Here’s the thing about thought leadership… Almost everyone in B2B marketing agrees it matters (in theory at least). But at the same time, virtually no one agrees on what it is, who it’s for, or whether the stuff they’re publishing does anything at all.
The gap between confidence in the theory and confidence in the results is vast.
So this is an attempt to close that gap. It pulls together primary research that actually measured something, rather than the secondhand statistics that get passed around until nobody remembers where they came from.
Every number here traces back to the people who collected it. The rule I set myself was simple. If I couldn’t find the original source, it didn’t go in.
The core of the analysis sits on the brilliant annual Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which surveyed 3,484 global business executives in late 2023 for the 2024 edition (the 2025 is also out, see below).
Alongside it sits Considered Content’s own B2B Effectiveness Engine research, which surveyed over 1,000 senior B2B marketers across strategy, measurement and just under 40 tactics.
Then there’s the buyer behaviour work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Bain, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the Content Marketing Institute.
A useful way to read what follows is this: The most valuable thing in any market isn’t the most exciting thing. It’s the thing that quietly compounds while everyone else chases bright shiny new things.
Thought leadership, done properly, is that quiet compounding thing. The data keeps saying so. Most marketers keep not listening.
Here’s the first uncomfortable finding, and it sets up everything else:
In Considered Content’s research, the correlation between how popular a tactic is and how effective it is comes out as weak to non-existent. Read that twice. The things marketers reach for most and the things that actually work are all too often entirely unrelated.
That’s not some rounding error. That’s the whole game.
Email is the clearest example. In technology marketing it’s the single most popular lead generation tactic, ranked first for popularity, yet it lands 34th out of around 40 for effectiveness. In professional services it ranks first for popularity and 24th for effectiveness. In manufacturing it’s the most popular lead generation tactic and doesn’t even make the effectiveness top ten.
Three sectors, one story. We keep doing the familiar thing because, well, it’s familiar.
Now flip it round. Thought leadership is the single most effective lead generation tactic in technology and it tops the effectiveness list for demand generation too. In manufacturing it’s the most effective lead generation tactic, yet only around one in six marketers use it.
The best tool is sitting right there, and most people walk past it.
Why the gap? Because effectiveness and comfort aren’t the same feeling.
Sending an email feels like doing something. It’s fast, it’s measurable, it produces a number by Friday. Publishing genuine thought leadership feels slow and uncertain. And the payoff arrives later, if it arrives at all in a form you can trace.
We’re wired to prefer the fast certain thing over the slow better thing. Marketing budgets are just that bias with a spreadsheet attached.
There’s some good news underneath all this. Decision-makers are hungry for the stuff. In the Edelman and LinkedIn study, 54% of decision-makers and 52% of C-level executives spend an hour or more a week reading thought leadership.
An hour a week, from the busiest people in the building. That’s a pretty significant investment from people who really understand investments.
And marketers know they should lean in. In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 benchmarks, 52% of B2B marketers said they expected to increase investment in thought leadership content, second only to video at 61%. So intention isn’t the problem. Follow-through is.
What the data says works: the effective tactics and the popular tactics are almost different lists. Thought leadership sits near the top of the effective list and nowhere near the top of the most-used list.
What B2B marketers should do: stop letting popularity pick your tactics. Audit what you actually spend time and money on, then ask a blunt question of each item. Is this here because it works, or because it’s easy? Move effort from the comfortable middle of the pack towards the tactics the evidence rewards. And treat the fact that few competitors bother with real thought leadership as the opportunity it is, not the warning it looks like.
To understand why thought leadership works, you have to understand when buying actually happens. And it happens far earlier, and far more privately, than most funnels assume.
Let’s start with the number that reframes everything. John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute gave us the 95:5 rule. At any given moment only about 5% of business buyers are in-market. The other 95% aren’t buying now and won’t be for months or years.
The maths is almost embarrassingly simple.
If the average buyer replaces a supplier once every five years, then only a fifth of the market is in play in any year and roughly 5% in any quarter. Dawes is careful to call it a heuristic rather than a precise law, but the direction is undeniable. Most of your future customers are not in the market today.
This is where most budgets go wrong. Considered Content found technology marketers put just 33% of spend into brand building and 67% into activation. Professional services firms split it 32 to 68. Manufacturers manage just 29% brand and 71% activation, the lowest of any sector studied.
The LinkedIn B2B Institute benchmark for all B2B is 46 to 54, and the classic Binet and Field rule is 60/40.
So marketers are throwing roughly two-thirds of their money at the 5% who are buying now and starving the 95% who’ll buy later. They’re fishing hardest in the smallest pond.
Then comes the second big idea in here. When buyers do enter the market, the decision is mostly already made.
Bain’s original research shows buyers pick from a shortlist of firms they already knew before doing any formal research around 90% of the time.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, working with Bain and NewtonX, surveyed more than 500 senior B2B buyers in March and April 2024 and found 81% said the product they eventually bought was known by everyone in the buying group on Day One. Only 4% bought something known to just a few in the group. Being on the Day One list isn’t an advantage. It’s close to a prerequisite.
Whichever figure you choose, the reality is: if you’re not known, you’re probably not going to win the deal.
So the real contest happens before anyone raises a hand. And the thing that gets you onto that list before the contest starts is exactly what thought leadership does.
The Edelman and LinkedIn data shows more than 75% of decision-makers and C-suite executives say a piece of thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering. Essentially, thought leadership manufactures demand where none existed. And this is the only kind of demand the 95% can give you.
Thought leadership’s influence on the deal itself is stronger than most people expect.
Among decision-makers who said thought leadership led them to research something new, 60% said good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium, and 23% said they began buying from the organisation that produced it.
On the shortlist itself, 86% of decision-makers say they’d be moderately or very likely to invite an organisation that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership into the RFP process. And 73% say an organisation’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging its competence than its marketing materials and product sheets.
People trust your thinking more than your selling. Of course they do.
There’s a defensive part to all this too, and it’s the part too many marketers simply ignore.
Thought leadership doesn’t just win you customers. It loses them for your competitors. In the Edelman and LinkedIn study, 70% of C-suite leaders say a piece of thought leadership has at least occasionally led them to question whether they should keep working with an existing supplier. Among those, 25% said it led them to end or significantly reduce a relationship with a current provider.
Right now someone is publishing the idea that talks your customers out of renewing with you. Silence isn’t safe. It’s just quiet.
One more piece completes the picture.
Buying groups are crowded and divided. The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn report found more than 40% of B2B deals stall due to internal misalignment within buying groups. Hidden buyers (the procurement, finance and IT people who never show up in your CRM) actively consume and evaluate thought leadership just like target buyers. Bain’s follow-on work with LinkedIn found those hidden buyers hold roughly half the influence over the Day One decision.
Thought leadership is how you reach the people you can’t see. And a lot of deals die not because someone said no but because nobody could agree on yes. On top of of all this, Matt Dixon’s work finds 40% to 50% of deals end in no decision at all.
Your real competitor is often inertia.
What the data says works: the buying decision is mostly made before you’re in the room, by a group larger than you can see. Thought leadership is what gets you onto the shortlist, earns a price premium and pulls buyers away from incumbents.
What B2B marketers should do: rebalance towards the 95%. Move budget from pure activation towards brand-building thought leadership until you’re at least near the 46/54 benchmark, not the 33/67 reality. Write for the Day One list, not the RFP. Because by the time the RFP is out, it’s usually too late. Create content that speaks to hidden buyers in finance, procurement and IT, not just your obvious champion. And run at least some content to your existing customers, giving them reasons to stay before a competitor gives them reasons to leave.
Here’s a pattern that shows up everywhere in the data, and it’s more revealing than any single statistic. There’s a huge drop-off between having a strategy, getting it approved and getting the money to actually do it.
In technology, 82% of marketers say they have a strategy, 53% have it approved by senior management, and only 22% have the budget to execute it. Professional services runs 52%, 37%, 24%. Manufacturing is the starkest, 85% have a strategy, 45% get sign-off, and just 20% get funded, a 65-point gap between having a plan and being paid to deliver it.
A strategy without a budget is a wishlist with footnotes.
But strategy still matters enormously, when it’s real. In technology, high performers with a strategy hit 91% effectiveness in lead generation against a 67% average, 90% in demand generation against 69%, and 88% in brand building against 72%.
The Content Marketing Institute has found the same correlation for years. In its 2025 research, 97% of marketers said they had a content strategy, but only 29% of those with a documented strategy called it extremely or very effective. While 58% rated it merely moderately effective.
The gap between having a strategy and having an effective one is where most programmes leak value.
The single biggest lever inside strategy is differentiation. It’s also the one most firms fail.
Considered Content found top performers are roughly twice as likely to say they’re truly differentiated. In technology, 77% to 78% per cent of top performers claim genuine differentiation versus 37% to 39% per cent of average performers. And here’s the detail that should stop you. If your positioning is untested, you have a 0% to 1% chance of being a high performer.
Not a low chance. Essentially no chance.
Untested positioning is the marketing equivalent of never checking whether the parachute opens.
You can see why this matters for thought leadership specifically. Thought leadership that isn’t built on a differentiated point of view is just noise with a nice font.
The Edelman and LinkedIn quality data backs this up, which I’ll come to later. But the strategic root is here. If you can’t say something distinct and defensible, no amount of publishing frequency will save you.
What the data says works: a real, funded, differentiated strategy separates high performers from everyone else. Conversely, an untested positioning is close to a guarantee of mediocrity.
What B2B marketers should do: treat the strategy-to-budget gap as the fight worth having. A plan nobody funds is worse than no plan because it wastes the political capital you’ll need later. Test your positioning with actual customers before you build content on top of it, because untested positioning has almost no chance of working. And anchor your thought leadership to a genuinely differentiated point of view, since content without a distinct argument is the most expensive way to say nothing.
Once you’ve got a strategy, the temptation is to leap straight to production. The data says the planning in between, specifically what you research and how you target, is where a lot of performance is won or lost.
Considered Content found 74% of technology marketers conduct some market research, and top performers are 50% more likely to invest in it. In manufacturing the pattern is sharper still, 93% of top performers invest in market research versus 72% of their less effective colleagues.
More research, better results. So far so obvious.
Except not all research is equal, and this is the interesting bit. Of nine research types tested in technology, only four correlate with top performance. Researching your ideal customer profile made firms 71% more likely to be a brand-building leader. Researching broad views of customers, 36% more likely. Researching the buying committee, 24% more likely.
And the one that stings, segmentation research had the most negative effect of all. The activity that feels most like sophisticated marketing turns out to be the one dragging results down.
Why would segmentation hurt? Because a lot of B2B segmentation is built on demographic targeting that simply doesn’t work.
Research from MIT and Melbourne Business School found gender targeting is only 42.3% accurate (worse than a coin toss), and targeting something specific like senior IT decision-makers by profile is just 7.5%.
You’re paying a premium to aim at a target you can barely hit. Understanding your ICP deeply is not the same as slicing your audience into demographic boxes. The first builds. The second leaks money.
There’s a related trap in how many tactics people run. In technology the average marketer uses seven lead generation tactics, rising to 11 if they’re chasing MQLs and 13 if they’ve researched their ICP.
More isn’t obviously better. What the data keeps showing is that the tactics that suit small deals and the tactics that actually work barely overlap. In technology the top five most effective tactics and the top five used by firms with deals under £120,000 share just one tactic in common.
Spreading effort thinly across many tactics feels productive and usually isn’t.
On the buying group itself, the planning has to account for the crowd. LinkedIn’s financial services buyer survey found the average buying group now has around seven members and has grown for many respondents in the past three years. LinkedIn’s SaaS buyer survey found buyers researched six suppliers on average but only 3.5 made the shortlist (down from six three years earlier).
Bigger groups, shorter shortlists. The bar to make the cut is rising, and you have to clear it with more people at once.
What the data says works: deep research into broad customer views, your ICP and the buying committee correlates with winning. Demographic segmentation and profile targeting are inaccurate and can actively hurt. Running more tactics is not the same as running the right ones.
What B2B marketers should do: invest research budget in understanding your ideal customer profile and the whole buying committee, and be sceptical of segmentation and demographic targeting given how inaccurate the primary evidence shows it to be. Plan campaigns to reach the entire buying group, including hidden members, because shortlists are shrinking while groups grow. And resist the urge to run every tactic at once. Concentrate on the few that the effectiveness data actually rewards.
Now the hard part. Most thought leadership isn’t good. That’s not a cynical take, it’s what the buyers say.
In the Edelman and LinkedIn study, just 15% of decision-makers say the overall quality of the thought leadership they read is very good or excellent. Another 48% call it merely good.
So the bar most competitors clear is low. Which makes quality a moat, not just a virtue. When almost everyone is publishing forgettable content, the few who publish memorable content stand out by default.
Buyers are refreshingly clear about what good looks like. In the Edelman and LinkedIn data, the highest-quality thought leadership references robust research and strong supporting data (cited by 55% of decision-makers). It helps them understand a challenge or see an opportunity they’d been missing (44%). And it offers concrete guidance and case studies (43%).
Data, insight, usefulness. Not cleverness for its own sake.
The 2025 report goes further for hidden buyers who sway half the decision. They reward bold, perspective-shifting ideas that inform or even challenge how they think.
Say something. Back it with evidence. Make it useful. That’s most of the recipe.
Two more characteristics matter. Expert authorship, being produced by a prominent well-respected expert, and a distinctive format that looks different from everything else.
This is where a lot of firms fall down for a mundane reason. The Edelman and LinkedIn study found the top barrier to producing more effective thought leadership is that it’s under-resourced (cited by 50% of producers) while 27% say their organisation lacks the skills and 26% say they’re not engaging their most senior and talented people.
The best thinkers are busy, so their thinking never gets published, so the content ends up generic. The fix is unglamorous. Put real resource and real experts behind it. And yes, that will probably mean getting someone like us to interview them, get under the skin of their style and channel it into written output.
On formats, the primary evidence points a consistent direction. The Content Marketing Institute found videos have overtaken case studies as the top-performing format. 58% of B2B marketers say video delivers the best results, followed by case studies and customer stories at 53%, and whitepapers, ebooks and research reports at 45%.
Ascend2 and TopRank Marketing research found 48% of B2B marketers say interactive experiences, live and virtual events, and video content make thought leadership more impactful. And LinkedIn and Ipsos found that 41% of B2B video marketers say short-form social videos generate the highest ROI.
But formats are the delivery, not the substance, and it pays to remember which is which.
Considered Content’s effectiveness rankings put content types near the very top across every objective. In technology, top-of-funnel content ranks first for both lead generation and demand generation effectiveness and second for brand building, and mid-funnel how-to content leads brand building, beating even top-of-funnel thought leadership.
Content works. Which content wins depends on what you’re trying to do. So let the objective pick the format rather than picking the format because it’s fashionable.
Then there’s the measurement problem, which stealthily undermines everything else.
In the Edelman and LinkedIn study, nearly one-in-five producers (19%) have no process for measuring effectiveness at all. Only 29% can link sales leads back to specific pieces of thought leadership. And 30% say their organisation doesn’t really know how to use thought leadership as a sales or marketing tool.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t defend its budget, which loops right back to the funding gap from section three. It’s all connected.
What the data says works: most thought leadership is mediocre. This makes real quality a genuine advantage. Buyers reward strong data, useful insight, concrete guidance, credible experts and a distinctive format. Video and interactive formats are rising, but content substance beats format fashion. And poor measurement quietly starves the good stuff of budget.
What B2B marketers should do: aim to be in the 15%, not the 48%, because the low quality of most competitors is your opening. Build content on robust data and a genuine point of view. Get your most senior experts involved even though they’re busy. And make it stand out from the sea of sameness. Choose formats to fit the objective, leaning into video and interactive experiences where they suit, without mistaking the format for the idea. And fix measurement early, because content you can’t connect to outcomes is content you’ll eventually lose the budget to make.
If you strip all of this down to a single sentence, it’s this: Thought leadership works because it does its job when nobody’s watching.
It reaches the 95% who aren’t buying yet. It gets you onto the Day One list before the RFP is issued that decides everything. It reaches the hidden buyers you’ll never meet. It makes people willing to pay more and gently tempts your competitors’ customers away.
None of that produces a clean number by Friday, which is exactly why most marketers underinvest in it and reach for the email blast instead.
The gap between what the evidence says and what marketers actually do is the whole opportunity. Most people know thought leadership matters. Far fewer fund it, differentiate it, resource it with real experts or measure it properly.
The advantage doesn’t go to the marketers with the best information. It goes to the ones with the patience to act on it while everyone else chases the latest bright shiny new thing.
If you’d like to talk through how you can make thought leadership work harder for your brand, I’d love to chat. And yes, you can absolutely pick my brains.
Pick a time that suits you