Benchmark Report Secrets from B2B SaaS’s Top Content Marketers

We’ve all launched pieces of content that have failed to resonate. Luckily, your content flops probably didn’t bomb as badly (or as publically) as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The 2023 Harrison Ford vehicle was everything you want to avoid in a big content investment. Hideously expensive and with a plot that failed to resonate with the target audience, the movie tanked at the box office, losing Disney an estimated $143 million. That’s one ROI meeting we’re glad we didn’t have to attend.

There are lessons here for content leaders thinking about creating benchmark reports, the blockbuster assets of B2B SaaS. Get buy-in from budget gatekeepers before you get started, keep control of spend and, most importantly, find a theme that resonates deeply with target audiences.

Easy, right? 

Errm, wrong. Content marketers face tons of challenges when creating any sort of research asset, including benchmark reports, data reports, and state-of-industry reports. Getting buy-in from exec and data teams, analyzing the data when you do manage to gather it, distribution, tracking ROI on such a large content investment… all of these were highlighted as especially challenging by content marketers we spoke to.

That’s why the Campfire Labs’ team caught up with four of the industry’s top content marketers and asked them how they think about, and execute on, benchmark reports. We spoke to:

• Tracey Wallace from Klaviyo
• Jimmy Daly from Superpath
• Lauren Lang from Uplevel
• Nicole Bennett from Vena Solutions

They gave us their best advice on commonly felt areas of friction, including how to get buy-in from execs, how to craft insights that resonate with your audience, and why ROI is often the wrong metric to track.

Challenge 1: Getting leadership buy-in

No getting away from it—content that requires extensive research is expensive. Anecdotally, we spoke to content marketers who’ve spent up to $60,000 on one research report, with average spend hovering around $27,000. 

When you’re splashing that kind of cash, most folks at the company will want to trace a direct line from the report to revenue. But research reports are rarely lower-funnel, product-aligned assets, even when they’re based on proprietary product data. Take the Mixpanel 2024 benchmark report as a classic example—its findings are based on proprietary data, but the report itself is product-agnostic. 

The higher up the funnel a research report is the harder it is to track direct revenue. ROI becomes diluted through multi-touch attribution in which lower-funnel pieces of content or sales materials may get more credit for closing deals.

This can make it hard for leadership to buy in to research reports as a line item on the content budget.

Solution: Focus on education and diplomacy

For Nicole Bennett, Content Manager at Vena Solutions, education is the key to getting buy-in for brand-aligned content, particularly as AI’s impact on content accelerates.

“Things are changing in the SERPs because of AI overviews, and you can't guarantee what traffic you'll get from search in the future. So [content’s] job is to help the wider team realize that we can’t neglect brand. It’s a process of education.”

To get buy-in from demand teams and execs who are used to direct attribution, Nicole tries to educate about all the recycling and repurposing opportunities that a research report creates. 

“People want to see leads come off a report, but it’s so much bigger than that. We’re planning to spin off thought leadership, video content, social content, and event-based content off our next research report. So even if a report doesn't directly generate a ton of leads, its satellite content can.”

Finally, Nicole recognizes you have to give demand and exec teams what they want sometimes too. “As content marketers, we need to be prepared to track some tangible metrics of success off reports. Even if it's not leads, what can we use to quantify if this is a successful project or not?”

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Challenge 2: Data collection & analysis

This is a biggie. For data-based reports, content marketers are hampered by a lack of: 

• technical knowledge needed to access proprietary data from SaaS tools or data warehouses;
• relationships with an in-house data teams to support data extraction and analysis;
• data analysis skills. 

For survey-based reports, a limited pool of respondents and low engagement, plus failure to ask clear questions that surface insights, are the biggest blockers to success.

Solution: Build relationships to increase survey engagement

Superpath founder Jimmy Daly has been running surveys with his 20,000+ strong community for several years. He recommends putting in the hard work with respondents way before you ask them to complete a survey:

“I tease our annual salary report way before I launch the survey. I'll ask a couple of people to fill out the survey form as a test. There's quite a bit of discussion that happens in the Slack group about it before launch. So there are all these little ways I try to get buy-in from people before asking them to complete a survey. It's really hard to get people to engage with survey questions if you don't already have some kind of brand relationship with them.”

If you don’t have an engaged community to leverage, Jimmy notes that you can kickstart survey responses by creating a feeling of being part of something bigger. “Two years ago, we did a thing where we, like, for every response, we donated $1 to a charity that helped young people who were interested in writing. So there was a tie-in to our community. We had 500 plus respondents that year, the most we'd ever had in one survey.”

Solution: Invest in external experts

If you can afford it, work with external providers to gather, clean, and analyze trends in data. And, as Tracey Wallace from Klaviyo notes, the budget for that doesn’t necessarily have to come from content marketing.

“Early in my career, when I first started doing big research assets, we hired an agency to help and I think we paid them like $50k. That’s a lot of money. But it came from our PR and brand budget. Those teams very much understand the benefits of having proprietary data like that.”

If you can’t wrangle the budget for external help, Tracey recommends using solutions like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics, that find adequate respondents and package the data in easy-to-parse visuals.

“My advice for folks who are struggling with data collection, building out surveys, asking questions, and all that jazz—find somebody who can help you.”

Challenge 3: Crafting unique insights that resonate

Few content marketers are lucky enough to be members of their own target audience. Those of us who don’t market to other marketers need to work harder to understand the conversations and concerns of our target readers or buyers. There’s always a risk you fail to read to the room. And when you’re spending $30,000 on a piece of content, that risk is higher stakes than on cheaper marketing assets.

Solution: Lean into topic, stance, originality

Lauren Lang, who heads content at Uplevel, recently had a research report go viral, with 1,500 downloads and a 500% increase in web traffic. Impressive, and even more so when you factor in that her target audience is engineering leads, an audience notoriously suspicious of marketing.

Lauren used a three-part conceptual framework to inform her report design—topic, stance, and originality.

“We chose a topic that we knew our audience was talking about—AI copilots for engineering teams. We don’t have a horse in that race (Uplevel doesn’t have a specific copilot dashboard) so we were able to take a strong, data-informed stance on the topic. And that helped us be original and say what no one else is saying, but engineers might be thinking—that AI copilots don’t actually seem to make tech teams more efficient yet, despite the hype.”

The key, according to Lauren, is really to know your specific, niche audience, the conversations that are happening right now with them, and then maybe how they'll react to different aspects of that conversation. 

Tracey at Klaviyo has similar advice. “You have to have a journalist’s instinct to find those truly resonant storylines. For instance, at a former job during COVID, when a lot of folks were getting laid off, we decided to do a report on the freelance revolution. Even the government had put out a report about the growth of freelancing, and we bounced off that news cycle.”

Challenge 4: Demonstrating ROI… or not

Return on investment sometimes seems to be a sensitive subject for content marketers. Several factors complicate tracking content ROI, including: 

• A lack of integration between tools in the marketing stack;
• The use of last-touch attribution models;
• Lengthy sales cycles involving multiple content (and marketing/sales) interactions

It’s not that research reports exacerbate these challenges. It’s more that research reports are expensive, as noted above, and therefore more subject to questions about expected (and real) ROI.

Solution: De-couple reports from ROI, and follow up with BoFU

Surprisingly, the four content leaders we spoke to didn’t track revenue metrics as their main KPIs for their recent research reports.

“These reports are typically about top-of-funnel lead gen, for me,” says Tracey Wallace. “ Yes, you're getting someone in who is interested in the data, and you probably have some information in [the report] on how your business can help solve specific problems related to the data. But should a salesperson be calling that person when they download it? No, because [the reader] is not at that point yet.”

Tracey recommends creating several lower funnel lead gen assets off the original report, such as checklists, webinars, or verticalized versions for niche audiences. And the ROI of those assets can be attributed back to the original report.

“These reports aren’t necessarily driving immediate ROI. They're driving brand credibility. They're getting you additional backlinks. They're getting you thought leadership opportunities. You should be talking about that data throughout the year and referencing back to it. But often they’re more of a trust signal than something that's going to drive immediate revenue.” 

That can sometimes be a tough conversation to have with other folks in the company, as Lauren from Uplevel acknowledges: “If you're doing a brand play based off a research report, and you get asked, ‘How is this going to influence pipeline? What's the ROI on this?’ You’re expected to extrapolate out, like, ‘well, we're going to get x number of media mentions, and you'll be able to talk about it at a TED talk’, something like that. It's a challenge for a lot of content marketers to make those arguments. 

Lauren’s advice is to level-set with decision-makers early on, and balance top-of-funnel assets with a commitment to invest in bottom-of-funnel supporting content. “You need to help them understand that this isn’t going to directly drive demo requests, probably. There’s a lot of balancing that needs to happen—I’m doing a lot of bottom-of-funnel content based on our viral report.”

Build reports that resonate

The content leaders we spoke with reveal the nuanced approach needed to create impactful benchmark reports—reports that resonate with audiences, justify the investment, and build long-term brand credibility. From gaining buy-in to crafting insightful, relevant data stories, each step requires a strategic balance of education, relationship-building, and authenticity.

As you look ahead, a practical next step is to choose one challenge your team often faces—whether it’s getting buy-in, managing data, or setting ROI expectations—and refine your approach. For instance, if getting buy-in for reports is tough, consider starting with a ‘recycling map’ that shows how one report can fuel multiple assets across the funnel. Begin small, iterate, and remember: the bigger-picture goal is always to build a content ecosystem that not only reaches but truly connects with your audience.

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