Forty percent of respondents in the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs Insights for 2022 survey described their content marketing as mature or sophisticated. The research covered 810 B2B and B2B+B2C marketers worldwide, and the responses came in during July 2021. That makes it a historical content marketing maturity benchmark and not a current percentile, so the rest of this piece uses newer research to compare the capabilities and outcomes that tend to show up in stronger programs.
Most teams start with the question "how mature is our content marketing program?" and the short answer is to measure it against one named content marketing maturity model, then look at the evidence behind the label. A stage name describes how a program operates. A survey figure tells you how common a capability was in one sample at one point in time. Neither one gives you a verified spot in an industry ranking.
What do the content marketing maturity stages actually mean?
The most useful published definitions come from the same CMI and MarketingProfs research. They split a program into five stages, and each one is defined by what the team can do, not by how much it publishes.
| Stage | Published definition |
|---|---|
| First Steps | Doing some aspects of content, but have not yet begun to make content marketing a process |
| Young | Growing pains, challenged with creating a cohesive strategy and a measurement plan |
| Adolescent | Have developed a business case, seeing early success, becoming more sophisticated with measurement and scaling |
| Mature | Finding success, yet challenged with integration across the organization |
| Sophisticated | Providing accurate measurement to the business, scaling across the organization |
Publishing a lot does not move you past First Steps, because the first stage is about whether a process exists. Mature does not mean finished, since the definition says integration across the organization is still a challenge. And Sophisticated is defined by measurement that the business can rely on, which is a higher bar than a full calendar or a traffic report.
The definitions do not set a required article count, traffic level, revenue threshold, team size, or program age.
There is a second model worth knowing about, and it measures something a little different. Content Science describes five stages of content operations, which a Georgia Digital Services article from August 2021 summarizes as Chaotic, Piloting, Scaling, Sustaining, and Thriving. That scale is about the behind-the-scenes work of running content across business functions. It is related to content marketing maturity, but the names, populations, and stage boundaries differ, so the two should not be lined up as if Adolescent equals Scaling. Use the CMI model to place the program, and use the operations model to understand why repeatable process and organization-wide adoption matter.
How many programs were mature in the published benchmark?
In the 2022 report, 40% of all respondents called their content marketing sophisticated or mature. Among the most successful respondents it was 71%, and among the least successful it was 5%.
Here is how the report defines those groups, because the definitions matter. Success means achieving the organization's own desired or targeted results. The most successful group, also called top performers, rated their overall approach as extremely or very successful. The least successful group rated it as minimally or not at all successful. So this is respondents judging themselves against their own goals, not an outside audit.
A few readings are supported and a few are not.
- In that survey, the most successful group was far more likely than the least successful group to describe its program as mature or sophisticated.
- It does not mean mature companies have a 71% chance of success. The 71% is the share of top performers who said their program was mature or sophisticated, which runs in the other direction.
- It does not put you in the top 40% because you feel mature today.
- The other 60% were not all without a strategy. That group includes Adolescent and Young programs as well as First Steps.
What separates stronger programs from weaker ones?
The same 2022 survey measured several capabilities and broke them out by how successful respondents said they were. Four of them line up closely with the stage definitions.
| Reported characteristic (July 2021, 810 respondents) | Most successful | All respondents | Least successful |
|---|---|---|---|
| Has a documented content marketing strategy | 62% | 40% | 11% |
| Describes content marketing as sophisticated or mature | 71% | 40% | 5% |
| Measures content performance | 90% | 75% | 39% |
| Rates ability to demonstrate ROI as excellent or very good | 64% | 36% | 8% |
The "All respondents" column includes the top and bottom groups, so it is not a middle tier. The ROI row is a self-rating of ability, not a measured return. And the columns compare success groups, so they should not be relabeled as mature and immature teams.
The pattern still points somewhere. Documented strategy and performance measurement are much more common among successful programs, and the gap on being able to show ROI is the widest of the three capability rows. That fits the stage definitions, where measurement becomes the thing that separates the upper stages from the middle ones. If you want a closer look at the strategy side, this site has a piece on why documented content strategies outperform undocumented ones.
Newer research points the same way, though with less precision. In the Outlook for 2025 research, fielded from June 25 to August 16, 2024 with 980 B2B respondents, CMI reports that top performers were more likely to rate their strategy as effective, to have the right technology to manage content across the organization, to have a scalable creation model, and to measure performance effectively. The article describes those differences but does not publish exact percentages for each, so they stay qualitative here.
Top performers in that same report also explained what they credit for their success. This is a list of reasons they picked, not a count of how many have each capability.
| Factor top performers credit for success | Share of top performers |
|---|---|
| Understanding their audience | 82% |
| Producing high-quality content | 77% |
| Industry expertise | 70% |
| Setting goals aligned with organizational objectives | 62% |
| Measuring and demonstrating content performance effectively | 53% |
| Having a documented strategy | 47% |
Only 47% crediting a documented strategy does not mean that 53% of top performers lack one, because people chose among several options. Audience understanding and quality came first, a reminder that a repeatable process is only useful when it serves the reader.
What does measurement maturity look like in practice?
The CMI definitions describe a path from struggling to create a measurement plan at Young, to getting more sophisticated at Adolescent, to giving the business accurate measurement at Sophisticated. They do not say every team has to track the same metrics. The test is whether your measurement fits your goals and gives the business something it can use to decide.
The 2022 data shows why tracking activity and proving value are different things. In that survey, 75% of all respondents said they measured content performance, while 36% rated their team as excellent or very good at demonstrating ROI. Those are two separate questions, so you cannot subtract one from the other to say that 39% measure but cannot show returns.
The 2020 report found a similar shape. Fielded in mid-2019 with 679 North American B2B respondents, it found 67% of the most successful measured content marketing ROI against 23% of the least successful. That question asked whether they measure ROI, not how good they are at it, so treat it as older support for the same direction and not as a trend line.
A more recent and narrower comparison comes from the Insights for 2026 report, fielded June 24 to August 14, 2025, with 1,015 B2B marketers. It looks only at thought leadership content, and it compares "pacesetters" (respondents in the Established, Advanced, or Leading adoption stages) with everyone.
| Thought leadership measurement | Pacesetters | Overall |
|---|---|---|
| Tracks business impact, such as leads and pipeline influence | 75% | 63% |
| Tracks brand authority, such as media opportunities and citations | 51% | 38% |
This supports a narrow point, that more established thought leadership programs track business impact and authority more often. It does not say every mature content program uses those measures.
What do mature process and executive buy-in look like?
On process, CMI's content operations guidance recommends documenting all stages of the content lifecycle, with clear accountability and smooth handoffs between steps. Content Science's fact sheet describes governance as how content gets produced, published, and managed, including ownership and roles, documented workflows, standards, training, and ways to measure impact. These governance principles are not survey thresholds for entering a stage. A well-run blog can be a working pilot without being a mature organization-wide program, which is exactly the Piloting stage in the operations model.
On executive buy-in, the evidence supports calling it an enabling condition, because the upper CMI stages are about integration and scaling across the organization, and that is hard to do from inside one channel. Content Science's fact sheet says content needs a seat at the leadership table. The closest number is the 62% of 2025 top performers who credit goal setting aligned with organizational objectives, and that is a different variable from executive sponsorship, so it should not be quoted as one.
What has not been established is a figure comparing executive sponsorship in mature and immature programs. In practical terms, buy-in tends to look like leaders who know what the program is meant to achieve, goals tied to company objectives, agreed ownership across functions, and results that feed real decisions. That is an interpretation of the published definitions, not a survey result. If you are building the case internally, getting executive buy-in for a content program is covered in more detail elsewhere on this site.
How should you read the newer benchmarks?
Several recent figures sound like maturity numbers and are not, and that is where most misreadings start.
Strategy existence is one. In the Insights for 2026 report, 97% of surveyed B2B marketers said they have a content strategy, and 3% said they do not. That tells you almost everyone has one, which is exactly why it cannot tell you who is mature. It also does not say the strategy is documented. Among those with a strategy, 13% said it significantly improved and 48% said it somewhat improved, and that describes change, not a stage.
Effectiveness is another. The same report asked how marketers rated their effectiveness over the prior 12 months across marketing generally, and 12% said highly effective, 47% somewhat effective, 31% neutral, 7% somewhat ineffective, and 3% highly ineffective. The Outlook for 2025 report asked a different success question and found 22% extremely or very successful. The wording and scope differ, so a drop from 22% to 12% is not a finding that content marketing got worse.
Thought leadership adoption is a third. Of the 2026 respondents, 96% create thought leadership content. They placed their programs as Exploratory (17%), Developing (36%), Established (36%), Advanced (7%), or Leading (4%). Those are adoption categories for one type of content, not the five CMI stages, so Leading does not equal Sophisticated.
Content Science's current public study summary adds a view from operations. It reports that 45% of organizations aspire to the highest operations maturity level and 9% operate there, with more than 100 professionals in the latest research and nearly 1,000 across the whole study. The page gives no exact fieldwork dates or full method, and an older fact sheet's 2% at Level 5 comes from a different, unmatched sample, so the two do not show an industry improvement.
Measuring content effectiveness was also a top-three challenge for 33% of 2026 respondents, so measurement is still hard for many teams.
How to read these numbers
A few cautions should stay attached to any figure from this research.
- The edition is not the fieldwork year. The 2026 figures describe answers gathered in 2025, and the 2022 maturity benchmark describes July 2021.
- These are self-reports. Maturity and success labels are what respondents chose, not certifications.
- Association is not causation. Successful teams may be better able to invest in strong operations, strong operations may help results, or other factors may drive both.
- Populations changed. The 2020 report covered North American B2B, while the 2022 eligible group was worldwide B2B and B2B+B2C.
- Wording matters. Having a strategy, documenting it, and seeing it improve are three different measures.
- The surveys were not a census. The surveys went to CMI and MarketingProfs email lists, so they are not probability samples of all companies.
Where does your own program stand?
Start with one model's exact language and write down the sentence that fits you best. A fair answer might be that your program most closely fits Adolescent: you have a business case and early success, but measurement and scaling are still developing. Or that you fit Mature, because the program is finding success while integration across business units stays difficult.
Then look for the evidence behind that sentence. The table below is a set of prompts built from the published definitions and governance guidance. It is not a validated scorecard, and it has no points or pass mark.
| Dimension | Early or fragile | More established |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Requests are disconnected from a cohesive strategy or measurement plan | A documented strategy ties audience needs, objectives, and the business case together |
| Production process | Work depends on memory and informal handoffs | Lifecycle stages, responsibilities, and handoffs are documented and used |
| Measurement | Activity is tracked without a clear link to intended results | Results are read against goals and shared with the business |
| Governance | Ownership, standards, and upkeep are unclear | Owners, workflow rules, standards, and training are in place |
| Organizational reach | A process works in one isolated area | Formal operations extend across relevant functions |
| Improvement | Problems come back with no agreed response | Processes are tuned and measurement informs changes |
Most programs are mixed. You can have a reliable production workflow and still lack mature measurement, or strong measurement in one team and no integration across the others. A good next step is to name the capability you can already demonstrate today, then name the one that keeps you from the next stage.
