Research institute · Edelman and LinkedIn
B2B Thought Leadership 2025: 95% of Hidden Buyers Receptive to Strong Content
The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (1,934 management-level professionals, 7 markets including the UK) finds 95% of hidden buyers more receptive to sales outreach from brands publishing strong thought leadership, and 79% more likely to advocate for those brands during the RFP process. The headline read for UK B2B marketers: thought leadership is not a brand-awareness expense, it is the most reliable single channel for moving stalled deals.
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Key findings at a glance
- 1,934 Management-level professionals surveyed across 7 markets (US, Canada, UK, Germany, Singapore, Australia, India), fielded 17 March to 3 April 2025.
- 95% Of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to a brand's sales and marketing outreach.
- 79% Of hidden decision-makers are more likely to champion vendors with consistent, high-quality thought leadership during the RFP process.
- 53% Of B2B decision-makers say strong thought leadership matters more to them than brand recognition when shortlisting vendors.
- 40%+ Of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment within the buying group, driven largely by hidden stakeholders.
- 51% Of hidden decision-influencers use thought leadership to convince C-level executives to support their preferred vendor.
- 71% Of hidden buyers report little to no direct interaction with sales representatives during the evaluation process.
- 64% Trust thought leadership content more than traditional marketing materials when assessing a vendor's capabilities.
- 63% Of hidden buyers spend more than one hour per week consuming thought leadership content, broadly matching the 64% of target buyers.
What the report covers
Edelman and LinkedIn published the 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report on 8 July 2025, the seventh annual edition of a study that has tracked how B2B buyers respond to brand-published expertise content since 2018. The 2025 fieldwork ran from 17 March to 3 April 2025 and surveyed 1,934 management-level professionals across seven markets: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Australia and India. The new edition is built around a structural shift the research team flag as the most important development in the seven-year dataset: most B2B purchases are now influenced or blocked by people the selling team never speaks to, named in the report as hidden buyers and hidden decision-influencers, typically based in finance, operations, legal, compliance and procurement.
The headline finding is that 95% of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to a brand's sales and marketing outreach, and 79% of hidden decision-makers say they are more likely to champion vendors with consistent, high-quality thought leadership when an RFP lands. 53% of decision-makers report that strong thought leadership matters more to them than the brand's overall name recognition, an unusually direct statement that challenger brands can out-publish their way past category incumbents. 71% of hidden buyers report little to no contact with sales representatives during their evaluation, which means whatever they decide is decided on the strength of what the brand has already published.
The second-order findings sharpen the operational read. 64% of buyers trust thought leadership more than traditional marketing materials, 63% of hidden buyers spend over an hour per week consuming it, 51% of hidden decision-influencers use thought leadership to convince C-suite executives to back their preferred vendor, and 52% use it to persuade other members of the buying group. The report also quantifies the cost of getting this wrong: over 40% of B2B deals now stall because of internal misalignment within the buying group, driven largely by these hidden stakeholders. The buying-group dynamic, not the front-door buyer, is the new bottleneck.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK B2B marketers, the 2025 dataset settles a long-running argument about whether content marketing strategy is worth the editorial effort. The original mid-2010s research from the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Brightcove showed that B2B marketers who said their strategy was effective tended to share three behaviours: documenting the strategy, publishing consistently, and putting senior people's names on the work. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn data confirms those behaviours still matter and adds a sharper read on why: the people doing the buying are mostly not on the sales call. 71% of hidden buyers have little to no direct sales interaction, so whatever they decide is decided on what the brand has already published. A UK B2B content marketing programme that publishes generic, anonymous, AI-drafted thought leadership is effectively giving the buying group nothing to react to. One that publishes named, point-of-view content from senior people gets championed inside the buyer's organisation by people the sales team will never meet.
Second, the 53% finding that strong thought leadership matters more than brand recognition is the most actionable single number for UK challenger brands. It means a smaller, focused B2B firm can out-rank a more famous competitor in the RFP shortlist by publishing better, more pointed, more original content. The mechanism is straightforward: hidden decision-influencers (51% of whom use thought leadership to convince C-suite) need ammunition for the internal pitch, and an unknown brand with sharp, defensible writing gives them more ammunition than a famous brand with generic content. For UK firms competing against US-headquartered category incumbents, this is structural rather than tactical. A disciplined organic content programme covering the questions buyers ask in week one of the evaluation is now the single most leveraged budget line a B2B marketing team can run.
Third, the 40%+ of B2B deals that stall due to internal misalignment is the cost line attached to underinvesting here. If most of the buying group is hidden, the way to de-risk a deal is to make sure every plausible internal stakeholder has already encountered the brand's point of view before they are pulled into the buying conversation. That means writing for finance, operations, legal, compliance and procurement audiences alongside the target buyer, not only writing for the target buyer. UK B2B marketing teams should run a quick audit: list the top five hidden roles in your typical buyer's organisation, then check whether your last twelve months of thought leadership content meaningfully addresses any of them. The teams that do this will compound advantages over the next two to three years. The teams that do not will keep losing deals to internal misalignment they never see.
How they got the data
Edelman and LinkedIn fielded the 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report between 17 March and 3 April 2025, surveying 1,934 management-level professionals across seven geographic markets: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Australia and India. The respondent base spans C-suite, senior executives, mid-level managers and individual contributors across a wide range of industries and company sizes, with three sub-samples flagged for separate analysis: target decision-makers, hidden decision-makers and hidden decision-influencers. The data was collected via the LinkedIn platform with a median survey length of 11.5 minutes. Edelman has run the study annually since 2018 (the 2025 release is the seventh edition), giving comparable longitudinal data on buyer behaviour, RFP dynamics, content quality preferences and the influence of thought leadership on purchase consideration.
The published report is freely available on the Edelman insights hub, with the headline charts and methodology note included in the PDF. LinkedIn's B2B Institute publishes complementary commentary on the same dataset. The geographic split makes the data directly usable for UK marketers: UK respondents are included in the seven-market sample, and Edelman has previously released UK-specific cuts of the data in supporting webinars. The full report runs to roughly 50 pages and is the single most-cited public dataset on B2B thought leadership impact for the 2025 to 2026 planning cycle.
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From Edelman and LinkedIn · published 08/07/2025