Before we get going, a quick note on what you’re seeing here.
This is a stripped down version of the findings of the B2B Effectiveness Engine research for the technology sector. It is closer to a ‘just the facts ma’am’ version than the full report.
If you want more analysis, prettier graphics and a PDF download option, head over to the full report here.
Email is the most popular lead generation tactic in technology marketing. However, it ranks 34th out of around 40 tactics we explored for effectiveness. We see this consistently across all the tactics. High popularity is more likely than not to equal relatively low effectiveness.
Put simply, the tactics teams reach for most are frequently the ones delivering the least.
Most marketing broadly ignores this. The industry tends to move on habit rather than evidence. Teams repeat what’s familiar, what’s quick to set up and, often enough, whatever the vendor who sold them the tool recommended.
To put some rigour behind that claim, we surveyed more than 1,000 senior B2B marketing professionals across 38 tactics. The results are at 95% confidence with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
What came back was a striking gap between common practice and genuine effect. Here’s what the data shows.
So, going deeper into the popular vs effective conundrum,when we lined up how often a tactic gets used against how well it performs, the relationship was faint at best.
| Tactic | Popularity rank | Effectiveness rank |
|---|---|---|
| Email marketing (lead gen) | 1st most popular | 34th most effective |
| Organic social media (demand gen) | Top 10 popularity | Outside the top 20 |
| Content syndication (brand building) | 37th most popular | 6th most effective |
Look at that table for a moment. Email and organic social do well for popularity. We all know they are two of the defaults technology marketers reach for in lead generation. Yet both are pretty poor performers. Content syndication, however, is almost an afterthought ranking 37th in popularity. But comes in 6th for brand building.
The pattern holds across the study: what the crowd favours and what the evidence rewards keep pulling in opposite directions.
Poorly, judging by current behaviour. The research on brand-building versus activation is about as settled as anything in marketing gets, and technology marketers are largely disregarding it.
| Benchmark | Brand building | Activation |
|---|---|---|
| Binet and Field 60/40 rule | 60% | 40% |
| LinkedIn B2B Institute (all B2B) | 46% | 54% |
| Technology marketers (actual) | 33% | 67% |
Technology firms are putting only 33% of their budget into brand building and 67% into activation. That falls short of the 46/54 benchmark for B2B generally. And it’s a world away from the classic 60/40 split.
The reason this matters comes down to the 95:5 rule, drawn from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. At any given moment, only about 5% of buyers are in-market. Pouring two-thirds of your budget into chasing that 5% while neglecting the 95% who’ll buy somewhere down the line isn’t really a strategy, it’s what happens when impatience gets a budget line of its own.
Given a menu of nine possible objectives, the average technology marketer signed up for four, which tends to leave effort scattered rather than concentrated.
| Objective | % selecting it |
|---|---|
| Increased revenue | 60% |
| Increased brand equity | 52% |
| Greater market awareness | 52% |
| Leads into pipeline | 48% |
| Greater market demand | 48% |
| Lower customer acquisition cost | 24% |
Increased revenue leads at 60%, while lowering customer acquisition cost trails everything else at 24%. Interestingly, high performers were around 20% more likely than the average to name increased revenue as their primary objective. Basically, they’d narrowed their focus rather than spread it.
The takeaway is to choose a small number of objectives and let them do real work. Whatever you decide to measure, and whichever tactics you back, will end up bending towards those objectives. So it pays to pick them carefully.
On paper, the great majority have a strategy in place. In practice, far fewer get to spend against it. There’s a steep drop-off between owning a strategy and being handed the money to deliver it.
| Strategy milestone | % of technology marketers |
|---|---|
| Have a marketing strategy from business strategy | 82% |
| Have it signed off by senior management | 53% |
| Have the budget sign-off to execute it | 22% |
So 82% say they have a strategy, 53% have secured approval and just 22% hold the budget to carry it out.
The difference between high performers and everyone else is clear. High performers with a strategy reached 91% success in lead generation against a 67% average, 90% in demand generation against 69%, and 88% in brand building against 72%.
We’ll be blunt: If you fix one thing, fix this.
Top performers are roughly twice as likely as everyone else to describe themselves as genuinely differentiated. Somewhere between 77% and 78% of top performers claim real differentiation, compared with 37% to 39% of average performers.
And the flip side is stark. If your positioning is untested, your odds of being a high performer sit somewhere around 0% to 1%. Not merely low, but close enough to zero to treat as zero.
Why does this weigh so heavily? Partly because of what Bain calls the Day One List: their research shows buyers pick from the shortlist of companies they already knew before doing any research roughly 90% of the time. Matt Dixon’s work adds a second reason: somewhere between 40% and 50% of deals end in no decision at all. Put those together and the message is plain: if you’re not already lodged in the buyer’s mind, you’re rarely in the running.
Which is why, if you only get one thing right, we’d argue it should be positioning.
It can be, though less reliably than you might expect. Around 74% of technology marketers do some form of market research. Top performers are 50% more likely to invest in it. But only four of the nine research types we looked at actually correlate with higher performance.
Here are the four that move the needle for brand-building leaders, with the effect attached:
| Research type | Uplift in likelihood of being a brand building leader |
|---|---|
| Researching your ICP | 71% more likely |
| Researching broad views of customers | 36% more likely |
| Researching the buying committee | 24% more likely |
| Pre-testing communications before launch | Positive effect |
Notably, segmentation research showed the most negative effect of the lot.
Demographic targeting fares even worse. Research from MIT and Melbourne Business School found gender targeting is only 42.3% accurate, and targeting senior IT decision-makers by profile lands at just 7.5%. This means, for much of your spend, you’re effectively paying to miss the people you’re aiming at.
Marketers were asked about 32 possible measures. The average technology marketer keeps an eye on seven. The real question is which seven (because, as ever, the popular choices and the effective ones barely overlap).
| Most popular measures | Most effective measures |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Sales accepted leads (SALs) |
| Social engagement | Brand awareness |
| Cost per click (CPC) | Closed-won |
| Return on investment | Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) |
| Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) | Market share |
Only two measures show up on both lists: brand awareness and MQLs. Social engagement, meanwhile, ranks 28th for effectiveness, and cost per click comes in dead last.
CPC has obvious appeal. It’s cheap to track and it obligingly falls whenever you optimise for it. What it doesn’t tell you is whether any of those clicks turned into revenue. The more useful habit is to track what closes rather than what clicks.
The data indicates its rarely the ones being run. The average technology marketer uses seven lead generation tactics, climbing to 11 among the MQL-focused and 13 among those who’ve researched their ICP. Yet the five most effective tactics and the five most used by firms with deals under £120k share only a single tactic between them.
| Most popular lead gen tactics | Most effective lead gen tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Email marketing | 1. Top-of-funnel content |
| 2. Videos | 2. Custom landing pages |
| 3. Bottom-of-funnel content | 3. Intent data |
| 4. Brand-led in-person events | 4. Mid-funnel content |
| 5. Top-of-funnel content | 5. PPC advertising |
| 6. Sales enablement | 6. 1-to-1 and 1-to-few ABM |
| 7. Paid social | 7. Influencer marketing |
| 8. Online articles and blogs | 8. SEO |
| 9. SEO | 9. Paid social |
| 10. Media advertising | 10. Collaborative campaigns |
Top-of-funnel content (thought leadership, in other words) is the single most effective lead generation tactic. Bottom-of-funnel content, which ranks as the third most popular thing marketers do, manages only 17th for effectiveness.
The instinct is understandable: the bottom of the funnel feels closer to the sale, so that’s where everyone crowds. The data suggests the opposite starting point. Begin at the top.
The average technology marketer runs six demand generation tactics, rising to eight among the revenue-focused and 10 among those focused on closed-won. The lists for the lowest and highest deal sizes overlap on only two tactics.
| Most popular demand gen tactics | Most effective demand gen tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Email marketing | 1. Top-of-funnel content |
| 2. Videos | 2. Collaborative campaigns with other brands |
| 3. Loyalty programmes | 3. Bottom-of-funnel content |
| 4. Media advertising (non-social) | 4. Influencer marketing |
| 5. Organic social media updates | 5. Online product and service configurators |
| 6. Top-of-funnel content | 6. Mid-funnel content |
| 7. SEO | 7. Webinars |
| 8. Online configurators | 8. Loyalty programmes |
| 9. Webinars | 9. SEO |
| 10. Influencer marketing | 10. Third-party events and tradeshows |
Top-of-funnel content sits at the top of the demand generation effectiveness rankings, as it does on the lead gen list.
Collaborative campaigns, influencer activity and SEO earn their place because they extend your reach and lend you credibility from people the buyer already trusts. Configurators earn theirs for a different reason: they let a buyer explore a solution at their own pace, without a salesperson hovering.
The average technology marketer runs six brand-building tactics.
And content wins again (seeing a pattern yet?). This was a finding that surprised even us. We’d assumed paid advertising would come out ahead. It didn’t.
| Most popular brand building tactics | Most effective brand building tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Organic social media updates | 1. Mid-funnel content |
| 2. Email marketing | 2. Top-of-funnel content |
| 3. Paid social media advertising | 3. Bottom-of-funnel content |
| 4. Videos | 4. Videos |
| 5. Loyalty programmes | 5. Content syndication |
| 6. Online articles and blogs | 6. Your own in-person events |
| 7. SEO | 7. Third-party events and tradeshows |
| 8. Bottom-of-funnel content | 8. Paid social media advertising |
| 9. Media advertising (non-social) | 9. SEO |
| 10. Primary research | 10. Organic social media updates |
Here it’s mid-funnel how-to content that leads, edging ahead of even top-of-funnel thought leadership.
In B2B technology, brands are built on a reputation for genuine competence rather than on smooth talk. The effective list divides neatly down the middle: the top half is about creating content, the bottom half about extending reach.
That split is a fair snapshot of what B2B branding looks like in 2026.
The study distils everything into twelve. Here they are blunt and in order.
O1. Be clear about your marketing strategy. Make sure it flows from business strategy and has executive support and the budget to execute.
02. Sign up to meaningful objectives. They bias what you do, what you measure and the results you get.
03. Do not just track what is easy to measure. Be sceptical of data from anyone with a vested interest in how you spend.
04. Understand what customers really care about, not what you wish they cared about. Research it and focus on it 100%.
05. Spend more time on the 95% of buyers who are not in-market than the 5% who are. The numbers do not lie.
06. Build brand and mental availability first. The Day One List shows why this is job number one.
07. Develop distinctive positioning backed by real brand assets, from identity to personality to the quality of your content.
08. Prioritise reach over personalisation. Market to the broadest relevant audience. Distribution matters a lot.
09. Invest in excess share of voice against competitors. It is a proven way to grow.
10. Be consistent yet creative over time. Find new ways to say the same thing and repeat.
11. Do not pass non-leads to sales. Poorly qualified email addresses are not leads and they undermine your authority.
12. Use tactics that work, not just tactics that are easy and popular. There is finally solid research to tell which is which.
These statistics come from The B2B Effectiveness Engine, the largest in-depth study of real-world B2B marketing effectiveness to date. It surveyed more than 1,000 senior marketing professionals and tested 38 tactics across lead generation, demand generation and brand building, with results carrying 95% confidence and a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
The Technology Edition focuses specifically on B2B technology marketers (about half the overall responses).
The work was produced by Considered Content, a B2B thought leadership agency that has created work for 22 of the world’s top 50 technology companies. Our philosophy is straightforward: out-think the market rather than outspend it.
You can read the full Technology Edition report or reach the team at hello@consideredcontent.com.
What’s the most effective B2B marketing tactic? Top-of-funnel content. It ranks first for effectiveness in both lead generation and demand generation, and second for brand building. Content of one kind or another dominates the effectiveness rankings across all three areas.
Is email marketing effective? Not relative to how much it’s used. Email is the most popular lead generation tactic in technology marketing, yet it ranks 34th out of around 40 for effectiveness. One of the many reminders that being popular and being effective are often two different things.
How should B2B tech marketers split brand and activation spend? Well, they currently allocate 33% to brand and 67% to activation. The LinkedIn B2B Institute benchmark is 46% brand and 54% activation, while the classic Binet and Field rule suggests 60/40. On any of those measures, most technology firms are under-investing in brand.
Why does positioning matter so much? Top performers are about twice as likely to be genuinely differentiated, and firms with untested positioning have close to no chance of being high performers. Add the Day One List finding that buyers choose from a shortlist they already know around 90% of the time, and positioning becomes the highest-leverage thing a marketer can address.
How many buyers are in-market at any one time? About 5%, according to the 95:5 rule from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The remaining 95% are future buyers. This is exactly why brand building aimed at the whole market matters more than activation aimed only at today’s handful.