Why Most B2B Content Fails - and It's Not What You Think

Priscilla McKinney:

Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, mama bird and CEO here at Little Bird Marketing. And I'm excited about today's episode. But before we get started, I just want to say thank you for joining us. And you have to know that this is a labor of love for me.

I am actually not watching the masters live in order to record this today. So I feel like it's a sacrifice, but would you do me a favor and just go give me a review somewhere, wherever you got this podcast, it helps us with our show, ranking and it also helps other people discover the content here. I would be so appreciative, but today we're going to talk about something I really do like to talk about. And that is the frustration that people feel about B2B content.

Sometimes people can't put their finger on why most B2B content fails. And I think it's not really the reason why they think it's failing. And you know that line in the Princess Bride, when he says, that word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means. That's what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about something many people know is a problem, but almost nobody is diagnosing it correctly, in my opinion.

So here it is. I have reviewed hundreds of B2B blogs over the years. Lord knows I've written a lot of them, but I can tell you this. Most of them fail for reasons that really have absolutely nothing to do with writing quality. Nothing.

And I know that sounds like good news because you're thinking great. I was going to assign this to someone junior on our team. That's not what I'm saying, but stick with me. If you're investing real money and time in B2B content marketing and you're not seeing results, understanding why is the only thing that will change the outcome.

So today I'm going to talk about what I think are the real culprits. We're going to talk about the expertise gap. We're going to talk about this what I call the random acts of marketing play, the collaboration problem, the authenticity versus optimization traps. So these are some interesting things. I hope that you'll say well that one doesn't really apply to me, but wait a minute, what's going on? This might be the problem.

By the end of the episode, you'll have a clear picture of what actually works and why it looks so different from what most companies are doing. And I hope that it will give you a new lens to look at your body of writing and get inspired to create something meaningful. So let's get into it.

The first reason I think B2B content marketing fails is because of the expertise gap. This is the one that genuinely makes me a little bit crazy because it is so solvable. There are two kinds of content produced in B2B marketing and they both fail for opposite reasons.

On one side, you have the subject matter experts and now these are brilliant engineers. They're scientists, data scientists and deeply technical people who know their stuff, you know, inside and out. This is who you want to call. Right? This is your one call in who wants to be a millionaire.

But they sit down to write a blog post, and what comes out is essentially a white paper that three people on the planet can actually understand. Now, it's accurate, it's thorough, and it's completely unreadable to the person who actually needs to be persuaded. On the other side, you have professional writers. Now, they're excellent at grammar, and Lord knows, I love me some good grammar.

Their sentences flow beautifully and they've been handed a topic that they actually don't understand. So oftentimes what they produce is too generic. Sometimes it's actually fluffy and sometimes it sounds just like marketing and the person reading it, your actual prospect can smell that a mile away. I've seen this play out over and over.

One client had technical content that was impressive in terms of knowledge, and written for peers, but not prospects. Another client had beautifully written content with great headlines and structures, but it completely missed the industry context. Right ideas, wrong direction.

So the problem is that we treat content creation as either a technical or a creative exercise, but actually it is translation work. Your content has to translate real expertise into something that is genuinely accessible to the human on the other side of the screen. And that requires both deep knowledge and communication skills, plus an understanding of your audience at a behavioral level.

This is the translation piece, right? So they need to think. When I'm writing, what am I actually trying to solve? When my client is trying to solve this, what language do they use? And what do they already believe that you need to either confirm or gently challenge?

And this is where my background in cultural anthropology comes in because it has always shaped the way I think about marketing. Understanding audience behavior, the small little tacit agreements we make in our mind, the shortcuts, the heuristics to help us get through the day a lot quicker. Those kinds of things matter more than perfect grammar.

And you know people are skimming things, right? So you need to make those leaps from one section to the next section, really well, just translating it as you go. What does this mean for me? Not, is this a fantastic piece that I'm writing about expertise? The anthropological question is, who is this person that I'm writing to? What is their world like?

And is the foundation on everything I'm talking about understanding that and meeting them where they are. And in that way, that meeting, that connection, it is then bridging the experience gap. I hope that's helpful.

The next thing I see is a lot of random acts of marketing going on. If you're laughing right now, it's because you recognize this in your own company. And I just want to say you are not alone.

But random acts of marketing looks like this. Someone in leadership says, we need to be blogging. So you start blogging. You notice a competitor started a podcast. So you suddenly say, we need a podcast. You read an article about how video is the future and now everyone is scrambling to get on the video topic.

And three months later, it's AI and six months later, it's something else. And each of these things might actually be a good idea for your company. The problem is not the tactic. The problem is that none of them is connected to a strategy.

A blog as a tactic might produce amazing things for one company and a podcast might be killing it for another company. But you taking that same tactic may not work and you need to know why. When companies operate this way, it's not because they're being careless. It's because they have not taken the time to answer the foundational questions first.

Who are we talking to? What do they need to hear at each stage of their buyer's journey and what business outcome is this content supposed to support? And without these answers, it's just you're producing content. Yes, that exists. You're getting marketing done. You're checking a box off, but honestly, that's like the best thing you can say about it. It's not moving your company, your brand toward the right goals.

So we had a client that came to us in our SOAR onboarding process. And if you don't know what SOAR is, believe me, there's so many podcasts about it and there's so many blogs on my website about it, and you really should read them or listen to them. But they had published many, many posts, about 100, right? And you could see that work had gone into it, but they had zero conversions to show for it.

Now, think about that, 100 blogs. I mean, writing a blog is not one checklist item for us. It's about 32 items, right? I mean, it's foundational research, it's keyword research. I mean, I can go on and on. But the content was actually not terrible. And truly, some of it was genuinely good. And I found some of it riveting.

But because there was no system underneath it, there was no strategy connecting to the goals, there was no map from awareness to consideration to decision. It was just output, output, output, right. And this is what our SOAR system is built to solve.

So just in a short version, SOAR stands for Strategic, Organized, Accountable, and Repeatable. And you can think about all of your content in those four things, but I've got to say, get it done in that order. Strategic means everything starts with strategy. Before you write a single word, you need to know who the audience is, what that audience is trying to accomplish, why they're frustrated, why they haven't been able to accomplish their goals yet.

And they need to be presented with you as a solution, but in a way that is respectful of where they are in their buyer's journey. Maybe they're just at the beginning, just trying to get some information, or maybe they're really considering in-depth reasons for their problem, or they're just out there today, ready to make a decision. That matters, right?

So the next thing is organized and I'm trying to do this very quickly so we can stay on topic today. But organized means that your marketing systems are set up to reduce stress and to create consistency rather than chaos. So when I say organized, it doesn't mean just that it has checklists. It also means organized as in I can assign this to Priscilla and I know Priscilla has bandwidth to get it done. What good is assigning something to me and organizing it if it's not going to be able to be done in the deadline, right?

Then accountable means that you're measuring what matters, not just traffic, but conversions, right? And then repeatable is the thing that everybody likes to talk about at the beginning, but it comes at the very end. And repeatable means that you've built the process that can sustain itself year after year because you documented it and now you know why the thing succeeded, right?

So no more starting from scratch in January. January should be a time where you look at that data, you look at the reports. And you say, let's stop doing this and let's do more of this. But if you have not gotten things in that order and documented them from the beginning, then the repeatable part never happens. You just keep doing it just as repetition, not repeatable as in repeat the good stuff.

One more thought about this random acts of marketing problem is that you have to understand that the buyer's journey is real. They are on their own self-guided path to finding what they're going to purchase. And the goal with writing B2B content is to insert yourself, your company, your brand, your even your like items that you would want them to consider in buying this product as early in the process as you possibly can. That's what content is all about in the B2B sphere.

And so your prospect needs content sequenced properly that meets her where she's at in the moment. So first there's building awareness, then help her think through her opinions and ultimately make the case that you're the right partner. And if your content is all over the place, she just moves on. And frankly, she has other options.

If you're interested about how these random acts of marketing get really messed up, I have an entire podcast episode called B2B content strategy beyond random acts of marketing. I'll link it in the show notes. It's a great episode. And if it sounds like that is just what the doctor ordered, then there's a whole dose of medicine for you.

So the third reason why I think B2B content fails is a little subject I like to talk about a lot and I even wrote a book about it. It's about collaboration, right? I believe in it deeply, but there is a major problem going on about collaboration.

Now in my book, Collaboration is the New Competition, I lay out a framework for what real collaboration requires. Now you might have been calling something collaboration, but if you look at my framework, it might not have been collaboration. So don't throw collaboration out and say, I've tried that before. Wait, wait, wait, go make sure it really was collaboration.

Because in real collaboration, there's mutual risk and reward. There's transparency and openness, and there's a genuine drive to win. And I need for you to apply that framework here because companies are making a very costly mistake with content. They try to fully outsource it without actually considering the collaboration piece.

And look, I understand why content is hard and it takes time. And it's hard to find the right person on the team that has the bandwidth. You've got to have someone who writes, someone who understands how to put it all together. So you've got to get the graphics. You've got to know that the keywords are right. It touches like five different people, five different roles, right? And so it feels very easy to just send your content out.

And a content mill, a low-cost freelance marketplace is kind of a dime a dozen, honestly. I'll tell you right now, go out to Fiverr, go out to Upwork. You will find a lot of people who say they can write your content for you. In fact, they'll turn it around maybe even 10 posts in a week and a price that you feel like, wow, this is a bargain. And I've had a lot of clients come to us after living in that world and the results were cheap, fast and terrible. Forgettable at best and brand damaging at worst.

Now wait, what are you doing? Because you get paid to take over company content. So are you saying I'm not supposed to be outsourcing it? No. In fact, forgive the rabbit hole, just a minute here. Let's say you could hire a full-time marketing person. Let's just say it's about 75K a year. And I think depending on where you live, that might seem reasonable. That might seem very, very low for a few of you, but you get one person and they have a few skills.

Now, if you spend $60,000 with Little Bird Marketing on our SOAR program for content development, you get access to an entire team of experts. You get the keyword expert, you get the strategy done, you get the experienced writer, you get a graphic designer, you get video and motion editing, and you get all of those things, most importantly, wrapped up in a proven framework. And the job in this environment is not to get marketing done, but to collaborate with the client and the subject matter experts at the client in order to move the revenue needle with the writing.

That kind of collaboration is super important. And writers need access to expertise in meaningful ways, but they also need an environment where they can collaborate effectively. And I make it so easy on our clients. We send a little link. I already have everything ready to go with the strategy, with the keywords, and the blog title, and I've got my interview questions already because we've done the work ahead of time, right?

And then we let the subject matter expert spend 15 minutes downloading what they're unconsciously competent about, and then we go get to work. And the quality of brainstorms is really important. The open feedback, the active involvement from your subject matter expert, really creates an environment that can create content that stands out.

And writers also need to understand that the piece they're working on doesn't stand on its own. It interacts with other pieces. And that's why when someone sends a piece out to this writer and then one to this writer, it doesn't end up making sense, right? And we know for Google ranking and search engine optimization, you need to have hyperlinks from page to page. It's what we also call Easter egging a little bit in our industry.

And so you need to be thinking about how that piece interacts with other pieces of content, with events, with downloads, to bring more value to the ideal client buyer and help them have a meaningful journey toward buying from you. So when clients come to Little Bird Marketing and they lean in, when they show up to those strategy sessions and share real stuff, the content is just genuinely different.

It has a point of view. It has their tone of voice. It has specificity and it sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows the industry because it was. And that is what true collaboration looks like in content creation. And it's the only route that produces content that actually moves the revenue needle.

Okay, the fourth problem I see is what I kind of refer to as authenticity versus optimization. This one's gonna feel like I'm picking a fight with SEO people and okay, that's okay with me. But I have SEO people on my team and this is the argument we have and make sure that we are really doing content for the B2B audience that really stands out.

So there is a real tension in B2B content marketing between this authenticity and optimization and many companies have resolved it in the wrong direction. I see it all the time. Keyword stuffed content that reads like it was written specifically for a bot. Or corporate speak that's so thick you can't really understand what the actual point is.

Sometimes I'm reading a sentence and I read it like three or four times and I'm thinking, yeah, again, I do not think this means what you think it means, right? Hey, that's the second Princess Bride quote reference here in this podcast. That's important. But there are also blog posts where the brand's personality is just completely sanded off in pursuit of rankings. I understand the pressure. SEO matters and discoverability matters.

But I like to push back on this approach because I think you should be writing primarily for humans. Because when you write primarily for algorithms, you lose the thing that actually makes the content effective. You lose your voice. And once you lose your voice, you lose trust. And once you lose trust, you lose the sale.

So our approach at Little Bird Marketing is to optimize our writing for humans first and search engines second. So here's the reality. AI knows how to hit keywords. It's an incredibly powerful way to hit keywords. And any reasonably well-prompted language model can identify the right terms and then work them into a paragraph.

Now, it'll lie to you and it'll tell you what terms it thinks you should use, but you really need to go do your work on analytics to actually feed it to AI. So do not trust AI when it says, you should write and use these keywords. It does not know. It could be just mocking other work that's out there. So you know, just extra bonus tip for you today.

But AI can't replicate your unique perspective. Look, AI has no friends. It doesn't know the story of your founder in a heartfelt way. And it doesn't really understand how a specific case study fit into the experience of how your team changed what they think and how they changed how they go to market.

Or they don't know, and I say they, all the bots, they don't know that contrarian take that your best sales rep makes on every Discover call. And it just seems to win the day. And you're like, wow, that lands perfectly. Let's use that. That's a competitive content advantage. And it's only accessible if you're willing to write with your real voice.

And if you have not done a tone of voice exercise and you don't have that communicated clearly for all people creating content, and that's from blogs to podcasts to social media posts all across the board, then this is going to be much harder than it needs to be. One piece of content is going to work and another one's going to fail, right?

I had a client who had been producing very optimized, very beige content for many years and they looked at the rankings and truly the rankings and the traffic were okay. And the engagement, okay, it was flat. It wasn't anything exciting, but the conversions were nearly non-existent because search engine optimization can bring more people to your page. But what happens when they get there?

We've got to build your blog strategy around your authentic voice with your genuine opinions, with real client stories and your specific industry language that signals to readers, gosh, these people get me, right? That's a moment where whatever it is you're offering is no longer about price, but it's about trust. It's about, I couldn't possibly go look at someone else's proposition.

And as we worked together and we built that strategy, engagement on the page went up. And here's the part that surprises people. Also, SEO performance improved as a lagging indicator. It's not always the front runner indicator. So when humans engage with content, search engines notice. That's dwell time, return visits, and backlinks from people who found your content genuinely useful. That signals quality. And the search engines know it.

And it's your authentic voice that is not the enemy of SEO. It is what should be driving it. And a content mill that treats your brand like a template and work to get done and a checklist to check off is the enemy of both your brand and your content.

So let me tell you a little bit about what we do and what the Little Bird Marketing approach to B2B content looks like when it's working. First of all, it starts with personas, not generic buyer profiles, but real personas that capture specific goals and fears and language patterns and decision triggers of the actual humans you're trying to reach. Who are we writing for?

We're not writing for a job title. We're writing for a person, a person with pressures and a person with skepticism and a limited amount of time for crying out loud, right? And there is a very specific thing that they need to believe in order to take the next step with you. And to do that, you need a good system. And we have a free one on our resources page. So go to littlebirdmarketing.com/resources, but word to the wise.

Make sure you have the right people in the room when you do this exercise. The people who get overlooked often in this exercise are the people at the front line, the ones who talk to your prospects and your clients every day, the ones that know the tone of the frustrations they feel, the ones who know how to talk about their problems and bridge that gap, the ones who leave jargon behind and communicate effectively and they turn those prospects into customers. Do not leave them out of the room when you are creating your personas.

Because once you know who you're writing for, it becomes so much easier. And then you can map that content to the buyer's journey. What does it look like when they're just getting aware of the problem that they have? That looks different than when they're considering why they have this problem and what they might do about it. And finally, when they're deciding, should I go with this company or that?

Those are very different pieces of content that you need to write. And if you don't know the difference, you'll write a lot of great awareness content and then wonder why everybody looks to you for helpful things, but goes to your competitor to actually buy. You have to meet your prospect where she is and give her what she needs at each stage to keep her moving toward you.

And there's that translation piece, taking genuine expertise that has passion and making it accessible. And that's the core of the craft. And it requires partnership between the people who know the subject and the people who know how to communicate it because it's a writing problem and a distribution problem. You need to be cognizant of having both of those people in the room, in your environment, in your ecosystem.

And you need a system that keeps them working together consistently, not just when someone gets inspired. That happens a lot. The system piece is what most people skip. And it's where everything either holds together or falls apart.

A real B2B content marketing strategy has structure. It has cadence and accountability built in, and it can run year after year without starting over from scratch. Can I get an amen? That's tough work and content mills and typical freelancers will produce output for you. What they can't produce is a system that serves your buyer, reflects your genuine expertise and carries your authentic voice that compounds value over time.

That's what we build and that's what actually works. If this resonates with you and you are tired of content that does not move the needle, check out how we approach things differently and look at our SOAR system a little bit more deeply. The link is in the show notes and I promise you it's not what you've seen before, but I hope that's very helpful. And from all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.