Over 4 in 5 marketers today use content marketing, and more than half of companies plan to increase their spending on content marketing.
Content marketing is all about quality, AI-driven efficiency, and strategic audience targeting. With 89% of marketers using AI, 82% relying on SEO tools, and 50% increasing budgets, the shift is clear.
Learn what’s working now, what’s outdated, and where content marketing is headed next. Let’s unpack the most valuable insights shaping how content drives leads, boosts traffic, and builds trust in 2026.
Content Marketing Statistics 2026: Top Picks
- Around 89% of small business owners and marketers use AI for content marketing and SEO.
- Nearly 36.9% of businesses plan to spend more on content marketing.
- AI boosts results, with 68% of businesses seeing higher content marketing ROI.
- 45% of B2B content marketers expect bigger budgets in the upcoming year.
- Social media is key, with 90% of marketers using it to share content.
- Blogs remain essential, with 79% of marketers actively running one.
Content Marketing Usage
Content marketing is used by most businesses to increase their reach, returns, and increase sales rates. Content marketing also helps generate qualified leads for businesses.
- 82% of companies use content marketing.
- 73% of B2B and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy.
- Half of all marketers say they outsource some content marketing.
- Blogging is one of the top media formats marketers plan to leverage for the first time in 2024.
- 83% of the B2C marketers create short articles/ posts.
Meanwhile, 61% of content marketers have created or used videos in 2023. The usage of long-form articles increased from 22% in 2022 to 42% in 2023.
- The pandemic led to a 207% increase in content usage.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, WPbeginners, Hubspot, Search Engine Journal.
Content Marketing Strategy
- 83% of marketers say it’s better to focus on quality rather than quantity of content, even if it means posting less often.
- 47% of businesses conduct audience research.
Other major content marketing strategies that businesses follow are:
- 46% perform search engine optimization.
- 44% said improving the quality and value of their content has led to success
- 45% are publishing more content and publishing more frequently
- 41% said analyzing their competitors influenced their success
- 42% said updating existing content has boosted their content marketing value
- 40% said creating more visual and video content improved their content marketing
- 55% of the businesses said that creating more content and posting more often helped them.
Here are further details about the tactics that have helped the business to boost its rankings.
| Tactic | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Creating more content and posting it often | 55% |
| Improving the quality of the content | 53% |
| Creating more research-driven content | 37% |
| Paying more attention to keyword research | 36% |
| Improving technical SEO on the website | 30% |
| Building topic clusters and content hubs | 24% |
| Link building and guest posting | 21% |
- 36.9% of marketers plan on increasing their investment in content marketing.
- Over 41% of marketers measure the success of their content marketing strategy through sales.
- 42% of the marketers use content automation, 82% use SEO tools, and 88% use web analytics tools.
Source: Hubspot, Semrush, Ahrefs.
Types Of Content
- 83% of the content marketers create articles and posts, while 91% create videos.
These are the top two content types B2C marketers used in 2023. The usage of long-form articles, including videos, blogs, and infographics, increased to 42% from 22% recorded last year.
- Short content of 300 to 900 words attracts 21% less traffic and 75% fewer backlinks than articles of average length (900–1200 words).
- Short-form video is the top leveraged media format in marketers’ content strategies.
- 87% of marketers say that video has increased traffic to their websites.
- Interactive content witnessed a 52.6% in engagement rate compared to static content.
Buyers spend an average of 8.5 minutes viewing static content and 13 minutes viewing interactive content.
- According to 67% of marketers, video content has gained the most importance in the last year.
- 38% of the marketers say that the video content produces the best results.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, Search Engine Journal, Ahrefs, WyzOwl
Content Consumption
- 89% of consumers said they want brands to share more videos.
- 51% of the content consumption comes from organic searches.
- On average, Americans spend 7 hours per day consuming content.
- The average daily reader spends only 37 seconds reading a blog post.
- 58% of Americans listen to podcast content monthly, while 80% of Americans have listened to a podcast at least once.
- 91% of the people wanted to see more video content from their favorite brands.
Source: Ryan Robinson, Ahrefs, Wyzowl, Podfest Messenger
Benefits Of Content Marketing
- Over 58% of B2B marketers said content marketing helped boost their sales and revenue.
Also, 75% of B2B marketers are increasing their budgets specifically for B2B influencer and creator partnerships in 2026
- Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
58% of marketers say content marketing directly generates sales and revenue, and content marketing ROI is generally seen as 4.7x cheaper than high-end human-only content when AI-assisted.
- 76% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads.
This is a 9% increase since last year. Plus, 63% of marketers say that content marketing helps to nurture leads, and 50% say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients.
- 50% of consumers now use AI-powered search (Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT) as their primary research tool.
- 81% of marketers reported that content marketing helped them create brand awareness.
Meanwhile, 63% of the respondents reported success in building a growing loyalty with existing clients and customers.
- 70% of the people said that they would rather get to know a company through an article rather than an advertisement.
Source: Ahrefs, Content Marketing Institute, Forrestor, Taboola
Challenges Of Content Marketing
- 57% of the content creators cited that creating the right content for the audience is one of the major challenges of content marketing.
- Scaling content production is one of the most common challenges cited by 48% of content marketers.
- 48% of content marketers think aligning content with the buyer’s journey is challenging.
Meanwhile, 45% of marketers think aligning content efforts across sales and marketing is a huge challenge.
Here are further details about the situational challenges that B2B content marketers face.
| Challenges B2B Content Marketers Face | Percentage Of Marketers |
|---|---|
| Lack of resources | 58% |
| Aligning contempt with the buyer’s journey | 48% |
| Aligning content efforts across sales and marketing | 45% |
| Workflow issues/ content approval process | 41% |
| Accessing subject matter experts (SME) | 39% |
| Keeping up with new technologies | 34% |
| Lack of strategy | 25% |
| Keeping up with privacy rules/ regulations | 19% |
| Technology integrations | 15% |
- Another 41% of marketers reported that attracting quality leads with our content seems to be the biggest challenge.
Here are some of the challenges that content marketers face while creating content.
- Promoting content and generating enough traffic: 39%
- Creating content that resonates with our audience: 31%
- Increasing the ROI of the content: 30%
- Attracting quality leads through the content: 41%
- 64% of the B2C marketers reported that changes in the SEO and search engine algorithms are one of their major concerns.
Meanwhile, 53% and 48% of them say that changes to social media algorithms, data management, and analytics are among their biggest concerns.
- 69% of the marketers said that the time required to produce video content is a challenge.
Some other challenges that marketers face while generating video content are
| Challenge | Percentage of Marketers |
|---|---|
| Generating video content consistently | 56% |
| Producing enough video content | 52% |
| Human resources required to produce videos | 43% |
| Production of high-quality videos | 43% |
| The cost required to produce videos | 40% |
| Expertise required to produce videos | 31% |
| Choosing the right distribution channel | 14% |
- 83.5% of marketers feel pressured to increase volume due to AI expectations.
- Due to the dominance of AI Overviews (SGE), 80% of all searches now end without a single click (a zero-click search). This forces content marketers to shift their entire strategy toward Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) rather than traditional traffic-driving SEO.
Source: Search Engine Journal, Hubspot, Content marketing institute, Hubspot, Click Vision
AI In Content Marketing
- Nearly 89% of small business owners and marketers now turn to AI to streamline their content marketing and SEO efforts.
- Approximately 68% of the businesses reported receiving content with better marketing ROI by adopting AI.
- 79% of the content marketers stated that their content quality increased with the help of AI.
- 58% of marketers use AI tools for researching and for topic ideas.
The following table displays the usage of AI by content marketers:
| Usage of AI By Tasks | Share Of Content Marketers |
|---|---|
| Researching content and topic ideas | 58% |
| Rewriting and paraphrasing text | 52% |
| Writing content from scratch | 50% |
| Creating a content marketing strategy | 47% |
| Expanding text – adding more content and ideas | 40% |
| Creating content outlines | 39% |
| Optimizing copy for target keywords | 33% |
| Audience research | 30% |
| Improving the copy’s readability | 29% |
| Creating content briefs | 27% |
| Improving the copy’s tone of voice | 26% |
| Writing meta tags | 23% |
| Optimizing written content for a specific audience | 23% |
| Creating visual content (images, video) | 23% |
| Avoiding plagiarism | 20% |
| Grouping and clustering keywords | 16% |
| Content localization and translation | 9% |
- Nearly half of content marketers utilize AI to generate new topic ideas.
46% use it to research headlines and keywords, and over 36% use AI tools for writing.
- 48% of content writers cited that working with new technology, such as AI, was the most popular skill of interest in 2023.
It was followed by interests like improving data analytics/data science skills (42%), and leadership skills (42%).
- 58% of marketers using generative AI for content creation said increased performance is the top benefit.
- 19.2% of marketers spend over 40% of their marketing budget on AI-driven campaigns.
- 75% of consumers trust content written by generative AI.
- 31% of Gen Zers now use AI platforms or chatbots (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini) as their primary method for finding information online.
- While total traffic volume from AI assistants is lower than Google, visitors referred by AI show a 4.4x higher conversion rate. This is because the AI assistant has already vetted the content before recommending it to the user.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, Hootsuite, Pecan AI, Ahrefs, Semrush, Averi AI
Conclusion: B2B Content Marketing Returns $2–$3 For Every $1 Spent
Content marketing in 2026 is smarter, faster, and increasingly driven by AI. With 68% of companies seeing a better ROI through AI and video, leading engagement, quality, and strategy matter more than ever.
Among all tools, AI stands out, as it is used by 67% of marketers to improve efficiency and quality.
Blogs are still vital (used by 79%), while videos have become indispensable, with 87% noting a traffic boost and 38% calling them the highest-performing format.
Despite this growth, key challenges include a lack of resources (58%), scaling production (48%), and adapting to SEO changes (64%).
