If you’re feeling the weight of B2B marketing right now, you’re not imagining it.
Gartner found that 77% of CMOs say they don’t have the in-house capabilities required to fully execute their strategy.
B2B marketers are navigating one of the most disruptive times in decades, defined by rapid AI adoption, changes in how information is discovered, rising expectations for personalization and credibility, and increasing pressure to prove ROI – all with fewer resources.
Across industries, marketing leaders are facing a similar reality:
- Buyers are harder to reach and even harder to influence.
- Content markets are flooded with sameness.
- Analytics tools disagree, and attribution is messier than ever.
- AI-generated content accelerates production but often erodes trust.
With this new reality there are disconnects. Research from TopRank and Ascend2 found that 93% of B2B marketers say research-backed content drives engagement and leads, yet only a fraction invest enough to differentiate. At the same time, 72% of marketers who frequently collaborate with trusted industry influencers report their thought leadership content is very effective, compared to just 29% of everyone else.
While B2B marketing is transforming and 56% of B2B organizations planning to increase agency spending, one thing is clear: the agency you choose can no longer simply be an execution partner. They need to bring the perspective of a strategic marketing partner. The right agency can help B2B marketers create greater certainty, build trust, and create systems that perform even as the landscape of how companies find, engage and source solutions transforms.
To help B2B companies navigate finding the right strategic marketing partner, this post is a guide for evaluating what to look for in a B2B marketing agency that provide a strategic perspective as well as a guide for implementation.
1. Look for Agency Partners Who Bring Clarity from Complexity
B2B marketers today face an overabundance of data but a shortage of insight. The most effective agencies go beyond reporting metrics to interpret patterns, ask better questions, and uncover the buyer signals that drive meaningful decisions.
In our 2026 B2B Thought Leadership research, top performing B2B marketers were far more likely to:
- Use CRM, customer feedback, and market research to shape strategy
- Build content from real buyer questions, not marketing assumptions
- Refresh insights frequently to reflect shifting discovery habits
A B2B marketing agency worth your trust practices data-informed clarity, going beyond dashboards to provide marketing intelligence that can shape narratives, content, and channel decisions from the start.
Ask potential agency partners:
“How do you determine what buyers actually need to know and how do you validate it?”
The best partners will have a disciplined methodology.
2. Favor Agencies That Think in Systems, Not Siloes
The most common failure pattern in B2B marketing today is fragmentation where marketing functions operate independently, creating tactical outputs that never add up to strategic outcomes.
Our own research shows this clearly: One-third of marketers cite over-reliance on a few channels as a barrier to full-funnel performance, and another third report limited visibility across the funnel.
A strong B2B marketing agency partner will approach brand, demand, content, and visibility as one connected system.
What to look for:
- A unifying narrative that ties all work together
- Content architectures that support the entire buyer journey
- Alignment with sales and customer success teams
- The ability to orchestrate campaigns across paid, owned, earned, and influenced channels
In today’s environment, integration is more than an advantage, it’s a prerequisite for growth.
3. Prioritize Agencies That Build and Multiply Your Brand Trust
In a world where content is infinite, trust is finite.
Our 2026 State of B2B Thought Leadership research found:
- 97% of marketers say thought leadership is critical to full-funnel success
- 35% believe original research is significantly more valuable than AI-generated content for building authority
- Influencer collaboration dramatically boosts content effectiveness
Trust today is built through:
- Evidence (original research, data, unique insights)
- Voices (industry experts, customers, practitioners, executives)
- Visibility (credible third-party mentions, earned media, community engagement)
Agencies that understand trust don’t focus on volume – they focus on credibility, consistency, and resonance.
Ask potential agency partners:
- “What proof points do you use to make client content more credible?”
- “How do you incorporate expert voices, customers, and partners into content ecosystems?”
If an agency talks only about “content creation,” rather than credibility creation, they’re operating behind the current state of the market.
4. Evaluate The Agency’s Ability to Create Experiences vs. Assets
Information has become a commodity. What buyers remember today are experiences – the moments that evoke emotion, spark clarity, or invite participation.
Yet despite this, our research found that 78% of marketers say experiential formats increase repeat engagement, but only 33% regularly use them. And 58% of B2B buyers say low-quality or shallow content is enough to remove a vendor from consideration.
Gaps like this represent the biggest competitive opportunities in B2B marketing today. As TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden has said, “Buyers don’t need more information. They need answers.”
The most effective B2B marketing partners:
- Create immersive content experiences (video, interactive tools, events, multimedia stories)
- Use human-centered storytelling to increase memorability
- Design content that feels alive – not formulaic
- Understand that emotion and clarity often outperform volume and frequency
Ask your potential B2B marketing agency:
“How do you ensure your content creates emotional connection?”
A modern B2B marketing partner should be able to show how strategy, creativity, narrative, and multimedia come together to create the kind of impact that makes your brand memorable. As Ty Heath from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute says, “A brand remembered is a brand bought.”
Read: 4 keys to unstoppable partnership between content team and agency
5. Ensure They Understand How Content Discovery Works in 2026 – Not 2019
Most marketers realize that buyers no longer follow linear journeys, and they certainly don’t rely on a single channel. The new reality is that they move fluidly across:
- Search engines
- AI-driven answer engines
- Social platforms
- Industry influencers
- Communities and dark social
- Video platforms
- Newsletters and trusted media
Our research found that 32% of B2B professionals now discover thought leadership through GenAI tools, which is a discovery path that many content strategies either ignore or don’t fully understand. With the vast majority of buyers arriving at a shortlist before they ever make contact with sales, it’s essential for B2B brands to be easy to find, easy to remember and and easy to engage. Standing out as the most credible source of information and solution across multiple channels is how successful B2B brands are navigating the shift towards AI search and multi-modal search.
A future-ready B2B agency designs for multi-channel discovery, to make sure your brand shows up wherever – and however – buyers are looking for answers.
Key questions to ask your B2B marketing agency partner:
- “How do you optimize content for human and AI discovery?”
- “How do you integrate organic, paid, social, influencer, and community channels?”
- “What practices do you use to ensure content is findable across formats and platforms?”
Visibility in 2026 goes beyond focusing on specific channels to architecting systems of discovery.
6. Look for Unified, Full-Funnel Measurement
Today’s B2B marketing needs to justify its existence beyond activity to measurable influence on pipeline and revenue.
But our research highlights a persistent challenge: 41% of marketers say difficulty measuring performance is the top cause of underperforming content.
As a solution, leading B2B marketing agencies integrate:
- Brand analytics
- Content performance
- Search visibility
- Influencer impact
- Engagement and sentiment
- Pipeline contribution
- Sales velocity and revenue influence
But the measurement story goes beyond integration. Multi-channel visibility and increased complexity of analytics requires a measurement solution that unifies disparate data sources. The goal here isn’t to measure more, it’s to measure what matters and use those insights to improve strategy, content, and activation continuously.
Ask your future agency partner:
- “How do you connect brand activity to demand and revenue outcomes?”
- “What is your approach to integrating and aggregating data sources into dashboards we can use?”
- “How do insights inform future creative and strategic decisions?”
If they cannot answer with specificity and clarity, it’s possible they cannot help you navigate the level of accountability modern B2B marketing leaders require.
7. Beyond Capability: Look for B2B Marketing Agencies Built for the Long Game
Technical skill is important. But in an environment that is increasingly defined by volatility, the intangible qualities matter just as much. For example:
- Tenure – Do they have the institutional experience to navigate cycles of disruption?
- Continuity – Will the same experts stay with you over time?
- Intellectual generosity – Do they publish insights, research, and thought leadership?
- Curiosity – Do they adapt quickly to new platforms, tools, and buyer behaviors?
- Perspective – Do they understand the patterns behind the noise?
The B2B agencies that deliver the greatest impact today have spent years and sometimes decades building the muscle memory of modern B2B marketing: understanding complex buyers, collaborating with expert voices, architecting experiential content, and designing integrated, multi-channel systems.
In an era of constant change, that depth is invaluable.
A Final Thought: Choosing a B2B Marketing Agency Is Really About Choosing a Future
Marketers today aren’t just looking for vendors, they’re choosing:
- Who will help them navigate uncertainty
- Who will help them earn trust
- Who will guide their teams through AI transformation
- Who will help them build systems that last
- Who will help them become the “best answer” in their category
The right agency doesn’t just execute campaigns; it elevates your organization’s strategic clarity, creative confidence, and market credibility. It helps you build a presence that buyers recognize, trust, and return to, becoming an engine not only of marketing activity but of sustained visibility, authority, and growth.
Of course, if you’d like to have a conversation with our B2B marketing agency, we’d love to connect.
