If you are heading into the second half of 2026 trying to make a case for budget, adjust your strategy, or just get a clearer picture of how B2B buyers are behaving right now, the numbers in this post are a good place to start. B2B marketing moves fast enough that data from even a year ago can send your strategy in the wrong direction.
Below, we’ve pulled together some of the most relevant statistics from primary research published in 2025 and 2026. Each one has a direct implication for how tech companies plan, measure, and prioritize, giving you the context you need to decide exactly where to spend your time and money.
According to Dreamdata's LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report 2026, the average B2B buyer journey now spans 272 days, up from 211 days the year before. The typical deal involves 10 stakeholders, 88 touchpoints, and four channels before anything moves forward. Buyers also spend roughly the first 220 of those days in self-directed research, well before your sales team enters the picture.
If your campaign planning is built around a 90-day cycle, you are building for a buyer who no longer exists. This also matters for how you measure success. A campaign that does not convert in Q1 is not necessarily failing; it may simply be early.
Worth noting: This is one of the strongest arguments for sustained brand investment over short campaign bursts. If buyers spend seven months forming opinions before they ever engage, the brands that show up consistently during that window have a structural advantage.
Forrester's 2026 Buyers' Journey Survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers found that 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models like ChatGPT during their research process. More notably, twice as many buyers named generative AI as their most meaningful research source compared to any other source in the study, outranking vendor websites, product experts, and sales representatives.
Shortlists are forming inside AI-generated answers, not just in Google results. If your brand does not appear in those answers, you are invisible at the moment when consideration sets are being built.
Our read: Most B2B content strategies were built for Google. That is still important, but it is no longer sufficient. The question worth asking now is whether your content is structured and credible enough to be cited by an AI engine, not just indexed by a search engine.
Gartner research finds that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors. When multiple vendors are being evaluated simultaneously, each individual vendor gets only 5 to 6% of that time. The remaining 83% is spent in internal meetings, peer conversations, and independent research, most of which happens in places you cannot track.
You are present for a small fraction of the process. The question is whether you are shaping the rest of it through content, community, and reputation, or simply waiting to be invited in.
From where we sit: This is why content that travels matters as much as content that converts. A well-placed case study or third-party mention can do more work during the invisible 83% than anything that happens on a sales call.
SEO delivers a 748% ROI for B2B companies, higher than any other channel, and 93% of B2B marketers plan to maintain or increase their investment in it through 2026. At the same time, when an AI-generated summary appears in search results, users click traditional links only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no summary is present.
The channel is not going away. But ranking well in search now requires thinking about how your content reads to a language model, not just how it ranks for a keyword.
Our read: The companies that will succeed at SEO in the next two years are the ones treating search and AI visibility as the same problem. Authority, credibility, and content depth matter for both.
81% of B2B buyers select their vendor before any direct contact with a sales team. Google continues to hold the majority of B2B search market share. These numbers reinforce what most marketers already know about where B2B decisions happen.
What is newer: Reddit recorded 4.4 billion visitors in January 2026 and is now one of the most cited domains across major AI platforms. Tinuiti's Q1 2026 AI Citations Trends Report found Reddit's citation share grew at least 73% across commercial categories including technology and electronics. For tech categories in particular, buyer conversations are happening on Reddit whether or not vendors are part of them.
The practical implication: You do not need to be active on Reddit to be affected by what is said there. Knowing what your buyers are discussing in those threads, and how your brand or category is being described, is worth monitoring even if participation feels premature.
86.4% of event organizers plan to maintain or increase in-person events in 2026, and 94% of marketers using event-led growth report consistent revenue from events. The problem is what happens after the event. 80% of trade show leads never receive any follow-up at all, and teams that do follow up often wait three to five days, well past the window where conversion is still likely.
From where we sit: Events are one of the few channels where the investment decision and the execution decision are completely disconnected. The event budget gets approved months in advance. The follow-up plan, if it exists, gets built the week after. Closing that gap is where most of the event ROI actually lives.
The pattern across all of this research points in the same direction: more of the buying decision is happening earlier, faster, and further from your sales team than most B2B marketing strategies account for. We help close that gap, whether that means building the kind of sustained content presence that shapes consideration during those first 220 days of self-directed research, or making sure that event leads actually get followed up before the window closes. If the data here is making you rethink where your current strategy has gaps, that is a good place to start the conversation.
The primary research sources are global with strong North American representation. Canadian tech buyers largely mirror the patterns described here, particularly around AI adoption in research, self-directed buying journeys, and preference for digital self-service before vendor contact.
Faster than most teams update their strategy. AI adoption and buyer journey data are shifting year over year, and figures from 2023 or 2024 may significantly understate where buyers are today.
The buyer journey length, the pre-contact shortlisting behaviour, and the dark social attribution data are the three most useful for making the case that your current measurement model is likely underreporting the value of brand and content investment.