Edited on Jun 23, 2026.
HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce, Shopify, and Canva each spend more on content today than they did several years ago.
That's not the consensus expectation. The consensus expectation — repeated across consulting decks for years — has been that content marketing budgets would compress as marketing tools commoditized the production side. The data says otherwise. The companies whose products depend on being found when buyers search continue to invest more, not less, in the content that makes them findable.
The question isn't whether content marketing survives. It's whether your brand shows up inside the surfaces buyers actually use.
What the five biggest content spenders are doing
HubSpot. Has run one of the largest editorial operations in B2B for over a decade. The company has not slowed its publishing cadence — it has accelerated it, with structured content across the full marketing, sales, and customer-service stack. The bet is that the corpus HubSpot has built since 2007 produces compounding category authority that competitors cannot replicate at smaller scale.
Adobe. Acquired Frame.io. Built Adobe Firefly. Re-positioned Creative Cloud around generative tooling. The content investment is not on the marketing side alone — it sits inside the product. Adobe's wager is that the most valuable real estate is the workflow buyers use to make content, not just the content itself.
Salesforce. Has expanded Trailhead, its learning platform, into the dominant educational corpus for CRM and revenue operations. The corpus is structured, branded, indexable, and increasingly authoritative across the broader enterprise SaaS layer. Trailhead is a meaningful content moat.
Shopify. Doubled down on the merchant blog, the help docs, the partner ecosystem content. The pattern is the same: own the corpus buyers pull from when the question is about commerce infrastructure. Shopify's content investment compounds the brand position as the default answer to "what should I use to run an online store."
Canva. Publishes one of the largest visual-content libraries on the open web. The library is also the product. The flywheel is that Canva's templates are how millions of people learn what good design looks like — and that learning is its own moat.
The pattern underneath
Three traits recur across the five spenders.
They publish original content, not aggregated content. The corpus is built from product expertise, customer data, and proprietary research. Original sources compound brand authority. Rewrites and aggregations don't.
They publish on durable owned channels, not platform-dependent ones. HubSpot blog, Adobe.com, Salesforce Trailhead, Shopify Help Center, Canva templates — every surface is owned. None of them depends on a social-platform algorithm to surface the content.
They structure the content for discoverability. Clear headings, FAQ sections, internal links, author attribution, updated dates. The signals that help readers and search engines find the right content for their question.
What "more valuable" actually means
Content marketing did not become more valuable in raw volume. The thesis that produced the early-2010s content marketing boom — produce more content than the competition — has weakened materially. The marginal cost of one more generic blog post has collapsed, which has collapsed the value of that marginal blog post.
What did happen: the most authoritative content in any given category became disproportionately valuable. A single piece of content that's recognized as the definitive answer to a high-intent buyer question can drive more pipeline than dozens of mid-tier blog posts ever could.
Where this leaves everyone else
Five categories of company are now visibly behind.
- Mid-tier B2B SaaS with a thin blog and no real editorial discipline. The corpus is too small and too generic to compete with HubSpot, Salesforce, or category-specific specialists.
- Consumer brands running entirely on paid social. When the social platform deprioritizes the brand, there is no owned content to fall back on.
- Professional services firms publishing white papers behind email gates. The gating reduces reach materially. The content might as well not exist for the audiences that never get past the gate.
- Legacy publishers retreating to subscription paywalls without a broader audience-building strategy. The paywall protects revenue. It also removes the publication from the broader conversation.
- Agencies billing for campaign content without an owned-corpus build inside the client. The campaign ends. The corpus does not get built. The next campaign starts from zero.
The structural shift
The structural shift is from campaign content to corpus content. Campaigns end. Corpus compounds.
The brands building corpus produce content that's still working five years after it was published. The brands running campaigns produce content that's effective during the flight and then evaporates. Both approaches have their place — but only one of them builds the durable category authority that compounds across years.
FAQ
Is content marketing still worth the investment?
For brands that can sustain an original, owned-channel program, yes. For brands publishing generic content that competitors are publishing just as well, the returns are increasingly weak.
Who's spending more on content?
HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce, Shopify, and Canva are visible examples. The common thread is that each company's product depends on being the default answer in its category, and serious content investment supports that position.
What kind of content actually performs?
Original research, substantive how-to content, named-expert commentary, owned-domain publishing with consistent voice and quality. Aggregated rewrites and gated white papers underperform.
How is corpus content different from campaign content?
Campaign content is built around a specific marketing moment and decays after the moment passes. Corpus content is built to be permanently useful and continues producing returns for years. The strongest content programs combine both — campaign content for specific marketing pushes, corpus content as the durable foundation underneath.
