The ultimate list of B2B digital marketing reports & benchmarks 2025/2026

B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark reveals one clear theme: trust has become the currency of modern B2B marketing. Nearly all marketers surveyed (94%) agree that trust is the key to success in B2B, shaping every deal, every decision, and every long-term relationship. In fact, 42% of senior B2B marketers say their top business priority this year is increasing brand awareness and reputation among decision-makers.

This latest benchmark study was conducted in partnership with research firm Ipsos, surveying 1,500 senior-level B2B marketers using a strategic blend of 70% expert network sample and 30% B2B panel providers. The research explores the key challenges, evolving behaviours, and emerging opportunities shaping the future of B2B marketing.

The report makes one thing very clear: video and influence now sit at the heart of trust-building in B2B marketing. As buyers engage vendors later in the process, trust has become the decisive factor influencing brand preference, credibility, and ultimately, pipeline.

Here are some of the most important B2B marketing shifts identified in the report:

• Trend #1: Video is no longer optional.
  78% of B2B marketers already use video, and over 50% plan to increase investment in 2025. Short-form video now delivers the strongest results for attention, recall and re-engagement.
• Trend #2: Influence has become a core strategy.
  55% of B2B marketers are partnering with creators, subject-matter experts and industry voices, signalling a shift away from generic brand messaging towards credible, human-led storytelling.
• Trend #3: Video + influence drives outsized performance.
  Brands combining these approaches are 2.2× more likely to be trusted and 1.8× more likely to be well known, while consistently outperforming on awareness, consideration and favourability.
• Trend #4: Trust is now the KPI that matters.
  94% of marketers agree trust is critical to B2B success, and 42% rank brand awareness and reputation as their top business priority for 2025.
• Trend #5: Buyer preferences form well before Sales engagement.
  Modern buying committees shape opinions early through short video, expert voices and trusted content ecosystems long before they speak to a vendor.

State of Marketing Report: HubSpot

Using survey data from 1,500 marketing leaders globally, the 2026 State of Marketing Report by HubSpot explores what marketing teams are prioritising in 2026 — their priorities, goals, and challenges in the age of AI. 61% agree that your taste and brand POV are more important than ever when humans and AI work together. 58% say that while search traffic is down, AI referral traffic has much higher intent, so visitors who do arrive on your site are much further along in their buying journeys than they used to be.

While AI is reshaping how marketing teams operate, the skills that truly drive growth remain fundamentally human. Creative problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and the ability to build trust and connection can’t be automated.

Nearly two-thirds say they need more distinctive, human-centred content to stand out in an increasingly automated landscape. Understanding how buyers think and feel, how to connect with them meaningfully, and how to earn their trust will always be a human responsibility. The most effective teams aren’t using AI to replace this, they are using it to sharpen their thinking, elevate their creativity, and strengthen the human impact of their work through practical, human-led AI training.

The HubSpot annual report highlights several key shifts that are reshaping B2B marketing:

• Trend #1: Brand is becoming a strategic performance lever, not just a creative asset
  Only 52% of organisations have a clearly defined value proposition that truly differentiates them from competitors, yet those that do treat brand as a data-driven discipline. Marketers are using competitor analysis, customer research, brand perception surveys and engagement tracking to validate positioning. Most teams now refresh their brand strategy quarterly or annually, reflecting a more iterative and adaptive approach to brand building in fast-moving markets.
• Trend #2: Omni-channel marketing is no longer optional
  Today’s marketing landscape demands presence across multiple platforms and channels. Only 6% of marketers now rely on just one or two channels. To stay competitive, 45% of teams allocate 10–20% of their budgets to testing new channels, while 94% diversified their channel mix last year. Notably, 4 in 10 teams said the most effective shift was moving from broad platforms to niche, account-based marketing (ABM) style communities, proving that a more focused audiences often drive higher-quality connections.
• Trend #3: Content by humans, for humans, converts
  71% of marketers say AI helps them create significantly more content but volume alone isn’t driving performance. The challenge is differentiation. High-performing teams are balancing AI efficiency with authentic storytelling, human insight and emotional connection. Human stories, behind-the-scenes content, partnerships and lived experiences are increasingly what cut through the noise and drive real engagement.
• Trend #4: Short-form video delivers the highest returns by a wide margin
  Short-form video is now the most leveraged content format and the highest ROI channel. In 2025, 104% more marketers named it their most valuable channel compared to 2024 and it’s where investment is growing fastest for 2026. With TikTok’s 1.6B users, YouTube Shorts’ 200B daily views, Instagram’s 3B monthly users (spending 50% of in-app time on Reels), and a 36% increase in LinkedIn video views, video dominates attention across both B2B and B2C.
  That said, format performance is contextual: small businesses are 23% more likely to see ROI from blogs, while enterprises are 24% more likely to see ROI from ebooks, reinforcing that content strategy must be audience-led, not trend-led.
• Trend #5: High-intent buyers from AI search are reshaping digital visibility
  Nearly half of marketers (49%) report declining traditional search traffic due to AI answers but 58% say AI referral traffic is significantly higher intent. Visitors arriving via LLMs like ChatGPT are much further along in their buying journey, converting faster and more efficiently.
  As discovery shifts toward AI platforms, brands must rethink how and where their content shows up across the digital ecosystem from SEO and technical foundations to AI answers and LLM citations. It is no longer just about being visible. It is about being understood, trusted and acted on. In this environment, smart marketing insights become the engine of optimisation, helping teams improve SEO and content performance through clearer visibility, stronger measurement and continuous optimisation for AI-platforms.

The APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research Report: Green Hat & 6sense

The Australian B2B marketing gurus at Green Hat have published their annual Australian 2025 B2B Buyer Journey Research Report, bringing fresh clarity to how buying behaviour is evolving across the region. The study surveyed buyers from 632 B2B organisations across APAC with two thirds coming from IT/tech, financial services and manufacturing, followed by professional and business services.

The latest collaborative research conducted together with 6Sense identifies a series of critical shifts redefining the B2B marketing landscape:

• Trend #1: Earlier engagement, later influence
  Buyers are engaging vendors 12 weeks earlier than before, yet they are still around 73% through the decision-making process before initial contact, meaning influence opportunities are shrinking while competition is intensifying.
• Trend #2: Bigger buying groups:
  The average B2B purchasing team now consists of 11 decision-makers, reflecting the growing complexity of modern buying cycles and the need for broader stakeholder alignment.
• Trend #3: New strategic forces shaping decisions
  B2B decision-making is increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence, economic pressures, and the rise of digital-native buyers in leadership and procurement roles.
• Trend #4 ABM is now a mainstream growth strategy
  57% of B2B marketers are planning or executing Account-Based Marketing programmes, with 52% reporting positive ROI, positioning ABM as a core growth engine rather than a niche approach through a data-driven ABM strategy.
• Trend #5: Content drives commercial outcomes
  Buyers who rate content as “extremely influential” are 131% more likely to purchase, reinforcing the business impact of high-quality, trust-building content across the buyer journey.

B2B Google Ads Benchmarks: Wordstream

Understanding whether your ads are truly performing is essential to maintaining strong search marketing results. Knowing how your CTR, CPC and conversion rates compare to industry benchmarks helps you make smarter optimisation decisions and invest budget more effectively.

For its 2025 Google Ads Industry benchmarks, WordStream analysed over 16,000 US-based campaigns, providing a comprehensive view of current performance standards across industries. The findings offer a valuable reference point for businesses looking to assess campaign effectiveness and maximise return on ad spend.

2025 PPC benchmark averages:

• Average click-through rate (CTR): 6.66%
• Average cost per click (CPC): $5.26
• Average conversion rate (CVR): 7.52%
• Average cost per lead (CPL): $70.11

These benchmarks set a new performance baseline for modern PPC campaigns, reflecting the impact of smarter targeting, better automation, and more data-driven optimisation strategies across search marketing.

To see the interactive year-on-year search advertising benchmark data from each industry, click here.

B2B Email Marketing Industry Benchmarks: MailerLite

Understanding the performance of your email campaigns is essential to nurturing prospects and driving long-term engagement. It’s not just about sending emails, it’s about knowing what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve. Tracking key metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, click-to-open rates and unsubscribes provides the foundation for building stronger, more effective campaigns.

Benchmarks play a critical role in this process. They give you real-world context, allowing you to compare your performance against industry standards and identify opportunities to optimise strategy, content, targeting and timing.

Using insights from MailerLite’s Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2026, this analysis draws on data from 3.6 million campaigns sent by more than 181,000 accounts across 46 industries. The results reveal a clear trend that engagement is rising, and so is the focus on cleaner, healthier email lists.

In 2025, opens, clicks and unsubscribe rates all increased. The rise in unsubscribes is largely driven by Gmail’s interface changes, which now allow users to unsubscribe with a single click directly from their inbox, even without opening the email. While this naturally increases unsubscribe rates, it also improves list quality by removing disengaged subscribers, leading to healthier engagement metrics over time.

Overall Email Marketing Benchmarks (All Industries)

• Average open rate (2025): 43.46% (Up from 42.35% in 2024)
• Average click-to-open rate (CTOR): 6.81% (Up from 5.63% in 2024)
• Average click rate: 2.09% (Up from 2% in 2024)
• Average unsubscribe rate: 0.22% (Up from 0.08% in 2024)

Open rate shows the percentage of the total campaign recipients who opened the email. A strong open rate suggests your emails are trusted, relevant, and anticipated by your audience. So, what’s a good open rate for your industry? Below are the average email open rates by industry.

• Agriculture & Food Services: 45.51%
• Art Gallery & Museums: 50.43%
• Business & Finance: 43.34%
• Construction: 39.95%
• Consulting: 45.96%
• E-Commerce: 44.78%
• Government: 48.52%
• Healthcare: 43.75%
• Higher Education: 43.98%
• Legal: 42.58%
• Manufacturing: 37.36%
• Non-profit: 52.38%
• Real Estate: 40.37%
• Software & Web App: 39.31%
• Telecommunications: 37.21%
• Travel & Transportation: 30.1%

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) shows the percentage of the people who open your email who also click on it. CTOR is a useful metric because it can show how engaging your email content is. A low open rate with a high CTOR suggests that the people who open your emails find the content relevant. Below is the average CTORs by industry.

• Agriculture & Food Services: 6.21%
• Art Gallery & Museums: 6.28%
• Business & Finance: 7.96%
• Construction: 12.38%
• Consulting: 47.67%
• E-Commerce: 4.01%
• Government: 14.72%
• Healthcare: 7.31%
• Higher Education: 9.15%
• Legal: 42.58%
• Manufacturing: 14.82%
• Non-profit: 8.24%
• Real Estate: 6.72%
• Software & Web App: 5.4%
• Telecommunications: 4.54%
• Travel & Transportation: 6.34%

What is the next thing on your to-do list? Check out the Mailerlite's steps on how to improve your email success metrics and outshine the competition.

B2B Social Media Benchmarks: WeAreSocial

Social media agency WeAreSocial released its Digital 2026 Global Report, with Australian data revealing the growing importance of digital in everyday life, as internet usage and social media engagement across Australia reach new highs.

According to the Australia 2026 Report, 26.2 million Australians, or 97.1% of the population are internet users, while the number of active social media users is 21 million, or 77.7% of the population.

The report also notes that almost 6 in 10 Australians now visit social networks to look for information about brands and products, highlighting its importance for brand discovery and purchase influence.

The following snapshot shows how Australians are distributed across major digital platforms, highlighting user scale and advertising reach to help marketers understand where audiences can be reached.

LinkedIn B2B Ad Benchmarks

These benchmarks give a high-level view of how LinkedIn ads typically perform across B2B markets. They provide a useful baseline for understanding efficiency, competitiveness, and cost expectations, but they should always be interpreted in the context of your objectives, audience quality, and sales cycle value. In B2B, performance is not about cheap clicks, it is about meaningful actions and commercial impact.

• CTR (Sponsored Content): 0.44% – 0.65%
• CPC (Cost per Click): $5.58 (global average)
• CPM (Cost per 1,000 Impressions): $33.80
• Conversion Rate: 5% – 15%
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): $15 – $350

Ad Format Benchmarks

Different LinkedIn ad formats deliver different outcomes, which is why performance varies across creative types. Understanding these differences helps align the right format with the right objective, whether that is awareness, engagement, lead generation, or pipeline creation.

Sponsored Content CTR

• Single Image: 0.56%
• Carousel: 0.40%
• Video: 0.44%
• Document Ads: 0.43%
• Event Ads: 0.55%

Message Ads (InMail)

• Open rate: 38%
• CTR: 3.6%

Conversation Ads

• Open rate: 50%
• CTR: 12%

Video Ads

• View-through rate: 29.5%
• Engagement rate: 1.8%

Lead Generation Benchmarks

Lead generation performance on LinkedIn varies widely depending on offer strength, targeting quality, brand trust, and buying intent. Cost per lead should never be viewed in isolation. In B2B, lead quality, conversion to pipeline, and deal value matter far more than raw volume.

• Lead Gen Form Completion Rate: 10%+ (strong performance benchmark)
• Cost Per Lead by Region
  • NAMER: $230
  • APAC: $80
  • EMEA: $120
  • LATAM: $60

Engagement Benchmarks

Engagement metrics are most valuable for brand building, demand creation, and sales enablement rather than direct conversion. They indicate relevance, resonance, and visibility, helping build long-term demand and trust in-market.

• Non-video Sponsored Content: 0.5% engagement rate
• Video Sponsored Content: 1.6% engagement rate

LinkedIn Live & Events Benchmarks

Live and virtual formats are becoming powerful B2B demand channels, enabling direct engagement, education, and relationship-building with professional audiences. These formats support long sales cycles by building credibility, trust, and real-time interaction.

• Live engagement rate: 10%
• Attendance rate: 37%
• Lifetime views: 200 – 19,000
• Cost per registration (without form): $55
• Cost per registration (with form): $89
• LinkedIn Live usage growth: +198% year-on-year

Cost Per Click (CPC) Benchmarks by Job Function

While the global LinkedIn CPC benchmark sits at $5.58, cost-per-click in B2B campaigns is heavily influenced by job function targeting. Seniority, demand for specific roles, and competitive bidding environments all impact auction pricing, which is why CPCs vary significantly across functions. Understanding these differences helps advertisers plan budgets more accurately and avoid misinterpreting performance.

• Accounting: $5.00
• Business Development: $6.30
• Education: $4.90
• Engineering: $5.10
• Finance: $6.90
• Human Resources: $6.00
• Information Technology: $7.90
• Marketing: $6.80
• Media and Communications: $5.60
• Operations: $5.70
• Product Management: $7.30
• Sales: $5.40

While these are the most common job functions targeted by businesses on LinkedIn, you can get a more specific CPC for your audience and region by utilising LinkedIn’s forecasting tool in the campaign manager section.

B2B Data-Driven Marketing Insights: KLIQmetrics™

Drawing on over a decade of hands-on experience and ongoing conversations with marketing leaders and long-term client teams, including marketing managers and CMOs, KLIQ’s insights reflect what B2B leaders are prioritising today, what is slowing them down, and what is driving measurable impact.

Through our work with trusted client partnerships across 21 countries, supported by KLIQmetrics™, our proprietary marketing analytics platform, we see marketing teams moving beyond activity tracking towards clearer accountability, smarter decision-making and more agile strategy execution.

KLIQ’s insights point to several key shifts shaping B2B marketing:

• Trend #1: Data is now central to demonstrating B2B marketing’s business value.
  Marketing leaders increasingly rely on data to clearly demonstrate ROI, justify investment and connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes, not just report performance metrics.
• Trend #2: B2B Strategy is becoming more agile and insight-led.
  Teams are moving away from “set-and-forget” campaigns towards real-time decision-making, using live insights to adjust strategy, messaging and channel investment as performance unfolds.
• Trend #3: Stakeholder confidence depends on clarity, not complexity.
  Marketing teams are using data to better support internal stakeholders, translating performance into clear narratives that guide priorities, expectations and decision-making.
• Trend #4: AI is reshaping how B2B buyers discover and evaluate brands.
  High-performing teams are using data to understand how AI-driven search and optimisation are influencing traffic, visibility and engagement across every stage of the B2B buying journey, from early discovery through to consideration and decision-making.
• Trend #5: Return on effort matters as much as return on investment.
  Leaders are increasingly focused on understanding which platforms, channels and tactics deliver the greatest impact relative to time and resources, enabling smarter optimisation of the marketing mix.
• Trend #6: A single source of truth is critical for modern B2B marketing teams.
  Disconnected platforms and fragmented reporting continue to slow teams down. Centralised, reliable dashboards are now essential for alignment, accountability and confidence in decision-making.
• Trend #7: Long-term B2B growth is driven by insight, not activity volume.
  Teams that consistently outperform are those that use insight to guide focus, prioritisation and iteration over time, rather than chasing short-term output.

What this means for B2B marketing leaders? Benchmarks provide useful context, but they are not the strategy. In modern B2B marketing, performance is no longer defined by isolated metrics, but by how effectively teams turn insight into action. High-performing organisations use data to guide decisions, align sales and marketing, prove commercial value, and stay agile in increasingly complex digital environments.

KLIQmetrics™ was built to support this shift. It enables marketing leaders to move beyond reporting and into decision intelligence, connecting channels, revealing real insight, and turning data into clarity, confidence, and commercial impact.

If you want to see how this approach delivers real impact with our long-term clients, explore our Success Stories and Case Studies, or get in touch with our team to discuss how expert B2B strategy and data-led insight can support your business growth.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in December 2025 and updated in January 2026 for comprehensiveness.