Our newsletterVendor reportHubSpot, 2026
When marketers rank channels by segmentation and personalization value, social shopping tools take the top spot
Channel mix & planning
Top marketing channels by ROI (segmentation/personalization tab)
Top marketing channels by ROI (segmentation/personalization tab)| Channel | Share of marketers naming it a top-ROI channel (%) |
|---|---|
| Social media shopping tools (e.g. Instagram Shops) | 29% |
| Website/blog/SEO (search engine optimization) | 28% |
| Paid social media content | 26% |
| Email marketing | 26% |
| Organic social media content | 25% |
| Content marketing | 19% |
| Brand awareness | 19% |
| Physical events and tradeshows | 17% |
| Mobile messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.) | 14% |
| Search/Display ads | 14% |
- Reader Note:
- This is the second, alternate tab of a two-tab ROI chart; the two tabs use different ranking criteria and produce a different order.
- Evidence:
- Self-reported behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- HubSpot surveyed 1,505 marketers in September 2025 across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, spanning seniority levels and industries; fieldwork run in collaboration with the research firm Datalily. The report does not disclose how the sample splits by region, industry or seniority, so every published figure is a single global average. It does report cuts by company size - small business, mid-market and enterprise.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.
Not for
- Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- The source never says how this number was measured.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
Related cards
Channel mix & planningTrend
TrendPaid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%
Channel mix & planningTrend
Paid media overtakes Direct traffic as Fashion's main growth channel
Go deeper on this topic
Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.
Channel mix & planningTrend
Open full graph53.9% of US marketing leaders say marketing keeps influencing a customer for a year or longer, though the most common single answer is several months at 24.4% and the report's median is six months
Channel mix & planningTrend
Marketing takes 9.6% of the overall budget and 8.9% of revenue at the average US companyChannel mix & planningTrend
SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive