Grow Your SaaS with the Rule of 40 | Takeaways from CMI's 2025 Content Marketing Report

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How to Calculate Rule of 40 and Grow Your B2B SaaS

The balance between growth and profitability is a struggle for any SaaS – from quickly expanding startups to successful enterprises seeking to gain traction in new markets. The Rule of 40 is a widely used efficiency metric that provides key insight and helps leadership maintain balance. It’s a metric that appeals to both investors and internal stakeholders by offering a clear framework for evaluating a company’s financial health. Knowing how to calculate Rule of 40 is critical.

The formula is simple: a company’s revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should equal or exceed 40%.

In the SaaS industry, where rapid growth often comes at the expense of profitability, the Rule of 40 ensures that companies don’t lose sight of long-term financial stability as they expand. Achieving a Rule of 40 score of 40% is considered an indicator of a healthy, well-balanced SaaS business. Higher scores are even more impressive.

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Insights and Key Takeaways from CMI’s 2025 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report?

As B2B SaaS content marketing continues evolving, new research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) sheds light on emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities that will shape strategies in 2025. This lengthy, in-depth report created in collaboration with MarketingProfs and The MX Group provides valuable insights into what’s working, what’s not, and how leading marketers are adapting to meet the needs of their audience and navigate today’s increasingly competitive environment.??

Let’s look at some of the highlights:?

1. Strategic Priorities and Challenges?

Key Difficulties: B2B marketers continue to face resource limitations, with budget constraints, small teams, and an increased need for specialized skills topping the list. These challenges are compounded by rising demands for high-quality, engaging content that aligns with audience expectations and generates measurable results. According to the CMI study, marketers identify resource issues (54%) quantifying the results of their efforts (47%), and aligning content with the buyer’s journey (45%) as their biggest hurdles in the past year.?

Shifting Objectives: Marketers are prioritizing goals that directly impact customer engagement, lead generation, and brand awareness. The data reveals that over 80% of marketers emphasize top-of-funnel objectives, aiming to build brand visibility and drive new customer acquisition. However, just over half (52%) are focused on deeper, relationship-building activities, such as customer retention and loyalty. This trend suggests a gap between brand awareness efforts and nurturing long-term customer relationships—a critical insight for SaaS marketers, where SaaS churn rate can be a significant concern.?

Goal Alignment Across Teams: 43% of the marketers surveyed identified poor alignment across departments as another pain point, especially as the responsibilities of content teams increasingly intersect with sales and customer success. Misaligned objectives can result in disjointed customer experiences and missed growth opportunities, which is why many organizations will emphasize improving collaboration across teams in the coming year.?

2. The Growing Influence of AI and Technology?

AI Adoption in Content Marketing: AI tools are making waves in the B2B content marketing realm, with over 81% of marketing teams regularly using tools to generate content and 19% integrating AI into their daily workflows, conducting data analysis, and personalizing content at scale. ChatGPT and similar generative AI models are frequently used for content ideation and drafting, offering efficiencies that appeal to lean teams. 61% of marketers rank generative AI output as good or better. However, more than half of respondents expressed concerns about accuracy and ethical implications, particularly regarding transparency and quality control. Accordingly, 55% of B2B marketers report that their organizations now have guidelines in place covering everything from security precautions to acceptable use of generative AI in content marketing.?

Content Operations & Tech Stacks: Companies are exploring modular content workflows and integrated tech stacks to improve efficiency and enable scalability. However, only 26% of marketers rate their current technology setup as effective in supporting content strategies, indicating a significant area for improvement. As a result, 2025 may see more investments in content management systems, AI-powered analytics, and tools designed to foster team collaboration and workflow optimization.?

Data-Driven Decisions: Access to robust data analytics is increasingly critical for content teams aiming to justify their own budget line. 56% of those surveyed reported that they struggle to attribute ROI to their content marketing efforts. As tech stacks evolve, many marketers are prioritizing data integration and predictive analytics, which allows teams to track engagement and conversion metrics more effectively, ensuring each piece of content drives value.?

3. Audience-Centric Content and Personalization?

Understanding the Audience Journey: The CMI report highlights a growing emphasis on mapping content to the customer journey. High-performing teams demonstrate an advanced understanding of audience needs, preferences, and challenges. 82% of the top performers attribute their success to understanding their audience. Their B2B SaaS marketing plan will include buyer persona development and regular customer feedback collection to ensure content resonates across various touchpoints.?

Scaling Personalization Efforts: Personalized content, targeted to specific audience segments, remains a top priority. However, achieving this level of customization remains challenging. Many B2B marketers struggle to implement scalable personalization, with 44% citing gaps in technology and resources. Despite this, leaders in the field continue to experiment with segmentation strategies and automation tools to deliver content that feels relevant and timely to each audience subset.?

4. Effective Content Formats and Distribution?

Preferred Content Types: The report reveals that blogs, articles, and eBooks remain staples in content marketing, but video content, webinars, and interactive formats are quickly gaining traction. Marketers are seeing the value of video. It was ranked number one in effectiveness this year, and 61% of respondents anticipate investment growth in 2025.?

Omnichannel Distribution: The research emphasizes the need for an omnichannel approach to distribution. Social media channels, email marketing, and organic search remain primary vehicles for B2B content. Social media use has increased overall. LinkedIn and YouTube have grown in popularity as effective B2B platforms, but X has seen a drop in popularity and effectiveness, and podcast usage declined slightly.?

5. Emerging Trends to Watch?

Investments in Thought Leadership and AI: 2025 is expected to see more companies investing in thought leadership to establish authority and influence within their niche. Spending on AI is expected to rise, particularly around content optimization and performance. This presents an opportunity for SaaS marketers to showcase their grasp of cutting-edge technologies and their adeptness in its use.?

The Evolving Role of SEO: To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of SEO’s death are greatly exaggerated. Only 35% of survey respondents indicated that SEO was a top challenge this year, down from 45% the year before. SEO’s not dead; it’s evolving. With search engine algorithms continuously changing and AI SEO poised to be a game-changer in 2025, B2B content marketers must stay agile, focusing on long-form, evergreen content optimized for voice search and core web vitals.?

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CMI’s annual report is loaded with data to help guide your strategic decisions in the months to come. Where will you make changes and where will you stand pat? Let us know in the comments.?

For a deeper dive and all the insights, read the full report here.?

Top 16 B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies for 2025

SaaS marketing is a full spectrum of efforts to build brand awareness and generate qualified leads. It typically begins with the creation of a marketing plan that includes a detailed marketing strategy, PPC, content marketing, and more, all designed to build brand awareness and generate leads. The best B2B SaaS marketing agencies also monitor and analyze campaign data to ensure maximum ROI. It’s a massive, complex undertaking. An agency that can get these goals accomplished without wasting your money is one worth considering.

Identifying and selecting the agency that’s best for your company can be challenging, but it gets easier when you know what to look for and who to call. We’re here to help with a guide that will teach you how to choose a strong marketing partner for your US-based SaaS and a list of the top 16 B2B SaaS marketing agencies for 2025.

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