Vendor reportHubSpot, 2026

Website, blog, and SEO deliver the best marketing ROI of any channel

Channel mix & planning

Top marketing channels ranked by ROI

Top marketing channels ranked by ROI
Channel	Share of marketers naming it a top-ROI channel (%)
Website/blog/SEO (search engine optimization)	27%
Paid social media content	26%
Organic social media content	24%
Social media shopping tools (e.g. Instagram Shops)	23%
Email marketing	22%

Reader Note:: Chart shows a top-5 subset.
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.

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.

Paid 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%

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025
Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

33.8%

of US Fashion site visits now come from paid channels (Search + Social + Display), overtaking Direct traffic's 27.8% share for the first time in three years (Jul 2023–Jul 2026).

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.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

53.9% 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

Marketing Performance: Perceived marketing influence duration on customers, as reported by US CMOs in 2026
Duration	Percent (%)
An hour	0.6%
12 hours	0.6%
A day	1.3%
A week	2.6%
A month	6.4%
Several months	24.4%
6 months	10.3%
1 year	21.8%
2 years	18.6%
5 years	9%
7 years	0%
10 years or more	4.5%

Open full graph

9.6%

of overall budget and company revenues go to marketing on average (2026 survey of US companies)

SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive

Marketing budgets ranged from 5.8% to 9.7% of company revenue across industries in 2025, with consumer products highest and IT and business services lowest

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue by industry, 2025
Industry	2025 (%)
Consumer products	9.7%
Manufacturing	9.5%
Pharma	9%
Media	8%
Insurance	7.5%
Financial services	7.2%
Retail	7.1%
Tech services and products companies with over $250M revenue	7.1%
Travel and hospitality	6.7%
Healthcare	5.9%
IT and business services	5.8%

Open full graph

Website, blog, and SEO deliver the best marketing ROI of any channel

Good for

Not for

Related cards

Go deeper on this topic