A Third of B2B Marketers Can't Prove Their Content Is Working. Almost No UK Manufacturer Has Asked Whether Theirs Is.

A third of B2B marketers still cannot say with any confidence whether their content is working. That is the headline finding from Content Marketing Institute's 2026 B2B Content Marketing Trends research, run with MarketingProfs and sponsored by Storyblok, which surveyed 1,015 B2B marketers between 24 June and 14 August 2025. Measuring content effectiveness came up as one of the top three challenges facing the industry, named by 33% of respondents. For a discipline that has had a decade of "prove your ROI" pressure from finance departments, that is a striking number to still be seeing.

Look closer at the effectiveness breakdown and the picture gets murkier rather than clearer. Only 13% of marketers say their content strategy has significantly improved. Nearly half, 48%, describe modest gains. Another 30% report consistent performance with no real change either way. Put those together and you get a majority of B2B marketing programmes sitting in a holding pattern, neither obviously succeeding nor obviously failing, which is precisely the zone where measurement matters most and is hardest to do well. A vague sense that "things are fine" is not the same as evidence that a specific campaign, article or sales asset earned its budget.

The same pattern shows up outside pure content marketing. The IPA's Effectiveness Culture Monitor, a smaller UK survey of 178 responses across 91 agencies and client-side brands, put the industry's average marketing effectiveness culture at 7.3 out of 10 for agencies and 6.9 out of 10 for brands. That sample skews toward larger consumer and agency-side organisations rather than technical SMEs, so it is corroboration rather than direct evidence for engineering and manufacturing marketing specifically. But a self-rated score sitting comfortably in the middle, not a confident 9 or 10, from people whose job is marketing effectiveness, tells its own story about how unevenly measurement discipline is actually applied even where the resources exist to do it properly.

Resources are exactly where UK engineering and manufacturing SMEs tend to come up short. Most don't have a dedicated analytics function, a CRM wired up to marketing activity, or anyone whose job is specifically to check whether last quarter's trade press advert or LinkedIn campaign produced a single qualified enquiry. Nebula's own analysis of UK marketing spend found that most SMEs in this sector are already spending below the levels larger firms consider adequate. Spending cautiously while also having no reliable way to tell what that spend is achieving is a genuinely difficult combination, because it removes the one piece of evidence, proof of return, that would justify spending more.

One figure from the CMI research points toward a fix rather than just describing the problem. Among marketers who did report improved effectiveness, 45% credited closer alignment between marketing and sales as a driver, second only to content relevance and quality at 65%. That is a specific, testable claim: measurement gets easier, not harder, once marketing and sales agree in advance on what counts as a result. A technical sales team can tell you within a week whether a lead from a case study led anywhere. A marketing team working from download counts and social impressions usually cannot, because those numbers were never connected to what the sales pipeline actually needed.

None of this requires elaborate attribution software, which is itself often oversold to smaller businesses that don't have the traffic volumes to make it statistically meaningful. It requires picking, in advance, two or three things content is meant to do, an enquiry through a specific landing page, a named prospect requesting a spec sheet, a sales conversation that opens with "I saw your piece on X", and then actually checking afterwards whether it did those things. Most of the failure in B2B content measurement is not technical. It is that nobody wrote the success criteria down before the campaign ran, so there was nothing to check the results against six months later.

This is where Nebula starts every engagement differently to how a lot of agencies work. Before a single article or social post goes into production, the brief includes what specifically it's meant to move, an enquiry type, a sales conversation, a named account, not a generic hope for "more visibility". That means a client can look back at any piece of content and get an honest answer about whether it did its job, including an honest "no" when that's the truth, rather than a report full of impressions and shares that nobody on the sales side ever asked for.