The 2026 B2B Content Benchmark

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Presented by Tracksuit

Finance usually sees brand at two ends. The spend going in, the revenue coming out, and a year-end report that lands after the budget is set.

Tracksuit surveyed 723 senior marketing and finance leaders. 94% of finance leaders already say brand drives growth, and both sides want to start the conversation earlier.

Always-on tracking covers the middle, so the proof is ready when the decision gets made.

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49% of the B2B brands I audited don't have an email list.

Even among the brands doing everything else well, 44% don’t have one. Their founders post, their team posts, and they publish videos and properly authored blogs.

Then all that attention hits a dead end.

I spent the last three weeks auditing 24,348 pieces of content across 134 B2B brands for the 2026 B2B Content Benchmark, which I built on Ploy and launched this week. Every brand is scored on six layers of organic content, the ways a brand can build an audience.

I've been banging on about owning your audience for years, and about B2B content’s missing middle between getting attention and driving conversions. I wanted to dig into just how common that gap is.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Clay's approach to lead magnets. Their Speed to Lead benchmark, also built on Ploy, gives every company it tested its own result, and that's the format I wanted to borrow.

The scoring criteria came first, built on what I've learned running organic content for B2B brands at my agency, Pistachio. Most B2B brands measure content at two ends, with impressions at the top and conversions at the bottom. These six layers focus on what happens in between:

Each layer is scored in tiers from 0 to 3, and all six weigh the same. A brand's score is the share of the 18 possible tiers it reached, so everyone ends up with a score out of 100.

I scored nine brands by hand and had AI agents score the same nine, so I could see where we differed and recalibrate the criteria. Sometimes I'd picked up something the agents missed. Sometimes they caught me out, like three brands I'd marked down on interactive tools where the agents found a live calculator or quiz I'd missed.

Seven criteria iterations later, we were ready for a full run. The agents then scored all 134 brands on the shortlist I’d created. That left me with two CSV files, one with every brand's score for each layer and another with every piece of content as evidence behind those scores. But how do I turn those into something as useful and unique as Clay’s resource??

That's where Ploy came in, I honestly would never have attempted a benchmark like this without them. I uploaded both CSV files to PloyDB, their built-in database, and its agent pulled out the findings and built the whole interactive site around them. That's a landing page, a report on the overall findings, a methodology page explaining how it was all done, and a dynamic report for each of the 134 brands showing where it ranks and the evidence behind every score. When a brand gets rescored, the pages update.

All up it took three weeks and about $330 in agent runs. More importantly, I finally had numbers on how B2B brands build an audience, and how many of them let it leak out of the middle.

Team advocacy is the strongest layer, with more than half the brands hitting the top mark. That honestly surprised me. I expected blogs to come out on top, but they were way down behind interactive tools and founder voice.

Email is the weakest by a long way, with only 5% of brands reaching the top tier.

That's the missing middle. B2B brands earn attention on LinkedIn every week, then give it nowhere to go.

Almost half of the brands have a strong interactive tool, but most of them have no email list. Someone can use the tool, get a useful result, and never hear from that brand again. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake, so every brand's report sits behind an email signup that adds them to this newsletter.

Ramp, the corporate card and spend management company, is the only one of the 134 at the top tier on all six layers. Co-founder Eric Glyman posts his own takes on LinkedIn most weeks, the team posts, there's a YouTube channel full of long-form talks, and there's a savings calculator on the site. They even hired an economist to turn their own transaction data into public research and a weekly newsletter.

Ordinal and beehiiv tied for second on 94, which isn't a surprise. Ordinal is social media publishing software and beehiiv is a newsletter platform, so they both understand content. But Ordinal does it with a team of less than 15 people.

A bigger team makes things easier, but Ordinal shows small teams can still win.

If your brand is one we tested, your page is already live, with your score on each layer, the evidence behind every number, and even some recommended next steps to help you increase your score. If your brand isn't on there, you can still get the full report and see how the market stacks up.

P.S. The benchmark runs on Ploy. If you want to build something like it, Brand Chemistry subscribers get 50% off their first month with code Isaac-Peiris.

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