What the 2026 Content Marketing Institute B2B Marketing Trends Report means for video strategy in New Zealand medium and enterprise businesses
Letter from Kaushik
We make videos for a living, so it would be easy to look at a report about B2B content marketing and focus on how much more video businesses should be producing, that’s not what stood out to me.
Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs surveyed 1,015 B2B marketers for their B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026 report. Almost every organisation surveyed is now using AI. Almost every organisation has a content strategy. Almost every organisation produces thought leadership.
Yet the businesses reporting the strongest marketing performance are not simply the ones producing the most content, buying the newest tools, or spending the most money.
They are the ones producing more relevant work, building stronger internal capability, improving their strategy, aligning more closely with sales, and making better use of the expertise already inside their organisation.
That is what makes this report so relevant to video.
AI has made the mechanics of content production a lot easier. Writing, editing, transcription, captions, repurposing and even parts of video production can now happen faster than they could two years ago. The barrier to making something has fallen.
The barrier to making something worth watching has not.
The report found that 87% of marketers using AI for content creation have improved productivity, yet only 39% report an improvement in content performance. At the same time, content relevance and quality was the single most common factor associated with improved marketing effectiveness, at 65%, ahead of technology, budget and market conditions.
That gap between production and performance is the story.
For New Zealand businesses, particularly those competing in professional services, technology, healthcare, engineering, manufacturing and other expertise-led sectors, I think the implication is clear. The next competitive advantage is not going to come from being able to make more content. Everyone can do that now.
It will come from having better ideas, clearer expertise, stronger points of view, and a better system for putting the people who hold that expertise in front of the market.
This is not a summary of the CMI report, nor a replacement for it. It is our interpretation of what the findings mean for New Zealand organisations that are trying to build trust, visibility and demand through video without becoming another business filling LinkedIn with content for content’s sake.
Kaushik Kumar, Commercial Director, Dark Matter
Executive Brief: The report in five minutes
If you read one section, read this.
The defining tension in the 2026 research is simple. B2B businesses have never been better equipped to produce content, yet the things driving effectiveness are still overwhelmingly human.
Ninety-five percent of B2B marketers say their organisations use AI-powered marketing applications. Among those using AI for content creation, 87% report improved productivity and 80% report improved operational efficiency. Yet the benefits weaken as the measures become more meaningful. Only 58% say content quality has improved and just 39% say content performance has improved. Twelve percent say AI has actually reduced the quality of their content (pp.8–11).
At the same time, when effective marketing teams were asked what had improved their performance, content relevance and quality ranked first at 65%, team skills and capability followed at 53%, sales alignment at 45%, and technology came fourth at 43%. Budget allocation was cited by only 20% (p.4).
For video, that changes the question from “how can we make more?” to “how can we make what our experts know more relevant, visible and useful?”
The first takeaway is that AI is a production advantage, not a thinking advantage. It can make video workflows faster, cheaper and easier to scale, but there is little evidence in the report that automation by itself creates stronger ideas. For video teams, the opportunity is to use AI around the expert rather than instead of the expert. Capture the thinking once, then use technology to transcribe, structure, edit, caption and repurpose it.
The second takeaway is that almost everyone produces thought leadership, but very few organisations have built a real thought leadership system. Ninety-six percent say they create thought leadership, yet only 11% describe their programmes as advanced or leading. Thirty-seven percent say fewer than 5% of their employees with specialist expertise contribute at all, and another 30% say participation sits between 5% and 15% (pp.12–13). The content may exist, but most of the experts are still invisible.
The third takeaway is that LinkedIn remains the strongest distribution environment for B2B thought leadership. Seventy-six percent of marketers identify LinkedIn as one of their most effective thought leadership channels, ahead of email newsletters at 54% and speaking events or webinars at 52% (p.13). That makes a strong case for video programmes built around named experts rather than company pages alone.
The fourth takeaway is that strategy is creating more value than scale. Sixty-one percent of marketers say their content strategy improved over the past year, and 74% of those marketers credit strategy refinement as a reason. Only 16% credit budget changes (pp.5–6). The businesses getting better are not simply spending more, they are becoming clearer about what they want to say, who they want to reach, and what role content plays in the buying process.
The fifth takeaway is that there is a growing contradiction between what marketers say improves performance and where businesses plan to spend money. AI is the largest planned investment area for 2026 at 45%, while human resources, salaries, training and development sit at just 9% (p.25). If content relevance and team capability are among the strongest drivers of effectiveness, there is a risk that businesses invest heavily in the machinery of content while underinvesting in the people and ideas that make it worth consuming.
For New Zealand businesses, this creates an opportunity. We may not have the budgets or scale of larger global competitors, but we can have sharper expertise, closer customer understanding, stronger people and clearer thinking. AI can reduce the production gap. Video can make that expertise visible. The businesses that connect those two ideas well will have an advantage.
Chapter 1: AI made content cheap, but it did not make attention cheap
The biggest mistake a leadership team could make after reading this report is to conclude that the organisation needs to produce more content because AI has made it easier.
The data suggests the opposite.
Content has become abundant. Attention has become harder to earn.
The report found that 95% of B2B marketers are already using AI-powered applications, with 89% using AI for written content creation or optimisation and 53% using it to create or edit images, video and other visual assets (pp.8–9). This is no longer an emerging behaviour. AI has entered the standard marketing workflow.
The benefits are real. Among marketers using AI for content creation, 87% report better productivity, 80% report better operational efficiency and 65% report improved creative capability. If your marketing team spends large amounts of time transcribing interviews, producing first drafts, building captions, repurposing recordings or creating variations of the same asset, AI can remove a meaningful amount of that work.
Where the report becomes more interesting is what happens after efficiency.
Only 58% report an improvement in content quality. Just 39% report an improvement in content performance. Twenty-one percent see no improvement in quality at all, while 12% say the quality of their content has fallen (pp.10–11).
That tells us AI is very good at reducing the cost of production. It is much less reliable at increasing the value of what is produced.
For video, that distinction matters enormously. A faster edit does not create a stronger argument. An automated script does not create twenty years of experience. A synthetic presenter does not recreate the judgement of somebody who has spent their career solving the problem being discussed.
The opportunity is therefore not to automate expertise. It is to automate everything that prevents expertise from reaching the market.
A senior engineer should not spend two hours writing a LinkedIn post. They should spend twenty minutes explaining the problem they understand better than most people, then let the content system do the rest.
A chief executive does not need to write every word of a monthly article. They need to contribute the insight, the experience, the opinion and the judgement. The production layer can increasingly be assisted by technology.
A consultant should not be expected to learn video editing. They should be expected to explain the recurring problem their clients keep getting wrong.
That is the distinction I think matters most.
Executive insight. AI has reduced the cost of producing content. It has increased the premium on having something worth saying.
This also explains why some AI-heavy content programmes feel increasingly interchangeable. If everyone uses similar tools trained on similar information to answer similar prompts, the average output naturally converges.
The differentiator is what goes into the system.
- Your experience.
- Your customer knowledge.
- Your mistakes.
- Your research.
- Your opinions.
- Your frameworks.
- Your examples.
- Your people.
In other words, the very things most organisations are still failing to capture.
Questions for your leadership team: Are we using AI to make our expertise easier to share, or are we using it to avoid involving our experts? If every competitor had access to exactly the same tools tomorrow, what would still make our content worth consuming? Where should human judgement remain non-negotiable in our content process? Are we measuring the amount of content AI helps us produce, or whether that content changes anything commercially?
Chapter 2: Almost every business does thought leadership, but most experts are still invisible
One of the most revealing findings in the report is that 96% of B2B marketers say their organisation produces thought leadership. At first glance, thought leadership appears to have become almost universal. Look closer and a different picture appears.
Seventeen percent describe their programme as exploratory, 36% as developing and another 36% as established. Only 7% consider themselves advanced and just 4% leading (p.12).
In other words, almost everyone is doing it, but relatively few believe they have mastered it. The participation data tells us why.
Thirty-seven percent of marketers say fewer than 5% of employees with specialist knowledge or expertise actively contribute to thought leadership. Another 30% say only 5% to 15% contribute. Just 18% report substantial or widespread participation across their experts (p.12). This is a structural problem.
If almost every company produces thought leadership while most of its subject matter experts do not participate, then a large amount of “thought leadership” is being created by people whose job is content rather than people whose job created the thinking.
That is not a criticism of marketing teams. It is a criticism of the system organisations have given them.
Marketing should not be expected to manufacture expertise on behalf of the business. The expertise already exists.
It sits with the people customers call when something goes wrong. It sits with the senior consultant who has seen the same problem forty times. It sits with the engineer who knows where the specification is likely to fail. It sits with the sales director who hears the same objection every week. It sits with the product leader who understands why customers adopt one feature and ignore another.
The mature thought leadership organisation gives marketing structured access to those people. This is where video becomes particularly valuable.
Asking a subject matter expert to write a 1,500-word article every month is unrealistic in most businesses. Asking them to spend thirty minutes in a well-run interview is much easier.
From that conversation, marketing can create a long-form video, short clips, an article, a newsletter, a webinar theme, sales content and internal knowledge assets. The expertise was captured once, the organisation gets value from it repeatedly.
This is also what separates thought leadership from generic content marketing. The objective is not simply to keep the publishing machine running. It is to gradually make more of the organisation’s real intelligence visible.
CMI itself makes this distinction clearly. The report argues that the strongest programmes treat thought leadership as a strategic asset rather than another content bucket, and that more mature organisations involve a greater proportion of their internal expertise while measuring business impact and brand authority more seriously (p.13).
For New Zealand businesses, this is particularly important. Many of our strongest companies are not large. Their competitive advantage often sits in a relatively small number of experienced people. If those people remain invisible, the market is left judging the organisation by its website, branding and sales materials rather than by the actual quality of its thinking.
Executive insight. Your thought leadership programme is only as strong as the expertise it can access.
The practical shift is simple. Stop beginning the content process with a blank page. Begin it with a person who knows something valuable.
Questions for your leadership team: Which five people inside our organisation understand our customers best? How much of what they know is currently visible to the market? If one of them left tomorrow, how much of their experience would remain inside the organisation? Is marketing being asked to create expertise, or given access to the people who already have it?
Chapter 3: Video should be built around relevance, not output
The most important number in the report for content teams may not be an AI statistic at all, it is 65%.
When effective B2B marketers were asked what had improved their marketing performance, 65% selected content relevance and quality, making it the most common answer. Team skills and capabilities followed at 53%, sales alignment at 45%, technology and tools at 43%, customer understanding and segmentation at 40%, and measurement and reporting at 40%. Budget allocation sat at only 20% (p.4). This should change how video programmes are briefed.
For years, businesses have often approached video through volume. We need four videos this month. We need a campaign film. We need something for the conference. We need social clips. We need a customer story.
- Those are production requirements.
- They are not audience requirements.
- Relevance begins somewhere else.
- What is the customer trying to understand?
- What decision are they struggling with?
- What do they keep getting wrong?
- What has changed in their industry?
- What risk are they underestimating?
What question appears repeatedly in sales conversations?
A video built around one of those questions begins with relevance. A video built around the requirement to publish something begins with output.
The report’s findings on content strategy reinforce this. Ninety-seven percent of respondents now have a content strategy, and 61% say its effectiveness improved during the previous year. When asked what drove that improvement, 74% pointed to strategy refinement, ahead of new technology at 51%, team and resource changes at 40%, and budget adjustments at just 16% (pp.5–6).
The lesson is not that budget or technology are irrelevant. It is that neither fixes unclear thinking.
A business can spend $100,000 on video and still be unclear about what it wants its market to understand.
It can produce fifty clips and still have no meaningful point of view.
It can hire an agency, install an AI stack and publish every week while remaining indistinguishable from competitors.
Strategy creates the filter.
- What do we want to become known for?
- Which customer problems do we understand unusually well?
- Which conversations do we want to own?
- Which audiences matter commercially?
- Which experts can credibly speak to those issues?
Only then should the organisation decide what to film.
This is where a medium sized New Zealand business can often outperform a much larger competitor. A large organisation may have more production capacity, but a smaller organisation can be much closer to the customer. It can move faster. It can put real experts on camera. It can respond to the questions people are actually asking rather than producing content several layers removed from the market.
That proximity becomes an advantage if the organisation knows how to use it.
Questions for your leadership team: If we stopped publishing for three months, which five ideas would we still want our market to remember? Are our videos based on customer questions or marketing requirements? Which pieces of content have changed a sales conversation, not simply generated engagement? Does our current video programme reflect what our market cares about, or what is easiest for us to produce?
Chapter 4: LinkedIn, email and events should work as one system
One of the most useful parts of the report is its view of thought leadership distribution.
When marketers were asked which channels were most effective for thought leadership, LinkedIn ranked first at 76%, followed by email newsletters at 54% and speaking events or webinars at 52% (p.13).
This is not simply a ranking of channels.
Read together, those three formats describe a strong B2B communication system.
- LinkedIn creates discovery.
- Email creates continuity.
- Events and webinars create depth.
- Video can connect all three.
A ninety-second expert video on LinkedIn introduces a useful idea to somebody who has never heard of the organisation.
That person may then visit the website, subscribe to an email newsletter, follow the expert, or consume another piece of content.
A deeper version of the same idea may become a webinar, breakfast briefing, roundtable or conference presentation.
Questions from that event then become the next wave of videos.
The conversation feeds the content, and the content feeds the conversation.
This is a much stronger model than treating each channel as a separate publishing requirement.
It also fits the New Zealand market unusually well.
Many B2B sectors here are not mass markets. A professional services firm may have a few hundred organisations it genuinely wants to work with. A specialised technology business may have fifty target accounts. An engineering firm may be trying to remain visible to a relatively small group of senior decision makers.
In that environment, reach is a poor proxy for success. You do not necessarily need 100,000 views. You need the right hundred people to repeatedly experience your expertise.
The report’s account-based marketing findings reinforce this. Among ABM users who had measured performance, 65% said it outperformed traditional marketing (p.24). The value is not scale. It is focus.
For video, that means creating content with a specific person or buying concern in mind rather than making broad content for “the market”.
A CFO and a technical buyer may be looking at the same purchase from completely different perspectives. A useful video programme acknowledges that.
The technical buyer may want detail. The CFO may want commercial implications. Operations may want implementation risk. The CEO may want strategic fit. One generic brand film will not answer all four.
A strong expertise programme gradually builds a library that does.
Executive insight. The objective is not to reach everybody. It is to become repeatedly useful to the people who can eventually buy from you.
This is also where live experiences become valuable again. Seventy-eight percent of marketers surveyed allocate budget to experiential marketing, and among organisations that have measured the effect on sales timelines, 51% report shorter sales processes where experiential touchpoints are involved (pp.18–20).
- Video should not compete with those experiences.
- It should extend them.
- The keynote becomes clips.
- The webinar becomes an article.
- The roundtable becomes new questions.
- The customer discussion becomes the next expert interview.
Instead of the event disappearing when the room empties, the expertise continues working.
Questions for your leadership team: Are LinkedIn, email and events currently separate activities or parts of one system? Are our best event conversations being captured? Which target accounts are repeatedly seeing our expertise? Are we optimising for audience size when our actual market is relatively small?
Chapter 5: The organisations that win will invest in thinking as seriously as they invest in tools
The final contradiction in the report may be its most important one.
When marketers describe what has improved performance, they consistently point towards relevance, quality, skills, strategy, sales alignment and customer understanding.
Yet when asked where they expect to increase investment in 2026, AI-powered marketing tools rank first at 45%.
Events and experiential marketing follow at 33%, owned media at 32%, paid media at 25%, content personalisation at 24% and technology infrastructure at 21%. Research and insights sit at 15%.
Human resources, salaries, training and development sit at just 9% (p.25).
There is nothing inherently wrong with investing in AI. Most businesses should.
The risk is what happens when an organisation invests heavily in its ability to produce content while underinvesting in its ability to produce ideas.
Better software cannot compensate for weak customer understanding. More automation cannot compensate for generic positioning. A faster editing process cannot turn a safe opinion into a useful one.
More content cannot create expertise where the organisation has not taken the time to extract it.
For video specifically, I think this creates a clear strategic choice.
Businesses can use AI to increase the amount of content they produce, or they can use it to increase the amount of expertise they are capable of sharing.
Those sound similar, but they lead to very different outcomes. The first produces more. The second reveals more. The second is where I think the value sits.
For medium and enterprise businesses in New Zealand, the opportunity is to build a system where experts contribute a relatively small amount of time, marketing captures that contribution properly, AI removes administrative work, video makes the expertise human and visible, and distribution repeatedly puts those ideas in front of the right market.
The production system becomes more efficient. The thinking becomes more visible. The organisation gradually develops a library of expertise that competitors cannot simply recreate by buying the same software. This also changes how video should be measured.
The CMI report found that 80% of marketers use audience engagement to measure thought leadership, while 63% measure business impact and only 38% measure brand authority. More mature thought leadership teams are more likely to measure both pipeline influence and authority (p.13).
Views still matter, but they are not the final outcome. A video that reaches 600 relevant people and influences two significant opportunities may be worth more than one reaching 60,000 people who will never buy.
A CEO video that results in a conference invitation, a referral and a conversation with a target account has created value even if the algorithm considered it average.
An engineering video that sales sends repeatedly to prospects may be one of the most valuable assets in the business even if it never generates large public engagement.
The measurement should follow the business objective, not the platform’s definition of success.
Looking ahead and the cost of doing nothing
The CMI research is not predicting the end of content marketing. It is describing its maturation. Production is becoming easier. AI will continue accelerating that trend.
As the cost of creating content falls, the amount of content in the market will continue to increase. The logical consequence is that average content becomes easier to ignore.
That puts greater pressure on relevance. Greater pressure on distinctiveness. Greater pressure on trust. Greater pressure on genuine expertise.
For years, businesses could gain an advantage simply by publishing consistently because many competitors did not. That advantage is disappearing.
The next advantage will come from publishing something competitors cannot easily reproduce.
- A real point of view.
- A strong framework.
- A hard-earned lesson.
- An expert explaining a difficult problem clearly.
- A business willing to say what it has learned instead of repeating what everybody already knows.
This is where I believe video becomes more valuable, not less.
Text can increasingly be produced invisibly and at enormous scale. A real person explaining a difficult problem well gives the audience more information to assess.
- How clearly do they think?
- Do they understand the nuance?
- Can they explain it without jargon?
- Do they sound experienced?
- Would I trust them in the room?
Those questions matter in B2B purchasing, particularly when the thing being sold is complex, expensive or dependent on human expertise.
Executive visibility will therefore become less about “personal branding” and more about making organisational capability observable.
Subject matter experts will become increasingly important marketing assets.
Marketing teams will spend more time extracting knowledge and less time manufacturing material from scratch.
AI will become infrastructure. The businesses that win will not be the ones talking about AI the most. They will be the ones using it quietly to make better human expertise easier to access. The cost of doing nothing is not that your company stops producing content.
It is that everybody else becomes more efficient while your best thinking remains trapped inside meetings, sales calls and the heads of experienced people.
Eventually the market cannot tell the difference between the business with twenty years of expertise and the business with a better content engine.
That is the risk. The answer is not more content. It is making the expertise real, visible, useful, and consistently available to the people who need to trust you before they ever speak with you.
A question for your next leadership meeting. If AI gives every competitor the ability to produce as much content as they want, what will we have to say that they cannot?
References
Primary source: Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026. Sixteenth annual B2B content marketing research programme, sponsored by Storyblok. The research reports on 1,015 B2B marketers from a wider sample of 1,229 global responses, with respondents drawn primarily from North America. Thirty percent of B2B respondents worked in medium sized organisations of 100 to 999 employees.
The key findings referenced in this analysis include marketing effectiveness and the factors associated with improvement, with content relevance and quality at 65%, team skills and capabilities at 53%, sales alignment at 45%, technology and tools at 43%, and budget allocation at 20% (p.4).
The report found that 97% of B2B marketers have a content strategy, with 61% reporting improved effectiveness. Among those reporting improvement, 74% credited strategy refinement, 51% new technology implementation, 40% team or resource changes and 16% budget adjustments (pp.5–6).
Ninety-five percent of B2B marketers report using AI-powered marketing applications. Among AI users, 89% use AI for written content creation and optimisation and 53% use it for creative assets including images and video (pp.8–9).
Among organisations using AI for content creation, 87% report improved productivity, 80% improved operational efficiency, 65% improved creative capability, 58% improved content quality and 39% improved content performance. Twelve percent report decreased content quality (pp.10–11).
Ninety-six percent of B2B marketers say their organisation creates thought leadership content. Thought leadership programme maturity is reported as exploratory by 17%, developing by 36%, established by 36%, advanced by 7% and leading by 4% (p.12).
Employee participation in thought leadership remains limited. Thirty-seven percent report participation from fewer than 5% of employees with specialised expertise, 30% report participation from 5% to 15%, 15% report 16% to 30%, 8% report 31% to 50% and 10% report participation from more than half of relevant experts (p.12).
The most effective thought leadership channels reported are LinkedIn at 76%, email newsletters at 54% and speaking events or webinars at 52% (p.13).
Thought leadership success is measured through audience engagement by 80% of marketers, business impact by 63%, audience feedback by 40% and brand authority by 38%. Thought leadership pacesetters are more likely to track business impact and brand authority (p.13).
Seventy-eight percent of B2B marketers report allocating budget to experiential marketing. Among organisations that have measured the impact of experiential touchpoints on sales timelines, 51% report shorter sales processes overall, with pacesetters more likely to measure those outcomes (pp.18–20).
Among ABM users who have measured performance, 65% report that ABM outperforms traditional marketing. The report argues that the value of ABM sits in focus and relevance rather than scale (p.24).
The leading planned investment areas for 2026 are AI-powered marketing tools at 45%, events and experiential marketing at 33%, owned media at 32%, paid media at 25%, personalisation at 24%, technology infrastructure at 21%, social and earned media at 20%, agency or outsourcing at 19%, research and insights at 15%, first-party data capabilities at 12%, and human resources, salaries, training and development at 9% (p.25).
Companion reading: our analysis of the Edelman and LinkedIn 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which explores how high-quality thought leadership influences hidden buyers inside complex B2B buying groups, and our analysis of Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report, which examines how businesses are changing the way they produce and distribute video.
About Dark Matter
Dark Matter helps medium and enterprise organisations turn internal expertise into video that builds trust, strengthens positioning and creates future demand.
We believe the biggest content opportunity inside most organisations is not another campaign idea. It is the experience, judgement and knowledge already sitting inside their people.
AI is making content easier to produce. Our role is helping businesses make sure the thing being produced is actually worth watching.