LinkedIn has published its inaugural B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, which provides an overview of the current state of the B2B marketing space, including trend notes, industry shifts, and more, all of which could impact your planning.

The 86-page report, which incorporates responses from over 1,900 marketing professionals, includes a heap of insights, and is well worth a read for those in the B2B space. You can download the full report here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key notes.

First off, LinkedIn highlights rising optimism in the sector, with respondents indicating that B2B budgets are increasing once again.

Of course, this is projected, and amid ongoing market instability, things could change fast. But there is a level of positivity among B2B marketers, which could lead to new opportunities moving forward.

One of the key opportunities at present is AI, with many respondents indicating that generative AI is a key focus this year.

Though at the same time, many CMOs are not confident that they’ll be able to find staff with the skills and talent to capitalize on these new tools – which could present new opportunity for those looking to advance their careers.

Getting a better understanding of generative AI tools could be key to securing new roles, and expanding your potential, with a range of ways that these applications could be used in the B2B marketing process.

And based on the skills trends among marketers, that could put you ahead of the pack.

The report also looks at exactly where B2B execs are planning to spend their marketing budget over the next year.

With more specific breakdowns of the types of events and activations they’re looking at.

The report also looks at which social platforms are the main focus for B2B (oh, LinkedIn comes out on top, what a surprise).

These are some valuable insights, which could help to inform your approach, and alignment with the rising skills and best practices in demand among business brands.

In addition to the report, LinkedIn’s also launching a new ‘B2B Index’, which will use LinkedIn performance benchmarks to highlight B2B companies that are excelling at their brand building efforts in the app.

As per LinkedIn:

“With the B2B Index, companies can gain valuable insights into how their brand is perceived and position themselves as industry leaders. By examining factors such as creativity, distribution and investment, the B2B Index generates a composite score for every organization. This allows us to build a comprehensive and comparable assessment of effective B2B brand building for organizations within the same industry.”

The B2B Index will power a new B2B Leaderboard, which will provide more insight into the best-performing brands, based on these factors.

It’s not currently available to the public as yet, but LinkedIn says that it will launch the new leaderboard ‘in the next few months’, with updates coming twice a year.

That is a heap of new insight for B2B brands, which could help to evolve your strategic approach, and again, it is worth checking out LinkedIn’s full report to get a better understanding of the latest trends.

You can check out LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report here.