have no strategy at all. This is not a small, outlier group. It represents a meaningful share of the profession, and it explains a lot about why content programmes stall, fail to get budget, or get cut when times get tight.

When I was running agencies, one of the first questions I asked any new content client was whether they had a documented strategy. Not a brand deck. Not a tone of voice document. An actual strategy: who they were trying to reach, what those people needed to know or believe at each stage of the buying process, and how content was supposed to move them forward. Most could not produce one. Some had a vague content calendar. A few had a list of topics someone had brainstormed. Almost none had connected their content plan to a commercial objective in writing.

That is not a content problem. It is a planning problem. And the CMI data reflects it year after year. The CMI’s own content marketing framework is worth reading if you want a structured way to think about audience-first strategy development. It is more practically useful than most of the commentary that gets written about the report itself.

AI Adoption Has Accelerated, But the Governance Question Remains Open

The 2025 report shows a significant jump in AI tool usage among B2B content marketers compared to previous years. This is not surprising. What is interesting is the nature of how AI is being used and the uncertainty that still surrounds it.

The majority of marketers using AI for content are applying it to ideation, drafting, and repurposing, which are the lower-stakes, higher-volume tasks. Fewer are using it for strategy, audience research, or performance analysis, which are arguably the areas where it could have more commercial impact. This pattern makes sense behaviourally. People adopt new tools in the areas where the risk of getting it wrong is lowest. But it also means many organisations are using AI to produce more content faster without necessarily producing better content or more strategically useful content.

The governance question is where the report gets genuinely interesting. A significant proportion of marketers say their organisations do not yet have formal guidelines for AI use in content. That is a real operational risk, particularly in regulated industries or in organisations where brand voice and accuracy standards matter. Moz has a useful perspective on how content marketing teams should think about AI in terms of what it changes and what it does not.

My honest read of the AI section of this report is that the industry is in the adoption phase but not yet in the integration phase. Adoption means using the tools. Integration means building them into workflows in a way that consistently improves output quality and strategic value. Most teams are not there yet, and the ones that claim they are often mean they have saved time on drafting, which is not the same thing.

Which Content Formats Are Actually Gaining Ground

The 2025 report tracks usage across a wide range of content formats, and a few patterns are worth calling out specifically.

Short-form video continues to grow in B2B, which surprises some people who associate it primarily with consumer brands. The reality is that B2B buyers are also consumers, and the habits they have built on LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms carry over into how they engage with professional content. Short-form video is not a gimmick in B2B. It is a format shift that reflects how attention works now.

In-person events have recovered strongly since the pandemic disruption and remain one of the highest-rated formats for relationship building and pipeline generation. This is consistent with what I have seen across agency and client-side work. Digital content builds awareness and credibility at scale. Events close the distance. The two work together better than most content plans acknowledge.

Long-form written content, including research reports, white papers, and in-depth articles, continues to perform well for thought leadership and SEO, but the bar for quality has risen. The volume of mediocre long-form content online has made it harder for average content to rank or get read. The organisations producing genuinely useful, well-researched long-form content are seeing strong returns. The ones producing it because they think they should are not.

Copyblogger’s breakdown of how SEO and content marketing intersect is worth reading alongside the CMI format data. The strategic question is not which formats are popular. It is which formats serve your audience at each stage of their decision-making process, and that requires knowing your audience better than most content teams do.

The Measurement Problem Has Not Been Solved

Every year, the CMI report surfaces the same tension around measurement, and 2025 is no different. Marketers want to demonstrate the commercial value of content. They struggle to do it convincingly. The metrics they can measure most easily, traffic, engagement, social shares, are not the ones that resonate with CFOs and CEOs. The metrics that would resonate, revenue influenced, pipeline contribution, customer retention, are harder to attribute to content specifically.

This is a genuine structural problem, not a failure of effort. Content rarely converts in a straight line. Someone reads a white paper, attends a webinar six months later, gets a sales call, and closes. Which touchpoint gets credit? Most attribution models either oversimplify or overcomplicate this question, and neither approach serves the content team well when they are trying to justify budget.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one thing that process taught me is that the marketers who make the strongest case for their work are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones who tell a coherent commercial story. They connect the content activity to a business problem, explain the logic of how the content was supposed to help, and then show evidence, even imperfect evidence, that it moved things in the right direction. That is a skill the CMI data suggests most content teams have not fully developed.

Moz has a practical framework for setting content marketing goals and KPIs that is worth bookmarking if you are working through this challenge. The CMI report tells you what metrics most teams are tracking. This gives you a better framework for deciding which ones you should be tracking.

Budget Trends and What They Signal

The 2025 report shows a mixed picture on budgets. A portion of B2B marketers report increased content marketing budgets year over year, while others are holding flat or seeing cuts. The organisations most likely to have increased budgets are those that have demonstrated measurable results in previous years, which creates a compounding advantage for the teams that have solved the measurement problem.

What the budget data also shows is that content marketing is increasingly being treated as a core function rather than a discretionary activity in more mature organisations. This is a meaningful shift from the earlier years of the discipline, when content marketing was often a bolt-on to other activities rather than a strategic investment in its own right.

The organisations still treating content as a cost centre rather than a revenue-generating function are the ones most likely to see budget pressure. The organisations that have connected content to pipeline and retention are the ones with the strongest internal case for investment. That connection does not happen automatically. It requires deliberate effort to build the measurement infrastructure and the internal narrative around it.

Early in my career, I learned something about budget conversations that has stayed with me. The answer to a budget request is almost never just yes or no. It is a signal about whether the person asking has made a credible commercial case. When I asked for budget to build a website in my first marketing role and was told no, the issue was not the budget. It was that I had not yet learned how to frame a commercial argument. The content teams that keep getting budget cuts often have the same problem, not a bad programme, just a weak internal case for it.

The Findings That Get Glossed Over

There are always findings in the CMI report that get less attention than they deserve, usually because they are uncomfortable or because they do not fit the narrative people want to tell.

One of those findings in 2025 is the persistent gap between content creation volume and audience development. Many B2B content programmes are producing significant amounts of content but have not invested proportionally in building the audience that would make that content valuable. Distribution is treated as an afterthought. The assumption is that good content will find its audience. It rarely does without deliberate distribution strategy behind it.

Another underreported finding is around internal alignment. The marketers who report the highest content marketing effectiveness are also the ones who report strong alignment between marketing and sales on content goals and usage. This is not a coincidence. Content that sales teams do not use, do not understand, or do not trust is content that fails at the last mile. The CMI data shows this consistently, and yet most content strategy conversations focus on production rather than internal adoption.

Copyblogger’s piece on the content marketing matrix is a useful framework for thinking about how different content types serve different purposes across the buyer experience. It is a better lens for planning than format popularity data alone.

There is also a finding around team skills that tends to get brushed past. The report identifies a gap between the skills B2B content teams have and the skills they need, particularly around data analysis, content strategy, and technology. This is not a new finding, but the gap does not appear to be closing quickly. Organisations that invest in upskilling their content teams consistently outperform those that treat content as a production function rather than a strategic one.

How to Read This Report Without Being Misled By It

The CMI report is genuinely useful, but it rewards critical reading. Here is how I would approach it if I were using it to inform a content strategy decision.

First, distinguish between prevalence and effectiveness. When the report says a certain percentage of marketers are using a particular format or tactic, that is a prevalence number. It tells you what is common. It does not tell you what is working. Always look for the effectiveness data alongside the usage data, and be honest about the fact that even the effectiveness data is self-reported.

Second, filter by company type. The report covers a wide range of organisations, and the findings for a 10-person B2B software company are not directly comparable to those for a 500-person professional services firm. Look for the segments that most closely match your situation before drawing conclusions.

Third, use the report to identify questions, not answers. The most valuable thing a report like this can do is surface the right questions for your specific situation. If the data shows that documented strategy correlates with success, the question for you is not “should we have a documented strategy?” The question is “what specifically is missing from our current approach, and what would a better strategy actually look like for our audience and our goals?”

HubSpot’s resources on empathetic content marketing and visual content creation are useful complements to the CMI data if you are translating findings into execution. The research tells you the landscape. These kinds of practical resources help you build the actual programme.

Fourth, and most importantly, compare the findings to your own data. The CMI report is an external benchmark. Your internal data is more specific and more actionable. If the report says email newsletters are declining in effectiveness but your newsletter is your highest-converting content asset, trust your data. External benchmarks are context, not instruction.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the disciplines I pushed hardest was this: know your own numbers better than you know the industry numbers. The industry numbers tell you where you sit relative to peers. Your own numbers tell you what is actually happening in your business. The second set is always more valuable for decision-making.

For a broader view of how content strategy connects to business planning, editorial structure, and long-term programme development, the Content Strategy and Editorial hub covers the full range of decisions that sit behind a mature content programme.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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