Buyer Attention & Engagement Study Highlights AI-Led Personalization and Attention-First Strategies as Global Attention Economy Moves Toward USD 1.2 Trillion by 2030

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vereigen Media, a U.S.-based B2B demand generation and first-party data company, today announced the release of its Buyer Attention & Engagement Study, a global research report examining how AI, first-party data, mobile-first behavior, and attention-first marketing are reshaping enterprise buying decisions.

The study finds that B2B marketers are now no longer competing solely for clicks. They are competing for genuine attention, credibility, and relevance. With early engagement windows narrowing to approximately eight seconds, business professionals receiving an average of 121 emails each day, and more than 60% of B2B research taking place on mobile devices, buyers have become increasingly independent and selective. In response, organizations are shifting their investment away from content volume and toward measurable engagement quality.

The study analyzed engagement behavior across more than 150 global B2B organizations and combines behavioral analytics, platform benchmarks, buyer psychology research, analyst intelligence, and vendor case studies from around the world to provide one of the industry’s most detailed views of modern B2B engagement.

Based on the study’s analysis, the global attention economy is valued at more than USD 740 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach approximately USD 1.2 trillion by 2030. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 9–11% across digital advertising, content marketing, engagement technologies, and attention analytics.

Market Growth Is Being Reshaped by Attention Scarcity, AI Personalization and the Shift from Reach to Engagement Depth

B2B content generation has grown significantly over the last decade; however, increased volume does not translate into increased engagement. According to the study, an average enterprise decision-maker spends around 37 minutes per week evaluating vendor content, down from 82 minutes in 2018. Per-vendor content consumption decreased 55%, whereas the number of vendors considered rose by 30%. This forces marketers to compete for a shrinking slice of the buyers’ time while buyers, on the other hand, consider more vendors at the same time.

The challenge extends far beyond visible digital interactions. As much as 67% of the B2B buying journey takes place within the “dark funnel,” where buyers research vendors through peer conversations, reviews, analyst reports, and professional and social communities that often fall outside traditional attribution models. Peer conversations and referrals influence 92% of B2B purchase decisions, while 73% of enterprise buyers consider analyst reports an important source when evaluating vendors. As a result, demand generation budgets are increasingly shifting away from vendor-controlled campaigns and toward third-party credibility, peer validation, and category authority.

This process is accelerated by the advent of AI. Individualized B2B engagement becomes economically feasible through the use of AI tools. ABM campaigns with personalized messages generate 30–50% more responses compared to mass outreach, and dynamic web page personalization increases site engagement time by 40–60%. Leads generated by AI scoring convert about two times faster than manually scored leads, and intent-qualified accounts also convert about two times faster than mere demographic targets.

Segmentation Analysis:

• By Engagement Channel
  High-impact engagement touchpoints include executive roundtables, videos, webinars, peer-review sites and personalized emails, although their value varies throughout the buying journey. Executive roundtables deliver the strongest engagement in high-value buying situations, particularly during the intent, validation, and decision stages. Video is especially effective during the research and evaluation stages, allowing buyers to understand product information more easily than through long-form content.

  Personalized emails also play an important role by prioritizing targeting and relevance over mass outreach. According to the study, personalized emails achieve an average open rate of 29% and a click-through rate of 5.2%, compared with 21.5% and 2.3% for generic emails. These results highlight the growing challenges facing broad email campaigns and non-targeted programmatic display advertising.

• By Content Format
  The report indicates that videos and original research are two of the highest value content investments on its performance framework that rates engagement depth, lead quality, shareability, buyer stage appropriateness, production cost and ROI. Original research is especially strong because of proprietary benchmarks and differentiated insights that offer information that buyers cannot get from any other vendor content.

  Interactive tools and calculators represent another strategically valuable format. The report identifies them as an underinvested, high-ROI opportunity that can deliver engagement depth comparable to video while capturing zero-party intent data directly from buyers. In contrast, newsletter-only and infographic-only programs generate significantly lower levels of engagement.

• By Buyer Journey Stage
  There is a dramatic difference in the time spent at each stage of the B2B buying process. Awareness stage interactions might receive as little as seconds of attention, while evaluation stage activities including demos, case studies, ROI calculators and technical validation can receive significantly more attention. This study is therefore skeptical about applying a single approach to content creation for the awareness, research, evaluation, intent, and decision stages.
     
  An enormous gap persists between investments at each stage of the B2B buying process. It is estimated that around 80% of all enterprise B2B decisions are made during the evaluation and intent stages, although a number of firms allocate as much as 65-75% of their demand generation budget to awareness activities.

• By AI-Powered Engagement Application
  AI-powered engagement is driving measurable improvements across the buyer journey. Content personalization can increase engagement by 2–3×, while predictive lead scoring can improve conversions by 30–40%. Conversational AI is also helping organizations reduce response times, with AI chatbots qualifying prospects and responding within minutes rather than hours. In paid media, AI-driven optimization can lower cost per lead by 20–35%, while intent data and account scoring can reduce cost per opportunity by 40–60%.

  Personalized video is also gaining traction as a valuable tool for engaging strategic accounts. According to the study, AI-generated personalized video campaigns can achieve response rates 3–5× higher than text-based campaigns targeting the same lead volume. The research predicts that the performance gap between organizations with advanced AI-powered engagement capabilities and those with lower adoption will continue to widen as first-party data, predictive targeting, and automated personalization become more deeply embedded in marketing strategies.

Regional Insights:

North America remains the largest market for engagement technology, accounting for 44% of global investment. This region is characterized by maturity of MarTech infrastructure, large scale implementation of intent data, enterprise software prevalence, and development of the dark funnel, review and professional communities. B2B customer acquisition costs here are about 40-60% higher than average worldwide; however, this can be explained by higher contract sizes and better conversion of sales opportunities.

Europe accounts for approximately 26% of global engagement investments. Privacy regulations, such as GDPR continue to shape how businesses approach engagement, accelerating the shift away from third-party data and toward consent-based marketing, owned communities, and first-party data infrastructure. According to the study, consent-based programs using first-party data are approximately 35% more effective than programs that do not prioritize consent.

The fastest growing region of engagement technologies is the Asia-Pacific region, which grows at a CAGR of about 18-22%. Such countries including India, Southeast Asia, and China are driving mobile-first implementation along with the video and messaging-based engagement. In the Asia-Pacific region, engagement costs are 60-70% lower than in North America and WhatsApp Business, WeChat, LINE, and other mobile solutions shape the regional B2B communication models.

In Latin America, mobile, social, and community-led engagement strategies continue to drive engagement. WhatsApp Business plays a significant role in B2B communication, while localized content in Spanish and Portuguese helps brands increase relevance and strengthen audience engagement. In the Middle East and Africa, relationship-led engagement strategies are gaining momentum. Direct communication with executives and industry peers is often viewed as more credible and influential than traditional email-based marketing programs.

Competitive Landscape & Leading Players:

The buyer engagement technology ecosystem is becoming increasingly specialized by function while also consolidating around broader platform strategies. Marketing automation and CRM providers are expanding into AI-powered journey orchestration, while intent data and account-scoring vendors are combining first- and third-party data sources. Sales engagement platforms are adding conversation intelligence capabilities, and content experience solutions are evolving to provide deeper insights into buyer journeys and content ROI.

The report identifies major platforms participating across categories, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, ActiveCampaign, 6sense, Demandbase, Bombora, TechTarget, RollWorks, Terminus, Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, Clari, Vidyard, Wistia, ON24, Intercom, Qualified and PathFactory. These vendors operate in marketing automation, CRM, intent data, ABM, sales engagement, video, conversational AI, and content-experience technology areas.

Competitive differentiation has become increasingly dependent on AI capabilities, proprietary first-party data sources, and real-time engagement functionality. The bigger platforms are expanding their capabilities through platform consolidation strategies, whereas smaller vendors must prove their deep understanding of their specific categories. AI is transforming into a basic requirement rather than a differentiating factor for major engagement platforms.

Emerging Buyer Attention & Engagement Trends Shaping Marketing Investment:

• AI-Driven Hyper-Personalization: Individual-level personalization is progressing beyond simple segmentation as AI leverages behavioral signals, account intent, content interactions and first-party data to decide the type of information that each individual prospect should see.
• Dark-Funnel Accountability: Attribution tools are supposed to improve their ability to measure communities’ impact, peer reviews, and social interactions. It is anticipated that the 30-40% of dark-funnel impact will be quantifiable, which may have implications on organizations’ spending priorities in terms of demand generation budgets.
• Interactive and Immersive Buyer Experiences: Static content loses its engagement share in comparison with ROI calculators, interactive assessments, virtual product experiences and personalized decision-support buyer guides, which provide direct intent signals simultaneously.
• First-Party and Zero-Party Data: Increased privacy regulations and decreased dependency on third-party tracking makes first-party and zero-party data even more valuable, as they include information that is actively shared by customers via calculators, assessments, product experiences, communities and other interactions.
• Attention-Based Measurement: Email opens, page views, clicks, and other surface-level actions are no longer sufficient measures of engagement quality. Marketers are increasingly evaluating deeper signals, including time spent with content, completion rates, scroll depth, content progression, account-level intent, and pipeline impact.
• Mobile-First B2B Engagement: More than 60% of B2B research begins on mobile devices, however, yet only 47% of B2B websites are optimized for mobile. Closing this gap represents a significant opportunity, as mobile optimization can increase engagement by as much as 35–45%.

Key Findings of the Report:

• Early B2B engagement windows have narrowed to around 8 seconds, which makes headline relevance, credibility and first impression quality highly important factors for engagement success.
• The wider attention economy is now valued at USD 740 billion in 2025 and estimated to hit USD 1.2 trillion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 9-11%.
• About 67% of the B2B purchase process happens in the dark funnel, making peer reviews, communities, analyst insights and social proof increasingly more important.
• Video and original research are among the top performing formats when it comes to engagement depth, lead quality, and return on investment.
• Content personalization via AI technologies can provide 2-3x engagement improvement, and predictive lead scoring can drive conversion rates up by 30-40%.
• Mobile devices are used to conduct more than 60% of B2B research, and therefore mobile optimization should be seen as a demand generation factor.
• North America represents about 44% of all global engagement technology spend, and Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region with 18-22% CAGR.
• B2B marketing budgets are moving from undifferentiated emails, non-targeted display and quantity-driven MQL programs to personalized content, video, original research, peer validation, mobile optimization and real-time responsiveness.

Download the Full Research Report for Free
Buyer Attention & Engagement Study Report

Exclusive Sections of the Report (The USPs):

• BUYER ATTENTION WINDOW & CONTENT SATURATION BENCHMARKING: Offers quantified insights into the 8 second rule for getting attention, the falling engagement levels on websites, the issues related to over-saturation of inbox and content overload.
• CHANNEL ENGAGEMENT & CONTENT PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKING: Analyzes executive events, videos, webinars, personal emails, peer review, LinkedIn, organic search, pay-per-click, and other media in terms of content type, engagement level, quality of leads generated, shareability, relevance to stage in buying process, cost of production, and return on investment.
• AI-POWERED PERSONALIZATION & PREDICTIVE ENGAGEMENT ANALYSIS: Assesses how AI-powered personalization of content, predictive lead scoring, conversational AI, campaign optimizations, intent data, and personalized videos affect engagement, conversion rate, response time, deal quality, and acquisition costs.
• BUYER JOURNEY & ENGAGEMENT PSYCHOLOGY ANALYSIS: Addresses attention needs through awareness, research, evaluation, intention, decision-making, and expansion phases while evaluating trust, credibility, risk perception, peer validation, and various psychological aspects that affect complicated B2B purchasing behavior.
• REGIONAL BUYER ENGAGEMENT & INVESTMENT INTELLIGENCE: Compare North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa on aspects of engagement investments, mobile activity, privacy needs, preferred methods of communication, engagement costs, and growth factors.

Research Methodology

The Buyer Attention & Engagement Study analyzed engagement patterns across more than 150 B2B organizations between January and July 2026. The research combines first-party behavioral engagement data, anonymized campaign analytics, executive interviews, publicly available industry benchmarks, and comparative analysis of enterprise marketing performance across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

About Vereigen Media

Vereigen Media, is a leading U.S.-based demand generation company that redefines how organizations connect with their most valuable buyers. With access to more than 110 million first-party contacts, Verified Content Engagement (VCE), zero-outsourcing, human verification, and privacy-compliant outreach model, Vereigen Media supports hundreds of top B2B global brands across technology, IT, finance, cybersecurity, SaaS, media, and other industries.

By combining intelligent first-party data strategies with human expertise, the company enables businesses to generate higher performing leads that perform better than traditional lead generation methods, helping organizations generate meaningful buyer engagement, strengthen trust, and accelerate measurable revenue outcomes.
Leads. Done Right.

Contact:
Manraj Singh – Marketing Manager
Vereigen Media LLC
Email: marketing@vereigenmedia.com
Phone: +1 512-240-2212 (US)

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e3de2122-7f8d-4206-9367-681e836c8a39