If you’re running a busy B2B operation and wearing many different hats in your day-to-day, marketing isn’t always the first thing on your mind.
It’s understandable – you’re focused on production targets, customer relationships, regulatory pressures, and commercial performance. Marketing sits somewhere in the mix. Important, you know that. But it can feel like a separate world, with its own language, demands, and claim on time and resource you don’t always have to spare.
That’s exactly the gap we exist to fill.
Think B2B Marketing is a B2B marketing agency with deep roots in packaging, print, life sciences, manufacturing, and technology. We work as an extension of our clients’ teams, handling everything from content strategy and copywriting to PR, digital campaigns, and brand positioning, so that businesses with serious technical muscle can communicate that expertise in a way that actually wins attention, builds trust, and drives commercial results.
We’re not a generalist agency that’ll need six months to understand your world. We already do. And that distinction matters more than ever right now, because the marketing landscape these businesses are navigating is getting more complex, not less.
New research from Canto and Ascend2, surveying 434 content and creative professionals, has put some hard numbers around what many of our clients already feel day to day: producing more content is the easy part. Making it work consistently, credibly, and at the right standard, is where many organisations struggle, and why many businesses trust Think B2B Marketing to deliver it.
Here’s what the data tells us, and why it should matter to you.
More content isn't the same as better marketing
Whether it’s blogs, press releases, email marketing or social media campaigns, over 80% of organisations plan to increase their content budgets this year. AI tools are turbocharging volume further: 75% of professionals say AI has already increased how much content they produce. On the surface, that sounds like progress.
But volume without strategy is just noise.
The top operational challenge, cited by 40% of respondents, is simply keeping up with rising content demands. The second is managing the sheer volume of content they’ve already created. The technology that was supposed to solve the problem is, in many cases, actually adding to it.
For businesses in technically complex sectors, where your audience is evaluating solutions based on real expertise over marketing gloss, a high volume of generic content can actively damage your credibility. Your buyers, whether they’re production managers, procurement leads, or regulatory affairs teams, can tell the difference between content written by someone who understands their world and content that merely pretends it does.
Instead, trust Think B2B Marketing to… build a content strategy that’s grounded in your industry, targeted at the right audiences, and designed to do more than fill a content calendar.
The operational reality (that most businesses don't talk about)
One of the more striking findings in the research: organisations with advanced, joined-up content workflows are 48% more likely to report a significant increase in ROI from their marketing. That’s not a marginal improvement, but a fundamentally different commercial outcome.
Yet only 43% of teams describe their processes as genuinely advanced. The majority are still dealing with fragmented systems, inconsistent approval processes, and assets scattered across shared drives, inboxes, and individuals’ desktops. Nearly half of those surveyed reported employee burnout as a direct consequence of poor asset management, while 35% had missed revenue opportunities because the right content wasn’t in the right place at the right time.
For businesses where marketing sits alongside (or sometimes beneath) production, sales, and operations priorities, this kind of operational drag often goes unnoticed. However, it has real commercial consequences – delayed proposals, off-brand materials reaching customers, and marketing spend that doesn’t result in anything meaningful.
Instead, trust Think B2B Marketing to… bring the structure, systems, and strategic oversight that turn scattergun marketing activity into something focused – that actually compounds over time.
On AI - and why it's not the shortcut it appears to be
It would be impossible to write about marketing content and communications in 2026 without addressing AI. Nearly every team is using it in some capacity. And we understand why – when marketing resource is stretched and demands keep rising, any tool that promises to accelerate output is tempting.
But there’s something important to understand about what AI content actually is.
When you ask an AI tool to write something, it isn’t thinking, analysing, or drawing on genuine knowledge or experience in the same way you would. It’s performing a sophisticated pattern-matching exercise. It’s essentially asking, based on billions of text examples, what might an answer to this look like? It assembles sentences by predicting which words typically follow others in similar contexts.
It has no understanding, for example, of whether functional ingredients actually operate the way it’s describing. It has no experience of packaging converter challenges, pharmaceutical compliance requirements, or why one substrate choice works better than another in a given application. In short, it cannot have the knowledge that comes from years inside an industry.
There’s a compounding problem too. AI learns primarily from content available online, and increasingly, that content is itself AI-generated. This creates a feedback loop where AI trains on AI output, which then trains the next generation of AI.
The result is an unavoidable sameness: every industry article starts to sound like every other, every case study follows the same template, every technical explanation reaches for the same handful of phrases. In sectors where genuine expertise is a primary differentiator, that approach is a real commercial risk.
The research backs this up. The teams seeing the strongest returns from content aren’t the ones producing the most AI-assisted volume, they’re the ones with clear strategy, mature workflows, and content built on actual knowledge.
That doesn’t mean AI has no role. Far from it. Used carefully, and always with expert human review, it can support structure, drafting, and refinement. But the expertise, the insight, the authentic voice. That has to come from somewhere real.
Instead, trust Think B2B Marketing to… to create content that’s built on genuine industry knowledge from our team and yours – the kind that earns credibility with technically demanding audiences.
What this means if marketing isn't your day job
Not every business has a dedicated marketing team. Some have one generalist juggling content alongside a dozen other responsibilities. Some are relying on sales teams to produce materials as and when they’re needed. Some have barely started thinking about marketing as a strategic function at all.
That’s not a criticism – it’s a reality of today’s business landscape. The point isn’t that you need to become a content operation, it’s that the businesses pulling ahead in these sectors are communicating their expertise more consistently, more credibly, and more strategically than their competitors. And building that capability doesn’t have to mean building a team from scratch.
The most effective route, for many businesses, is a marketing partner who already understands your industry. One who can translate deep technical knowledge into content that resonates with the right audiences, without needing six months of onboarding to understand what you actually do.
That’s where Think B2B Marketing comes in. We’ve spent a decade working alongside businesses in print, packaging, life sciences, manufacturing, and technology. As a result, we know exactly how to connect with an engaged audience through joined-up content strategy that gets your voice heard.
Ready to lift your B2B marketing game? Get in touch at hello@thinkb2bmarketing.com.
