Strategy
Part of How B2B content marketing works for a business team
B2B content marketing examples: the patterns that repeat
Named B2B content marketing examples from Gong, Klaviyo, HubSpot and others reveal the repeatable patterns behind each successful campaign and its results.
What to take away
- Gong is the clearest of these B2B content marketing examples: it built its category on mined call data, not opinion. The asset is the dataset, and the deck is only the wrapper.
- Klaviyo's benchmark reports work because the sample, the method and the caveats ship with the numbers.
- HubSpot's State of Marketing gives away the survey instrument, so other teams can reuse it.
- The patterns that repeat across the examples below start with evidence the company already holds. Publication is the second step, not the first.
- Every example below is a mechanism you can copy. None of the results transfer with it.
- A content asset that never reaches a buying committee is a writing exercise, whatever it ranks for.
What separates an example from a topic
Most lists of B2B content marketing examples hand you formats: the guide, the webinar, the case study. Formats are free. The thing worth copying sits underneath.
Eight named programs show the mechanism. Each answers a question a buying committee was already arguing about, and each owns its evidence instead of quoting someone else's.
Gong Labs: call transcripts turned into published research
Gong sells conversation intelligence, so every customer call is a transcript. Gong Labs turned that exhaust into published research on talk ratios, discovery questions and objection handling. The findings run on the Gong Labs blog and at Gong's annual Celebrate event.
The pattern: find the data your product already generates, aggregate it, and publish the aggregate. Competitors can copy the post format. They cannot copy the corpus.
The catch is consent and aggregation. Customer contracts govern whether call data can be pooled, and legal review belongs in the plan, not the launch.
Klaviyo: benchmarks with the method attached
Klaviyo publishes email and SMS benchmark reports by industry, drawn from activity on its own platform. The numbers arrive with the sample, the period and the definitions.
That disclosure is the product. A benchmark without a stated population is a marketing claim wearing a chart.
The Census Bureau's transparency standard lists fields a statistical product should carry:
- definitions
- sources
- populations
- dates
- methods
- errors
- limitations
- revisions Borrow the list. Do not imply federal review.
HubSpot: give away the instrument
HubSpot's annual State of Marketing reports run on a global survey of marketers. The company publishes the findings as charts, slides and a written report.
The reusable move is releasing the questionnaire. Other teams can run the same instrument on their own list and compare. That is how a vendor report becomes an industry reference instead of a lead magnet.
Drift and Chili Piper: content built around one argument
Drift argued against the lead form for years, in the book Conversational Marketing, on the Seeking Wisdom podcast and at its HYPERGROWTH conference. Chili Piper made the same case for instant scheduling on demo requests, the job its Concierge product does.
Both programs picked a fight with a default practice and kept swinging. The pattern suits companies with a genuine, defensible disagreement with the status quo.
It fails when the disagreement is manufactured. Buyers check.
Three more named programs: Ahrefs, Moz and the B2B Institute
Ahrefs publishes studies and free tools built on its own web crawl, including Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and its free keyword generators. The crawl is the evidence, and the blog posts cite it directly.
Moz runs the Moz Blog and the Whiteboard Friday video series. It also publishes Domain Authority, a Moz metric that other teams paste into spreadsheets. The score is Moz's own, not a Google ranking factor.
LinkedIn's B2B Institute publishes research with academic partners, among them the 95-5 rule: at any given time, roughly 5% of a category's buyers are in market. That finding comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
The pattern behind all eight programs
| Example | What it owns | Repeatable move |
|---|---|---|
| Gong Labs | Call transcript corpus | Publish aggregates from product data |
| Klaviyo | Platform send data | Ship benchmarks with method and sample |
| HubSpot | Survey panel and instrument | Release the questionnaire, not just the findings |
| Drift | A stated position on lead forms | Argue one default practice, consistently |
| Chili Piper | A stated position on demo scheduling | Argue one default practice, consistently |
| Ahrefs | Its own web crawl | Cite crawl data in studies and free tools |
| Moz | The Moz Blog and Domain Authority | Build a metric others quote, and explain it |
| LinkedIn's B2B Institute | Commissioned academic research | Partner with researchers, publish the finding |
Every row depends on evidence the company already holds. That is the test to apply to your own B2B content marketing plan before you commission anything.
Where these programs break
Gong's model stalls if the customer base is too small to aggregate without identifying anyone. Klaviyo's benchmarks only cover Klaviyo senders, which skews toward its own customer mix.
HubSpot's survey reflects the people who answer HubSpot's emails. Drift's argument aged as the market moved. Ahrefs' crawl reflects the sites it indexes, and Domain Authority is Moz's own score that Google does not use.
The B2B Institute's 95-5 rule describes buyer panels, not LinkedIn behavior. None of these programs publishes a result you can assume for your own pipeline. Treat each as a method, and check the current figures where the vendor publishes them.
Disclosure rules apply to every one
The FTC's Endorsement Guides cover honest endorsements, typicality, material connections and clear disclosure. A customer story, a paid expert contribution or a benchmark drawn from your own users all sit inside that territory.
Get permission in writing. State the relationship. Show the typical case, not the best one. Route the specifics to qualified counsel in your jurisdiction.
If your program touches personal data, the NIST Privacy Framework starting guide offers a voluntary process for assigning owners and managing risk. It is a planning tool, not legal clearance.
Make the asset usable
The W3C guidance on information and relationships says visual structure should also be available programmatically. Benchmark tables and comparison charts are exactly where that bites.
Build the table as a table. Label the axes. Then test with the assistive technology your audience actually uses.
Pilot before you scale
Pick one example above, copy the mechanism and run it once on a bounded audience. Set the outcome and the baseline before publishing, and record the result whether it is good or bad.
If it fails, separate four causes: weak evidence, poor execution, thin reach, wrong audience. Each has a different fix, and only one of them means the idea was wrong.
The common B2B content marketing questions sales teams raise are a good source of pilot candidates, because the demand already exists. The wider B2B marketing strategy examples reuse several of these formats.
Common questions
Which of these examples should a small team copy first?
Start with Klaviyo's disclosure habit, because it costs nothing and improves everything else. Add the sample, the period and the definitions to whatever you already publish. Build toward an owned dataset once you have enough volume to aggregate safely.
Can a company without proprietary data run this play?
Yes, but the evidence has to come from somewhere real: a survey you field, interviews you conduct, or a public dataset you analyze. Original analysis of public data is still original. Restating a vendor's numbers is not.
How do you know a benchmark is worth citing?
Check for a stated population, a sample size, field dates and a described method. If any of those are missing, treat the number as a claim rather than a finding, and say so when you pass it along internally.
